Brutal red-state losses are raising alarm among Republicans about the 2028 presidential battlefield.
Democrats’ midterm blowout is upending the political calculus for future presidential campaigns, more than a dozen strategists on both sides told POLITICO. Republicans are stressing the ramifications of a major tranche of once-reliably Republican Electoral College votes being in jeopardy, while Democrats are weighing how much surprise wins on red turf should reshape their electoral strategy.
“Last night undoubtedly made the mechanics of winning in 2028 harder for Republicans,” said former Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien.
Stepien lamented that Republicans had lost both once-swing Midwestern states like Ohio that Trump had brought toward the GOP, as well as formerly red Sunbelt states like Georgia and Arizona that have moved steadily left in the Trump era.
And then there’s Texas.
“Waging a campaign for president in Texas is big, expensive, and not something Republicans have had to do for a long time,” he added. “The impacts of last night are real.”
Trump had rearranged the electoral map for the past 12 years with a blue-collar coalition that moved Ohio and Iowa safely into Republicans’ ledger, turned Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania into true swing states and did enough in the Sun Belt to keep Texas from being in play. But that all fell apart this week as Democrats romped across the map. If things don’t change fast after Tuesday’s results, Republicans fear that the party’s next nominee will confront a bleak map akin to 2008 or 2012, when the GOP had an excruciatingly narrow path to victory.
Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, compared this year’s GOP gutting to Republicans’ 2006 midterm shellacking, which foreshadowed Democrats taking the White House and building massive majorities two years later.
“[Republicans] didn’t bottom in 2006, you bottomed after 2008,” said Short.
Democrats know that recreating their historically large estimated 14-point national popular vote blowout isn’t likely in the 2028 presidential election, and that Trump’s historic unpopularity was a major factor in the midterms.
“It’s not fait accompli that any of those voters that came over will stay with us, in the same way that they didn’t stay with Donald Trump after this last cycle, or they didn’t stay with Joe Biden after 2020,” said Dan Kanninen, former battleground states director for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. But the electoral map suddenly looks a lot different to strategists than it did a few days ago.
“In this environment, every state eventually becomes a swing state,” said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist who advised Hakeem Jeffries this cycle.
Democrats’ Texas Triumph
Democrats are particularly excited about their breakthrough in Texas, which — like Arizona and Georgia before it — has been trending to the left for years, driven by demographic change and suburban voters’ realignment. The state’s rapid Hispanic growth meant the swing in Hispanic voters back toward Democrats pushed the state especially hard towards them this cycle. “If we weren’t already considering Texas a swing state in 2028, we are now,” said Melissa Morales, the executive director of SOMOS PAC, a Latino voter engagement group.
Democrats swept Texas’ statewide offices on Tuesday despite being massively outspent, with Sen.-elect James Talarico leading the way with a 12-point blowout victory.
Talarico told POLITICO after his win that Texas is “absolutely” on the presidential map for 2028, and said he would “urge every 2028 candidate to vigorously compete in our state.”
Some Democrats urged party leaders to press their organizing advantage in Texas, seeing the state’s Black and Latino voters as central to the future of the party in a state where the Republican machine had helped keep the state out of reach for Democrats.
Democrats’ Midwestern Bounceback
Republican collapses in Ohio and Iowa, two longtime swing states that President Obama carried twice that had moved hard right under Trump, have panicked some GOP strategists in those states. Democrats won Senate and governor’s races in both states Tuesday, as well as flipping a half-dozen House seats between them as they romped across the region. Republicans in both states warn that the era of GOP dominance might have been more closely tied to Trump’s unique populist appeal and could be competitive in two years — an appeal that has taken a major hit since he returned to the White House.
“You lived off Trump’s brand, and Trump’s brand did a lot of good for the state of Iowa. We won a lot of things here. But you can also die by the brand as well,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa.
In Ohio, ancestrally Democratic blue-collar areas rebounded hard back to the left.
“Ohio should be considered a battleground,” Ohio GOP strategist Curt Steiner said. Republicans see the massive losses in all the future presidential battlegrounds as a huge blow to their organizational infrastructure in those states. Stepien said he would regularly lean on GOP governors in battleground states for guidance and strategy while helming Trump’s 2020 campaign, which he called a “massive advantage.” “You’re going to save time, you’re going to save money, you’re going to have to put less staff into the state. You’re going to have more local know-how,” Stepien said. “It is an automatic advantage to be able to tap into something that’s existing and that’s been tested.”
After Tuesday’s victories, Democrats hold the governor’s seats in all 10 presidential battleground states.
Dasha Burns, Adam Wren and Jason Beeferman contributed to this report.
