Top Republicans are scrambling for a response to the forces tearing apart President Donald Trump's winning 2024 base, according to a new report from The i Paper, as the party confronts a difficult road into this year's midterm elections. Every one of the House's 435 seats and roughly a third of the Senate will be on the ballot on 3 November, making it the first nationwide test of that coalition since Trump's 2024 win.

Writing for the outlet on Sunday, journalist Sarah Baxter argued that if the GOP falls short in November — losing its House majority and potentially the Senate as well — one problem will almost certainly be to blame: Trump's racism. More than anything else, she wrote, it has driven away the diverse coalition of voters he assembled in 2024 to win reelection. History offers little reassurance for the party in power: the president's side has lost House seats in nearly every midterm election since World War II.

Baxter highlighted a viral post from Bo French, a Republican politician running for election to an obscure regulatory body called the Texas Railroad Commission, which despite its name regulates the state's oil and gas industry, deriding South Asians celebrating a University of Texas football victory. The post, she argued, has come to symbolize Trump's broader difficulties with race.

"Six weeks before the midterm elections French's post has become a symbol of the breakdown of Trump's winning 2024 coalition of Hispanics, Asian-American, young and white working-class voters," Baxter wrote. "If the Republicans lose control of the House, and possibly the Senate, on 3 November, this will be why. According to a 2024 NBC exit poll, 46 per cent of Hispanics, 43 per cent of young voters under 30 and 40 per cent of Asian Americans voted for Donald Trump as president."

She continued: "All but the most MAGA, predominantly white voters are peeling away, according to a New York/Siena poll this week. This found that Hispanic voters favoured the Democrats by 43 points, young voters under 30 backed them by 35 points, while 'other non-white voters' supported the Democrats by 12 points."

Senior party figures are well aware of the danger the eroding base poses to the party's electability. Among them is GOP strategist and former President George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, who said he would vote Democratic for the first time ever in order to stop French. Baxter noted that Rove played a central role in turning Texas into a GOP stronghold, building support in particular among Latino voters.

"There are 'just asking questions' Jew-haters, misogynists who worship hypermasculinity, conspiracy nuts seeking clicks for profit, and religious bigots who won't differentiate between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots," Rove wrote in a piece for the Wall Street Journal. "I'll have no part of it. The GOP stables need cleaning."

Baxter also cited conservative commentator Rod Dreher, a former friend of Vice President JD Vance, who warned in the Free Press last year that up to 30–40 per cent of young Republican staffers in Washington were "groypers" — fans and fellow travellers of Nick Fuentes, an avowed admirer of Hitler. Dreher alleges that Vance ended their friendship after Dreher urged the vice president to disown them. In a separate episode, top staff at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank that supports the mass deportation of immigrants, resigned in disgust last year after the organization's head refused to criticize broadcaster Tucker Carlson for hosting Fuentes on his show.

Source: Alternet