With Georgia the last state to be called for Joe Biden, it is clear that President Trump has lost the election. Though lawsuits and recounts are ongoing, they are unlikely to change the final outcome in any of the battleground states, let alone the race as a whole. As of Friday, the Trump campaign has lost 26 of at least 40 cases contesting state election results, with the remainder still pending. And despite several ongoing recounts (most notably in Georgia), the margins in most states are nowhere near close enough to expect any of them to flip red. A recount may change results where the initial margin is in the hundreds, but not the tens of thousands.
President Trump himself seems to see the writing on the wall. While he has yet to concede, he has admirably authorized the government to begin the official transition process with the incoming Biden administration. He reportedly already has his sights set on 2024 — “If this doesn’t work out, I’ll just run again in four years,” the President said on a call with North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer. If he does choose to run, the nomination will likely be his for the taking — a recent Politico poll found that Trump has the support of 53 percent of Republican voters in a hypothetical 2024 primary. The next two runners-up were Vice President Mike Pence and Donald Trump Jr., with 12 and 8 percent of the vote, respectively. Candidates outside the Trump camp, including Senators Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio, and Nikki Haley, each received less than 5 percent of the vote.
Trump’s appeal is understandable. In just four years, he cut taxes for middle-class families, nominated three excellent Supreme Court justices, oversaw the defeat of ISIS, brokered three Arab-Israeli peace deals, pulled the US out of both the Iran deal and the Paris Agreement, avoided embroiling the country in new foreign wars, and (until the pandemic) presided over one of strongest economies in recent American history. That being said, many of his accomplishments — tax cuts, conservative judicial appointments, a robust foreign policy — would be expected of any Republican president. It is not a denigration of Trump’s record to acknowledge that at least a portion of the credit he gets for many of his achievements comes by virtue of him simply exceeding low expectations. Nor does it downplay Trump’s place in history as an effective conservative president to recognize that Republicans can, and must, do better.
As commendable as much of Trump’s record is, it is undeniable that his tone, character, and undemocratic tendencies have harmed the public discourse and alienated many past and potential Republican voters. In the future, Republicans will need candidates who attract new constituencies into the party instead of relying on an aging, increasingly white base. To be fair, exit polls have shown that Trump improved his performance with black, Asian, and Hispanic voters in 2020 compared with 2016. However, contrary to Trump’s claim that this was “largest share of non-white voters of any Republican in 60 years,” it was actually only the best showing in 12 years, and represents a recovery from the GOP’s sharp drop in minority votes during the Obama era more than anything else. George Bush, in fact, won the largest share of minority votes since 1960, in the 2004 election — not coincidentally, this was the last presidential race in which the Republican candidate won the popular vote.
Trump’s improved standing among minorities is worth celebrating, but simply making up for lost ground is not a recipe for success in a country that grows less white by the day. This has been a consistent problem for Republican presidential candidates in recent elections. In 2012, Romney — like Trump — lost overall, but was similarly commended for his performance among minority voters. In fact, polling revealed he bested the GOP’s previous showing against Obama virtually across the board, outperforming John McCain among men and women, whites and blacks, independents, older voters, and even Millennials. If Romney had run in 2008, he would have easily won the election — but by 2012, the country’s demographic makeup had shifted so significantly in favor of black, Asian, and Hispanic voters that Obama was able to keep his edge, despite decreased margins among whites and minorities alike.
Not only were Trump’s gains among minorities insufficient, they were offset by losses among other groups that are normally safe for Republicans. Edison polls showed that in 2020, Trump lost ground among white men, voters over 65, and college-educated white voters. Trump’s margin of victory among white, college-educated men — which was already lower in 2016 than for previous Republican candidates — plummeted from 14 percent to just 3. Some might argue losses among groups like this are inconsequential, and point to white working-class voters — who helped propel Trump to victory in 2016 — as an alternative core constituency of the GOP. This is shortsighted. While every effort should be made to keep working-class whites in the fold of the Republican Party, they are not sizable enough to form a viable base going forward. In 2019, they formed just 40 percent of the population — down from 60 percent in 1990 — and are expected to continue to decrease both numerically and as a percentage of the population. Hedging bets on a shrinking constituency while settling for losses among cohorts of the population that are growing will only make each successive presidential election a steeper uphill battle for Republicans.
It is worth mentioning again that of the past three elections going back to 2000 in which the Republican candidate won the presidency, only in one — 2004 — did he carry the popular vote. While losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college is an entirely legitimate path to victory, Republicans should not be satisfied with letting this become the party’s modus operandi. Without the popular vote, even the most decisive electoral college victory leaves the winning Republican candidate with a weak mandate to enact the conservative policies this country so desperately needs. Without neglecting white working-class voters, the GOP must find a way to rejuvenate its appeal among white college graduates and people of color, lest it become relegated to the position of a permanent minority.
Who can accomplish this feat for the GOP in 2024? Not Trump, if the 2020 results are any indicator. Nor Donald Trump Jr., who somehow exceeds his father in boorishness and divisiveness. A good option might be Nikki Haley, a staunch conservative with an immigrant background — not to mention a woman of color — who could appeal to voters of diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. As the popular governor of South Carolina, a state with a relatively blue-collar, less-educated population, she knows how to speak to working-class voters. She also has a conciliatory side — in 2015, after the Charleston church shooting, she called for the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds. If she were to run, she could capitalize on her background as a Trump administration alum (she served as his UN ambassador in 2017–18) to keep his coalition intact, while also potentially winning back Never Trumpers and other wayward Republican voters who went blue in 2016 and 2020.
Anyone who works in marketing will tell you that perception matters as much as reality, and presentation as much as the product itself. Much of Trump’s record has been great, but his tone, rhetoric, and personal character often bely his substantive successes. If the GOP wants to win in 2024 and beyond, it will need to find a candidate and message that appeal both to Trump’s largely white, working-class coalition, and to the educated and minority voters who will increasingly dominate the American political landscape. Besides Nikki Haley, other potential candidates who might fit this mold include Ted Cruz, Tim Scott, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Ron DeSantis. Republicans like Marco Rubio or Charlie Baker would probably represent too much of an establishmentarian reversion, while potential nominees like Kirsti Noem, Mike Pence, Tucker Carlson, Trump Jr., and of course, Trump himself, would lead the party further down the same failed path as in 2020. Finding a candidate who can bridge the gap between both wings of the GOP will be difficult but necessary if the party is to remain viable in the future.
Trump’s loss aside, the 2020 results as a whole were fairly rosy for Republicans. Of the seven Senate races classified as “tossups” by the New York Times, five so far have been won by Republican incumbents, and polling for the remaining two (runoffs in Georgia) looks favorable for the GOP as well. Republicans also flipped 11 House seats, cutting Democrats’ margin of control in half. Remarkably, all 11 GOP candidates who defeated Democratic incumbents were women or minorities, as are half of the roughly 40 incoming Republican House freshmen. Many of them were recruited by Elevate PAC, led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who herself is a paragon of exactly the kind of Republican the party needs. A small-government, pro-life Millennial woman, she combines staunch conservatism with an independent streak, breaking ranks with Trump and other Republicans on issues like climate change, immigration, and net neutrality. If Stefanik is a bellwether for Republicans of the future, there is cause to be hopeful about the party’s prospects in congressional, Senate, and presidential races going forward.
But the GOP cannot take this for granted. With the exodus of college-educated, suburban, and white female voters from the party since 2016, it may already be too late for the Republican electorate to shed — or at least mitigate — its Trumpist tendencies by 2024. But then again, maybe some of them will return, empowered by Trump’s loss in 2020. Either way, it won’t be too hard to find a 2024 candidate with less baggage and better rhetorical skills than our 45th president — so long as Trump himself is not the nominee. If he is, the change the party needs will have to wait until 2028. Whether it is in four years or eight, whichever Republican nominee comes after Trump will have a difficult task ahead of them — they must keep Trump’s coalition (working-class whites) energized and loyal, bring the voters Trump lost (white women and college grads) back into the fold, and make significant gains among fast-growing Democratic constituencies (blacks, Hispanics, and Asians). To do so will require walking a thin line, and Republicans cannot afford to gamble on another wild card nominee à la Trump. What the GOP needs is a candidate whose moral qualities align with their public stances; a candidate who can energize voters without peddling untruths and conspiracy theories; a candidate whose persona is suited to the dignity of the presidency. Anything else would be a death wish for the party and a disservice to the country.