US election: Republicans must change or die (this time for real)

The 2026 US midterm elections have dealt a crushing blow to President Trump and the Republican Party. Losing deep-red states like Kansas, South Carolina, and Texas in the Senate and Governorships, and dozens of House seats, is illustrative of the almost total refutation the American people have given to the Trump administration. More importantly, it also demonstrates how the coalition that propelled Trump to an unprecedented second term in 2024 has completely abandoned him. This reveals that the Republican Party, as it licks its wounds from the electoral rout, must change or die in 2028 and beyond. It oddly mirrors a reckoning the party had not too long ago and still unresolved in the long term for the Grand Old Party.

In the aftermath of the 2012 US election, the BBC published an article titled “US election: Republicans must change or die”. It seems a dramatic statement to make for an election most would be hard-pressed to recall as notable in any sense. Most would look back and see the incumbent President Barack Obama handily winning re-election to the presidency over milquetoast Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate. However, people often forget how consequential the presidential election was in epitomising the existential crisis the Republican Party faced then, as it does now.

In 2012, Obama was vulnerable, with an economy still reeling from the financial crisis, unemployment peaking at 10%, a healthcare bill mistrusted by small-government conservatives, gridlocked government from a Republican-controlled House, and an abnormally poor showing in the first debate with Romney resulting in a tightening in the opinion polls. The contest was viewed as too close to call going into election day. In the end, Obama won decisively, but it was how the President won that was particularly unthinkable and bitter for the Republicans.

America has signalled it is changing, moving on from MAGA. The Republicans must change or die, this time for real.

Romney won White voters by a margin of +20%. In 1980, when White voters made up 85% of the population, it would have been a landslide win for him. Yet a party that relies overwhelmingly on White voters will never win an election as America becomes increasingly diverse, with the electorate projected to be majority-minority by 2045. In particular, Latinos broke for Obama by a more than 2-1 margin. Though it would be a massive overgeneralisation to say Latinos are single-issue voters on immigration, many were turned off from the Republican Party due to its uncompromising attitude on immigration, exemplified in Romney’s controversial remarks on “self-deportation”.Combined with Obama retaining the crucial constituencies of the working-class vote and the youth vote, many Republicans feared they would be locked out of power for decades if they did not radically change. Unless they could build a cross-age, cross-class, and cross-race coalition, saving aberrations such as the Electoral College win in 2016, the party would die.

Such predictions appeared to age like milk in the 2024 election. Trump was propelled to the White House with the popular vote by building such a coalition. He won almost double the votes of Latinos – 46% – to Romney’s 27% in 2012. He made substantial gains with young voters, winning a majority of men 18-29, as well as Black voters and working-class, low-propensity voters. Trump’s economic populism and forceful message on immigration contrasted with Harris’s campaign, which appeared out-of-touch.

Ultimately, this was a temporary shift, as the 2026 elections have made abundantly clear. Latinos have swung hard back to the Democratic Party, with just 34% backing Republicans, much closer to Romney’s underperformance, angered by broken promises on the cost of living and by the scale of the administration’s immigration enforcement, especially the controversial tactics of ICE. Latino-majority House districts pitched leftwards, such as Texas’s gerrymandered 15th district, where the swing from the Republicans to the Democrats was an astonishing 42.2%, forming part of the Republican rout in Texas. Almost 3 in 4 18-29 year olds voted Democrat. Energised turnout among Black voters may turn out to be definitive in the knife-edge race for the Senate seat in Mississippi. Unsurprisingly, the combined effects of all of Trump’s self-inflicted errors, from affordability to tariffs to Iran and more, have not ended well for the President.

It is likely that a lame duck Trump will not care much about nuking the coalition he once built. But his Republican party, grappling for a future without him, will surely care. The staggering scale of the Democratic majority in Congress makes it seem all but guaranteed that a Presidential win in 2028 would usher in unified government. With such a refutation of the MAGA movement, it is difficult to see how any Republican could effectively distance themselves from the President, not least his previously loyal deputy. Ideologically, Trump has reshaped the Republican Party to support policies it would previously be antithetical to – bigger federal government, trade protectionism, isolationism, and so on – something many party bigwigs and presidential hopefuls are eager to reverse. Demographically, with the collapse of the 2024 coalition, Republicans now face the same underlying, unresolved questions they did on multiethnic support as in 2012.

Therefore, the Republican Party faces a reckoning as it stares into the abyss. It is clear the party must reinvent itself and refrain from indulging in radical right-wing tendencies of populism, Tea Party, and Trumpism, however much the ideological core of the party has shifted. Only by embracing being a big-tent party with consistent conservative principles and policies that are appealing to all Americans, not a narrow minority, can the Republicans ever be trusted again. America has signalled it is changing, moving on from MAGA. The Republicans must change or die, this time for real.

Image: PICRYL