The Republican Party just ran into a brick wall. Conservatives are bruised and demoralized, but there is little time to waste. The next two years are critical to restoring our movement.
This process begins with an honest reckoning of what went wrong. This wasn’t a narrow defeat: Democrats won Senate seats in South Carolina and Kansas, along with every statewide office in Texas. Mississippi is coming down to the wire.
Some will claim that the party in power always loses seats in a midterm election. Others will point to the unique dynamics of particular races — from retiring incumbents to less than stellar candidates. These factors are relevant but not determinative.
The unifying thread tying the losses together: the conservative movement has lost its way.
For decades, conservatives and the Republican Party had an understanding. Conservatives provided their votes to Republican politicians, so long as those politicians rejected the allure of big government and delivered conservative wins. This contract underpinned President Trump’s 2016 victory.
After winning in 2024, Trump and a cadre of populist advisors abandoned the deal, ignoring conservatives who believe in the principles that animated the founding of the United States. Too many in the conservative movement turned from principle into a political cheerleading squad.
What happens when conservatives don’t stand up for our battle-tested principles?
In April of 2025, President Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, which were, in reality, the first salvo in what would become almost $1,000 in new taxes for every American household. The rumored job boom failed to materialize, but American businesses still had to deal with the uncertainty and spoiled business plans created by a spontaneous tariff regime.
The economic chaos temporarily stopped in February, when the Supreme Court intervened and held that the law the president leaned on most “does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.” But instead of leaving well enough alone, he found ingenious ways to keep his tariff agenda alive in the penumbra of federal law.
American voters paid the Trump tariff bill at the checkout counter all year long, and didn’t forget come November.
Tariffs are just one example. The list goes on.
The president walked away from the right to life and treated pro-life voters as an afterthought. Bowing to him in 2024, the Republican Party watered down the pro-life planks from its platform for the first time in four decades.
The Trump administration took stakes in private companies, turning billions in taxpayer CHIPS and Science Act money into a government stake in Intel, among dozens of other private companies now partially owned by the federal government.
That’s simply not conservative and stands anathema to decades of conservative leadership.
The president routinely floated Democrat-style handouts and entitlement expansion. Weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, he promised “a dividend of at least $5,000 a person” — contingent on a Republican victory.
His foreign policy was often muddled and lacking in moral clarity. While the president deserves credit for engaging Iran to ensure they don’t get a nuclear bomb, his campaign suffers from a lack of resolve and no end point. On Ukraine, he seesawed back and forth for two years while ending the election season with a gambit to buy Russian diesel fuel, which would have had little to no impact at the pump while funding the Russian war machine as it continues its unjust war in Ukraine.
Time after time, the president walked away from conservative principles without fear of correction. Whether they would publicly say it or not, many conservative voters felt demoralized, and some stayed home.
You cannot change the past, but the conservative movement already knows the path forward. It has been tested: a free market economy where private citizens — not the government — own companies, limited government, free trade with free nations, peace through strength abroad, and a movement that defends our values while modeling those values itself.
Those principles won elections long before 2016, and they can win again.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. The Democratic Party is increasingly becoming the party of real socialism and antisemitism. If we fail, America will look more and more like Europe and less like our home.
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Tim Chapman is the President at Advancing American Freedom, a public policy advocacy organization founded by Vice President Mike Pence. Chapman has more than two decades of service in the conservative movement and as an advocate for public policy.
