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Republicans must stay unified around Trump’s policies or, assuredly, they will all be subpoenaed, show-trialed, and de-personed separately.
The midterms, for all their horrors, left the Republican Party bloodied, but that is far from broken.
Statewide contests in Florida followed the modest Republican lean I projected from registered-voter turnout, not dubious polls or vapid commentary. Republicans held the governor’s office, the U.S. Senate seat, and vital state cabinet posts, each by a narrow margin. Democrats, meanwhile, reclaimed both houses of Congress and ended the Republican supermajority in the Florida Legislature.
That outcome matched the registration-and-historical-turnout model I published late last month. I foretold that, in Florida, there would be no Ron DeSantis-style blowout victory, yet no blue wave, either. I saw real Democrat openings only in newly drawn congressional seats and in selected state legislative races. Those results arrived after a bruising cycle.
The temptation now is to treat stomach-churning GOP losses, from sea to shining sea, as proof that the party must move past Donald Trump. That reading is wrong. It dangerously confuses impermanent setbacks with permanent voter rejection.
I collaborated on an exit poll of 450 Republican voters, conducted on Election Day through interactive voice response and weighted to the latest population and voter benchmarks. It revealed that Trump’s second term has made 82 percent of the GOP electorate more supportive of the Republican Party. Sixty-eight percent said a Trump endorsement would guide their 2028 presidential primary vote.
Seventy-one percent said they are likely to vote Republican in 2028, regardless of how the economy performs. Eighty-one percent said they will continue supporting Republicans after the Trump presidency ends. Only 18 percent reported feeling less supportive of the GOP due to Trump’s administration. Just 29 percent said their 2028 vote might hinge on the economy.
The same survey found that 57 percent of Republicans base their Trump support on non-economic issues, leaving only 43 percent who back him for economic purposes. The GOP coalition is not a single-issue bloc waiting for a better fiscal cycle. It is a durable amalgamation that has already absorbed the costs, however steep, of the second Trump term. It demands the party stand with the White House.
Patrick Basham’s Democracy Institute, which correctly called the 2016 Brexit referendum and Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory, executed this exit poll. I wrote its questions. The margin of error is plus or minus four percentage points. The direction of its results is unambiguous.
Two years ago, I issued the Five-Point Forecast that correctly predicted Trump’s national victory and the outcome in every swing state. That model relied on lived economic sentiment, employment conditions, energy prices, perceptions of government response, and the reliability of accurate polling, rather than frozen historical checklists. This year, I used a radically different approach, applying it solely to Florida, and it nonetheless produced statewide calls that held.
Therefore, when I say the Republicans cannot afford to turn on Trump, the claim rests on that record, not on social media sophistry or sound-bite “journalism.”
Turning on Trump after these repulsive midterms would mean turning on the resilient voters who just showed up for the party. The 82 percent who feel more supportive of the GOP are not a fringe. They are the bulk of the Republican electorate that casts ballots, come hell or high water.