The Republican Party’s midterm wipeout has torn apart President Donald Trump’s coalition.
For months, polling has shown cracks among Trump’s 2024 voters over immigration, the Iran war and the president’s influence. Now, new results from The POLITICO Poll, conducted just days after the election, reveal a deep chasm between Trump’s self-identified MAGA base and the non-MAGA voters who helped fuel his return to the White House.
The two camps hold sharply different interpretations of the GOP’s historic midterm defeat and what comes next for their party, according to the survey conducted by PF Global. MAGA Trump loyalists were more likely to say the president is not to blame for the losses — that things would have gone better if he was on the ballot — and that the party should now move closer to Trump.
Non-MAGA Trump voters starkly disagreed, saying they are ready to move away from him and his unpopular agenda. About one in five said they voted for Democratic candidates this cycle.
The fault line is a fresh warning sign that Republicans, desperate to stitch back together a winning coalition after their midterm calamity, may struggle to keep the voters that powered Trump’s victory in 2024 in the fold.
And it calls into question just how loyal the party should be to a leader — and movement — it has spent the last decade united around. Overall, just over half of all Trump voters said the president will be able to make a comeback from the election losses.
“As the [GOP] spends the next two years figuring out who it is and what it stands for, these divisions will only be further exposed,” said Republican strategist Doug Heye.
Here are four charts that show just how much the midterms have divided Trump’s own voters.
A majority of non-MAGA Trump voters blamed Republicans’ loss of the House and the Senate on Trump’s actions since taking office, with far fewer saying the campaigns themselves were responsible. A 59% majority also said the president is a loser of the midterms, a striking rebuke from a group of voters who helped his return to the White House.
But MAGA Trump voters are torn over who they blame for their losses.
The divide mirrors disagreements happening at the top levels of the Republican Party. In the immediate aftermath of the election, some Republicans, at least tepidly, began pointing fingers at the president. Others have called for a “reckoning” without explicitly laying the blame at Trump’s feet or articulating an alternative vision for the GOP.
“There is no way to sugarcoat what happened on Election Day. From coast to coast, and in some of the reddest parts of the country, Republicans were humiliated,” 31 Republican National Committee members wrote in a letter to GOP lawmakers this week.
Trump, who ahead of the midterms repeatedly urged voters to “pretend” he was on the ballot, insisted in a Truth Social post after the election that, “I JUST WASN’T ON THE BALLOT. IF I WERE, WE WOULD HAVE WON IN A LANDSLIDE!”
“President Trump will never stop delivering results for the American people and he will undoubtedly go down as the most successful and consequential president in American history,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement.
As Republican Party leaders grapple with how to rebound from the midterms, MAGA isn’t ready to move on from Trump: They said the path forward is embracing Trump and his agenda.
Non-MAGA Trump voters said the opposite — and nearly half of them think their Republican candidates should have broken with the president on the economy this cycle.
“It is very clear that Election Day 2026 was an unequivocal rebuke of Donald Trump, both him personally and his policies,” said one national GOP operative who worked on midterm races, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape. “MAGA needs a serious rebrand if it is going to have any success in the future.”
That presents a complicated picture for Republican leaders, who will have to find a way to appeal to Trump’s fiercely loyal MAGA base without alienating the less committed voters who helped deliver his 2024 victory.
On Election Night, as the scale of Republican losses was becoming clear, POLITICO asked GOP operatives who worked on midterm races whether the defeat meant it was time for Republicans to consider a new vision for the party.
“How can it not be?” one person responded. It’s “the worst defeat a party has taken in 50 years.”
Non-MAGA Trump voters are split over whether Trump can make a comeback after the midterms bloodbath. MAGA, however, is quite confident in the president’s abilities to do so.
And collectively, Trump voters are more optimistic about the Republican Party than the president.
Some key aspects of Trump’s agenda are unpopular with Americans, including his push for mass deportations, tariffs imposed on key trade partners and the war in Iran. The congressional Republicans who once supported many of those policies are now weighing whether they can distance themselves to regain voters’ trust.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” after the midterms, Trump admitted his party’s losses may be attributed at least in part to the Iran war and the resulting high gas prices — though he also mentioned how, in some cases, voters “didn’t like the candidates” and asserted, again, that he wasn’t on the ballot.
“President Trump remains the unequivocal leader of our party who’s cut taxes, lowered drug costs and secured our border,” RNC spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said in a statement. “Republicans will continue to harness his ability to energize our base and expose the Democrats’ disastrous record to win back our majorities in 2028.”
As the party looks ahead to 2028, Republicans are already weighing how much the party’s next presidential nominee should carry the MAGA mantle.
Some Hill Republicans are increasingly warming to the prospect of a Marco Rubio presidential bid, arguing that voters may be looking for a new direction after Trump — and Vice President JD Vance may be too closely tied to the president’s agenda.
MAGA Trump voters said decisively that they prefer someone who has worked in the administration — another sign of their support for the president, and of the difficulty of changing course as a party given that loyalty.
“I think everybody reserves the right to adjust. You know, learn from this,” GOP Rep. and incoming Oklahoma Sen. Kevin Hern recently told POLITICO. Asked his favorite candidate of the three he expected to run: Vance, Rubio or DeSantis, he replied with a smile: “Everybody.”
