The 2028 GOP Presidential Primary Is Here, and It Kicked Off With an … Essay Contest?

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that totally predicted Democrats would get 260 House seats and 56 Senate seats in our heads weeks ago but, you know, didn’t feel like telling anyone.

Well that was sump’m else, huh? Crazy to think that Democrats were toast two years ago and that, starting in January, every American will be required to pledge daily allegiance to a nonbinary god. But anyway, the 2026 midterms are old news—what’s going on with the 2028 Republican presidential field? And could Democrats have picked up more than a measly nine Senate seats? Will anyone not vote to impeach Pete Hegseth?

Let’s first look ahead to what Democrats are planning to do with these majorities beyond passing national Sharia law.

What matters now: So what are these Democrats going to do?

If there’s any downside to flipping (likely) nine Senate seats and winning the largest House majority this century, it’s convincing the voters who brought you there that they’ve already seen the greatest accomplishments of the next two years.

The very act of winning ends Republicans’ partisan legislative agenda. It ends Donald Trump’s ability to gift 37-year-old brainmelt cases lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Trump will not be able to get another Supreme Court nominee confirmed come January. He will not be allowed to do as he pleases with the understanding that congressional committees will willingly ignore it. The most important elements of the incoming Democratic agenda, in other words, have already been completed.

In terms of how Democrats will spend their next two years in Congress, though, there’s not much to overthink.

They were elected principally on two issues: lowering the cost of living and reining in corruption. They should stick to those.

On the cost of living, they will vote early and often to end Trump’s tariff regime, either by disapproving existing ones or passing new legislation reclaiming congressional tariff authority. They will vote early and often on war powers resolutions to end the Iran war. They will vote to reverse Medicaid cuts—new work requirements for which will kick in next year—and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cuts, which have already kicked in. They’ll vote to restore enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to lower health insurance premiums. In short, they’ll vote to reverse all of the MAGA moves that voters hated and that cost Republicans the election, leaving Republicans the choice to filibuster, veto, or sustain Trump’s veto on any of these popular moves.

Trickier tactical decisions will come on must-pass government-funding bills. Most notably, Democrats can use the power of the purse to cut off funding for the Iran war, and they’ll attempt something along those lines in their opening bids. But we can already see many of the new, novice Democratic members and senators from red states getting queasy when the question becomes whether to shut down the government over the issue, even though Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter) have heard pretty resoundingly from the voters that they want this war finished.

On corruption, there’s more to do beyond oversight hearings—and there will be oh so many of those. Because those hearings can and should fold into legislation. Among the many things we’re eager to learn more about is the level of insider trading, favor granting, and prediction-market gambling from within the White House. We suspect the findings will be substantial. And that’s a great opportunity to extend popular proposed bans on congressional stock trading to the White House, as well as to ban prediction-market betting in the executive branch.

As important as any individual policy, though, is the need to stick to them, and to stay focused squarely on what midterm voters demanded without getting sidetracked by factional demands from one segment of these big, broad majorities that put them at odds with the other. Democrats were handed a gift from God in these midterms that they didn’t actually deserve. The Democratic coalition had been in a death spiral, having comprehensively lost the white working-class vote and watching anxiously as minority working-class voters drifted in the same direction. Without some correction, the Democratic coalition would soon be down to English majors. Thanks to Trump doing everything in his power to shatter the very groups that got him elected, Democrats were able to earn a tryout in the Great Plains, in the Deep South, in Texas. If they want to stay a viable party in the Senate and the Electoral College, it’s imperative to show that they’ll stick to the program.

What we’re monitoring: How’s ol’ J.D. Vance going to wriggle his way out of this one?

Vice President J.D. Vance’s presidential hopes nosedived on Election Day, and he knows it. He’s the deputy to, and chief public cheerleader for, the very same president that the nation comprehensively rejected. And his legacy contribution to the midterm campaigns was to serve as chief public cheerleader for Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy after the candidate weaponized his opponent’s childhood rape against her. The 2028 presidential nomination has never looked more up for grabs.

So it wasn’t surprising that his damage control came quickly and at length in a Twitter essay the following morning. And it was our first look at how he would attempt to balance his day job with his need to separate himself from his day job.

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. “The president himself said so last night.” OK, sure, Trump admitted that energy prices were the factor. It gets more interesting in the next part. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so,” he added. “Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”

To whom is this directed? He’s braying vaguely against neocons and hawks within the party. But he’s not allowed to be the avatar of the anti-war faction, as he’d like to be, because his boss started the war and made Vance a spokesperson for it. Maybe Trump will give him permission to become an open opponent of the war—he’s generally pretty loosey-goosey about demanding loyalty from his subjects, right? Right. Best of luck to Vance as he figures all this out!

He’s not the only presidential hopeful entering the essay contest. (It’s not a coincidence that these guys all have between one and two Ivy League diplomas.) Ted Cruz, now the lone statewide-elected Republican in the postrevolutionary Woke Texas, rattled off and gave credence to a whole list of voters’ concerns: “Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high,” he wrote. “Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long.” He observes these things as if they just came out of the blue. Why are there tariffs? Why is there an Iran war? This man behind the curtain goes unnamed.

The game, then, is correctly blaming Trump’s policies for why the GOP crashed and burned, without ascribing those policy choices to a source.

What’s a bunch of nonsense that you should absolutely enjoy: Funny GOP excuses for why they lost.

For the 80^th time: It’s not complicated why the GOP lost! Trump made things more expensive to amuse himself, while launching a losing war, while enriching himself, while being a jerk, while overplaying his hand on immigration enforcement, while building monuments to himself, while fighting hard to keep the Epstein files hidden, etc., etc. But let’s look at some of the other excuses out there.

Many of them come from Trump. He has argued that “Fox News bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse,” a thought that came to him while watching former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on the channel. We’d rank de Blasio’s persuasive abilities on cable news as relatively low on the reasons Republicans lost. Trump’s bigger argument is that Republicans lost because “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” It’s true Republicans get much better turnout among low-propensity GOP voters when Trump is on the ballot, or when it’s a presidential election cycle in general. But presidents are never on the ballot in the midterms—which come in the “middle” of a president’s “term”—and their party doesn’t typically lose the House popular vote by 14 points.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a notable supporting figure in the administration’s collapse, posted: “We were too successful the first year of the Trump administration.” Ah, yes, the winning was all too front-loaded, cannibalizing wins that could have been had closer to election time. But Trump’s approval rating has been a downward line since Day 1.

Some right-wing commentators blamed the failure of Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s strict voter-ID and voter-verification law, for the losses. And, sure, maybe its burdensome requirements could have disenfranchised some new registrants from exercising their right to vote. But can we now finally finish talking about the need for the SAVE America Act? Here are some of the states with the strictest voter-ID requirements and, in parentheses, how the GOP fared in those states: Indiana (yikes), Ohio (yikes), Mississippi (yikes), Georgia (yikes), North Carolina (YIKES). What that also does show, on the other hand, is that Democrats have an opportunity, should they want to ever attempt a bipartisan election-reform bill, to compromise with Republicans on a form of national voter ID without being so

More plunder …

• We feel as if we’ve read less articles and seen fewer questions about whether Trump will “moderate” after the midterms or “change” in some way after seeing the nation’s verdict. Everyone simply knows he won’t. And Trump made his intentions especially clear on Friday, when he announced that he was replacing chief of staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller, the architect and executor of various policies—especially the immigration-related ones—that led to Tuesday’s wipeout. On the other hand, he’s a pretty accomplished guy: He was able to turn Texas blue, after all.

• A unifying position among Democrats across the political spectrum this fall was that they should impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the erstwhile weekend-cable-news co-host who pushed for and did not win the Iran war while firing and/or alienating all the competent people around him. But Democrats may not get the chance next year, because it may happen next week. When the House reconvenes, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie will force a vote on Hegseth’s impeachment. All, or nearly all, Democrats will support it. But how many Republicans will? We’d expect a lot of interest. A great many House Republicans lost their seats because of this guy and now have to come back for a lame-duck session. Would you be in a “Let’s vote to save Pete Hegseth” kind of mood while you were cleaning out your office after losing an R +15 district? They might as well try to do it by unanimous consent. Hegseth sure seems to be preparing for a trial.

• Democrats may be on the verge of flipping nine Senate seats. Let’s chastise them for not getting more! There are two glaring missed opportunities on the map. Republican Julia Letlow won the Louisiana Senate race by only 1.8 points against Democrat Jamie Davis. This race had similar characteristics to Mississippi and South Carolina: stunningly high Black voter turnout after the Supreme Court’s latest whack at the Voting Rights Act, and a ho-hum Republican candidate with no competitive general-election experience. Perhaps Senate Democrats’ super PAC could’ve thrown a couple million bucks its way. And in Montana, the opposition to Republican Kurt Alme was split between Democrat Alani Bankhead and independent Seth Bodnar, when Bodnar should’ve just cut it with the cutesiness and beat Bankhead in the Democratic primary. He probably would have won. Maybe in the next rare historic tsunami with no modern comparison!

• There’s always one drop early on election night that tells you where things are going. In 2020, Joe Biden’s underwhelming early vote margin in Miami-Dade County suggested that there was going to be a massive polling error that year. In 2024, it was Kamala Harris’ underperformance in Loudoun County, Virginia. This year, it was the wildly terrible early vote numbers for Victoria Spartz in Indiana’s 5^th District. Spartz ended up losing her “likely Republican”–rated seat, while other Indiana Republicans held on. The only reason those other Indiana Republicans may have held on, though, is because state Republicans resisted ferocious pressure from the administration, and Speaker Mike Johnson, to maximally gerrymander their state. Trump punished those reluctant state senators by successfully primarying them out of office. In the end, their sacrifice may have been the only thing that prevented a wipeout of the whole delegation.

• Elections aren’t always one-sided disasters, so let’s look at all the Democratic seats that Republicans flipped in the House. They flipped Tennessee’s 9^th District, which state Republicans had gerrymandered into a Trump +21 seat, by a single point. They won one (1) of the five Texas districts they attempted to gerrymander Democrats out of: Texas’ 32^nd. And last but not least, former Maine Gov. Paul LePage won Maine’s 2^nd District. He certainly benefited from the performance of Susan Collins, who, even in losing, was the only Senate candidate to improve upon Republicans’ statewide margin relative to 2024. Anyway, that’s the whole list as of this writing. And LePage’s district, which Trump won by 9 in 2024, appears to be the bluest seat held by a Republican. Tsunamis (electoral) are nuts!

• After having bequeathed the lousy Democrats the largest House majority for either party this century, Johnson declared his work complete and announced he wouldn’t stay on as House Republican leader to lead a hollowed-out conference that will have no relevance whatsoever for the next two years. The race to succeed him appears to be between Reps. Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise. Our first thought is: Who gives a shit? Our second thought is: See first thought.