How Trump and MAGA Captured the GOP

Anne Kim: Your book stands out because you make the case that there was really nothing the Republican Party establishment could have done to stop the rise of Donald Trump. You also argue that it’s a combination of a long-brewing historical trend along with changes in party governance. This cuts against the idea that the establishment could have stopped Trump if they “just stood up to him” more. Do I have that right? 

Seth Masket: I think that’s right. One of the things I show is that there were a lot of people within the party’s leadership who were not comfortable with nominating Donald Trump for a third time in 2024. They wanted to steer their party in a different direction and found themselves basically powerless to do so. They had built a party they could no longer lead. The populist base has become very loyal to Trump and its MAGA beliefs and is pretty much resistant to any top-down leadership and recommendations. They were not interested in what their party leaders had to say.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk a little bit about how the party got to be that way. The first part of your book talks about the decades-long rise of xenophobic populism. You argue that Donald Trump rode this wave. He didn’t create it. And you start out back in the ’60s with Richard Nixon’s campaign as one of the key turning points in modern populism. Can you walk us through some of this history and these pivotal events that are milestones in the rise of populism?

Seth Masket: There have been different strains of populism throughout American history. You could see the beginnings of it, as I describe it, after Richard Nixon’s loss to John Kennedy in 1960. It was a very close election. Nixon lost very narrowly, and then there was a fight within the party as to which way the party should go after that. They recognize that there’s a growing number of Black voters in the cities, and maybe they should reach out to them. Or there’s a growing number of white voters in the South who have long been Democrats but are increasingly uncomfortable with their party, particularly on matters of civil rights. The party had a choice as to which direction to go, and ultimately, they went with trying to woo the southern whites.

A lot of things come downstream from that—modern party polarization and a number of things. You can see Richard Nixon and then, to some extent, George Wallace later in the ’60s pursuing this path of identifying with more populist and cultural issues, talking about safety and resentment toward elites and resentment towards other countries and things like that, as a way of signaling a comfort with more racist voters without actually coming out and saying that specifically. 

One of the big things I highlight later on in this movement is Pat Buchanan’s presidential run in 1992. Pat Buchanan was a prominent conservative journalist for many years and decades. But he decided to run as a Republican in 1992, challenging the sitting Republican, George H.W. Bush. He articulated this view of a much more conservative and populist-oriented Republican Party that was fiercely anti-immigration and advocating for working-class whites against party elites. He spoke in a way that other Republicans just did not speak at that point. It sounded very different the way he was campaigning with this culture war speech. It was clearly an area that the Bushes were uncomfortable with. 

But [Buchanan} won some votes with it. He clearly got some people’s attention, and you saw a development throughout the 1990s and 2000s where what was seen as a fringe movement was basically growing in adherents over time. You saw that with Rush Limbaugh and his innovations with conservative talk radio. You saw Newt Gingrich try to tap into that. Later the Tea Party tried to tap into that as well, until this has become a pretty substantial movement that had already transformed the party to some extent by the time Donald Trump comes along and wants to run in 2015.

Anne Kim: You mentioned Rush Limbaugh, and you talk a fair amount in your book about the rise of conservative media in validating and creating an echo chamber for this kind of populism. Can you talk a little bit more about the role that conservative media has had in enabling someone like Donald Trump to rise?

Seth Masket: I think it was very important because there’s a long-standing conservative belief that they aren’t getting the whole story from the traditional media—the legacy media, the old Big Three networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC, the New York Times. They felt like their views were not being adequately addressed. Fox News rose, in part, to capitalize on that. 

When Fox News starts in the mid-1990s, they have a very different model. Unlike most other television news, they are not drawing their reporters and correspondents from the world of print journalism. They’re drawing people from the entertainment world and to some extent from radio. But they’re drawing people who are designed to entertain and to shock, and with the idea that the news that the other networks won’t tell you is what they’re going to focus on—this idea that there was hidden but now revealed knowledge that they were conveying. 

Anne Kim: Conspiratorial thinking.

Seth Masket: Yes, it’s a very conspiratorial worldview. It’s the idea that whatever they’re telling you is wrong, and we’re telling you the truth. Trump worked very well with that kind of a mindset and often talks about how existing institutions are not trustworthy. They’re all part of a deep state, they’re part of some conspiracy to keep you down and keep you uninformed, and only hearing things directly from our leaders is the right way to do it.

Anne Kim: So you’ve got this undercurrent of right-wing nativist xenophobic populism happening. You’ve got the conservative media that’s amplifying and validating. You also write that at the same time, there is a change in political party structure that is effectively disempowering the establishment and shifting the locus of power toward these other forces.

It didn’t occur to me that we didn’t used to have primaries. I guess it’s a fairly new development, but talk about some of these structural changes that weakened the existing party structure in a way that enabled these other forces to come in.

Seth Masket: There are a lot of changes, but one that I think is really important to focus on is a series of changes that came specifically to the Democratic Party shortly after the 1968 election. That was in many ways a very catastrophic election cycle for Democrats. It included a violent and horribly embarrassing summer convention, Robert Kennedy’s death earlier that year, then Hubert Humphrey’s narrow loss to Richard Nixon in the fall. The party was open to making some substantial changes with the way they nominated candidates. In a series of reforms called collectively the McGovern-Fraser reforms, they ended up creating a [new] system. It wasn’t really designed to produce more primary elections, but that ended up being the consequence of it.

Instead of holding presidential nominations through conventions, more state parties started having primary elections. They would select their convention delegates that way and pick their presidential candidates that way. The result from that is that by the early 1970s, you started to see an explosion in the number of primaries and candidates recognizing that the way to win their party’s nomination is no longer to win the favor of elite party leaders in D.C., but to get on TV a lot, raise money, and win votes in Iowa and New Hampshire and places like that. It was just an entirely different incentive structure. People like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter were able to get the nomination, figuring out that new system, even if they weren’t the insiders’ favorites. 

There was a real fear at the time that this was going to totally blow up the way parties pick candidates and that there’d be an era of all these demagogues running for president. That largely didn’t happen until more recently, honestly. 

Adding to that system the growth of social media and the growth of conservative news and talk radio really changed the way people campaign. It made it so that if you want to get your name in front of the most people, if you want to win the attention of people who are going to show up at primaries and going to show up at caucuses and really have an outsized influence, you need to be on Fox News, you need to be doing a lot of podcasts, you need to be doing a lot of social media. That gets your name out there. And increasingly the way to do that is to be shocking. Or even to be involved in a scandal in some way. Or just say increasingly bombastic things. It’s a very different set of incentives. That’s what Donald Trump excels in. He’s really good at keeping the focus on himself, keeping the media focused on him, doing so through bombast, through scandal, just by driving the national conversation. And it really makes it hard for party insiders and party elites to have as much of an impact in selecting who their party should and shouldn’t nominate.

Anne Kim: There’s a tremendous irony in all of this too, right? The primary system presumably was intended to democratize the process of nominations because you had the party bosses that were controlling everything. But the democratization has backfired now, with the demagogues who’ve taken over. So let’s fast-forward to 2016, and we’re seeing the convergence of all of these trends. How did Trump win the nomination over the opposition of the establishment?

Seth Masket: You really see all these different forces within the party converging at that moment, in 2015 and 2016. 

Trump is the sort of person that in the past has expressed interest in being president—just a wealthy, famous person who thinks they should be president now. Political parties usually aren’t interested in someone like that. And they usually don’t pick someone like that. And yet he decides he wants to run for president. 

Just building off his fame, he’s granted tons of interviews and he starts barnstorming around the country throughout 2015 and increasingly getting into trouble and saying things you’re not supposed to say as a candidate and getting criticism from people left and right. Meanwhile, the more conventional Republican Party is having debates, and a lot of people are running for office, and they’re sort of doing the things that you would normally do to determine who they like, who is good. A lot of these people are voicing opinions strongly against Donald Trump at that point. And people within the party, people like Mitt Romney, who had run for president previously, other prominent Republicans are coming out and saying, this guy’s a joke, don’t pay any attention to this Trump guy. We have plenty of other perfectly good normal candidates who are running. 

But the insiders themselves never converged on an alternative to Trump. They were never able to sort of come together and say, we think Jeb Bush is the right guy. We think Marco Rubio is the right guy. And what might have happened is that they would have all reached a conclusion that this is the proper candidate. There would have been tons of endorsements for that person. A lot of money would have flowed to that person as a result. And there’s a chance that candidate could have defeated Donald Trump in the primaries in early 2016.

As it was, the rest of the party was very divided among the rest of the candidates running. Some people liked Chris Christie, or some people liked Bush or Marco Rubio or Scott Walker. So they never really told people whom to vote for instead of Trump. For a long time, Trump was not winning majorities of the votes in those primaries. But he was winning pluralities in a very scattered field of candidates and just accruing delegates that whole time. It never really came down to just one other person, and by the time the convention was coming along and Ted Cruz was trying some sort of last-ditch approach to winning the nomination, it was really too late at that point.

Anne Kim: Man, what could have been. Okay, so he gets the nomination, he gets the presidency, and then he begins to consolidate power, which is something else you write about in your book. One of the interesting things that I learned from your book is that one of Trump’s superpowers is his control of nominations and endorsements. Can you talk about how and why nominations and endorsements are so important to Trump’s grip?

Seth Masket: He has had a particularly outsized influence on who the Republican Party picks for lots of other offices, on who they pick to nominate. And he does this by endorsing regularly in Republican Party primaries to a degree that other presidents just don’t do. He endorsed more than 200 candidates in this year’s midterm primaries. There were more than 200 in 2022. He just gets involved in primaries. Most presidents don’t want to get involved in fights within their own party. They just don’t see much value in that. 

And to the extent that presidents have in the past played with the idea of reshaping the party in their image—Franklin Roosevelt tried that, and it largely backfired on him. Woodrow Wilson tried a little something like that a century ago. But most just don’t do this. I was part of a study a few years ago with some political scientists—Rachel Blum and Mike Cowburn—I referenced this in my book. We tried to measure the impact of Trump’s endorsements in the 2022 midterm primaries. We looked at all the Republican primaries for governor and U.S. senator in 2022 and looked at whether Trump endorsed or not and who he endorsed. Controlling for a lot of other factors, we found that if he endorsed someone, that person tended to do about 16 percentage points better than if he did not endorse that person. That’s a ridiculously large effect for one person’s endorsement to have. Nothing else really rivals it. 

So that has enabled him to exert a lot of influence over his party, and it’s a big part of the reason you rarely see Republican members of Congress and other Republican elected officials criticizing him too harshly or for too long because he holds the power of their careers in his hand. He can decide that they’re no longer doing it for him and back someone else in their next primary, and there’s a good chance they’ll lose their seat. We saw that with John Cornyn in Texas just this last year.

Anne Kim: One of the interesting ways in which you did the research for your book was your survey of county chairs. That’s a group I don’t think a lot of people know very much about or even think about. So I’m curious about why you targeted this group and what you learned from them about how Trump amasses power and wields it at the very local level.

Seth Masket: In a lot of the research I’ve done, I’m interested in finding what you might call the “party insider,” which is a very vague concept, obviously. That could mean a lot of different people. But really, I’m interested in following the people who are kind of the middle management of a party. People who basically see it as their job to focus on politics and nominations long before other people in their community do, who have something invested in their political party and are thinking about not just who they want, but who their party should have and what would be best for themselves and their party. 

So for this book project, I decided to focus on county party chairs. There are approximately 3,100 counties or county equivalents across the United States. Almost every one of those counties has a Republican Party organization of some sort. And almost every one of those organizations has a chairperson. That is, I thought, a good level to analyze this. First, because these are people all across the country, they’re rooted in their local communities. They don’t necessarily have a lot of direct power over what their party does and doesn’t do, but they’re considered locally influential and connected. People rely on their judgment, and they generally know what’s going on. 

They can have some local influence as to how people are thinking about an upcoming presidential race. So I identified as many of these folks as I could, reached out to them over email, and I started doing this survey in early 2023 where I would get between 100 and 200 responses from people, covering a pretty wide range of beliefs and backgrounds—people who’d been chairperson for less than a year and some who’d been there for more than a decade—and just use that as a sample of people to follow their set of beliefs about the parties. I asked them lots of questions about how the Republican presidential race was shaping up and who they were considering for president, who they didn’t want their party to consider for president, and I looked at how their views transformed over the course of 2023. It turned out to be a fascinating set of people to focus on.

Anne Kim: What did you find? Did they enable Trump? Did they try to block him? Where were they on that continuum of the populist base versus the insiders?

Seth Masket: One thing that really stunned me in the very first wave of the survey was back in February of 2023—a full year before like the Iowa caucuses. I asked people, are you committed to a candidate? If so, to whom? 

Roughly half of these party chairs said that they were uncommitted. They were keeping their options open, which kind of surprised me. I expected more to be early supporters of Donald Trump at that point. And what also surprised me is that among those who had made up their mind, Trump wasn’t even the top choice at that point. More people said that they were committed to Ron DeSantis. And I gave them a list of all the people running for president. Who are you open to? Who are you considering? Far more people said DeSantis than Trump.

A good third of these county chairs said that they did not want Donald Trump to be their party’s nominee in 2024. Now, my impression was nearly all these folks liked Donald Trump’s first term in office. They wanted more like that, but they were concerned about his electability. They were concerned that he had too much baggage, he had been in too much trouble with the media, he had too many legal investigations against him. He might lose to Joe Biden or whoever the Democrats were going to throw up against him. Whereas they had plenty of other good options in DeSantis and Nikki Haley and Mike Pence and others who wouldn’t carry that kind of baggage and would probably have a better chance of winning. 

They did what they could to try and steer primary voters toward other candidates, like inviting different candidates to their communities and their meetings to keep signaling that they were open to other people, but they found themselves really unable to do that. Another interesting thing is that while Republican primary voters were largely in the tank for Trump all throughout this period, it took a lot of these party chairs a lot longer to get there. 

One of the things that helped them get there, honestly, was all the criminal investigations and indictments against Donald Trump that came out across 2023.

Many of these folks were very skeptical about Trump, but when he started getting indicted for various felonies, that in some perverse way confirmed all the stories that Trump had been telling them: How the deep state is after him. And they came to say, well, look, this is our guy. He’s under attack. We have to rally around and defend him. And in some ways, it created a permission structure for them to back Trump even if they didn’t particularly like the idea of nominating him.

Anne Kim: It creates a very difficult position for Democrats, right? Because how do you fight back against it? 

Seth Masket: And for the other Republican candidates, one person I spoke to was just like, “yeah, the biggest mistake Ron DeSantis made was that his opponent got indicted for felonies.” That doesn’t work in other races. Yeah, it’s hard to know how to run against that.

Anne Kim: So now we get to the question of the future. Where does the Republican Party go from here, especially after Trump? Is his successor going to have the same grip on the party because of the way that the party has changed, or is there going to be a reconstitution of how the party governs itself after Trump?

Seth Masket: So it’s interesting. If you look at the primary votes and the caucus votes in early 2024, when it was really just a two-person race between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, she was actually getting about a third of the vote in a lot of these contests. And that struck me as very interesting because she was getting this vote largely from Republican primary voters who expected Donald Trump to be their party’s nominee. They still wanted to cast a vote for something different. I took her as kind of the avatar of the earlier version of the Republican Party, the more traditional version of American conservatism, that you might have seen from Reagan or Bush. I get the impression that wing of the party is still there. They know they’re not in command right now; they’re in the minority.

But at some point, Donald Trump will depart from the scene. And he really gives his wing of the party an extra edge. He keeps them on top. With him gone, I think you’re going to see the party fighting it out much more evenly in a lot of primary elections to come. And it won’t be obvious which of these wings is going to win. I think you’re going to see lots of very competitive claims over what the proper future there is for the party. But Trump has really demonstrated in a number of ways that whatever hold he has on Republican voters is not really transferable. He can endorse people, and they’ll do well. I expect he’ll endorse someone in the Republican presidential contest for 2028. But that doesn’t make that person have a Trump-like connection with Republican voters. They won’t necessarily go to the wall for this person and turn out in ways that they wouldn’t turn out for other candidates. His wing of the party will have a much more tenuous grip on that party than they do now.

Anne Kim: What about Democrats? After reading your book, I began to see a little bit of a parallel between what happened with the GOP and what might be happening now with the Democratic Party. We’ve seen a couple instances this fall in primaries where we’re seeing a phenomenon kind of similar to what you document for the GOP. I’m talking about the campaigns where the DSA candidate, prevails over the establishment. How much potential do you see for the same kind of capture in the Democratic Party by a minority that’s kind of on the fringe of the left?

Seth Masket: I think we’re seeing a version of that on the left right now. In some ways, what’s been going on this year is tantamount to the Tea Party in the 2010 primaries on the Republican side, but it’s nowhere near at that scale. There have been progressives, leftist DSA members who have done very well in some Democratic primaries this year. They’ve done surprisingly well. They won some races people did not expect them to. But we’re still talking about, at most, maybe a dozen of these races, whereas we were talking about 60 or 70 such seats when Republicans were dealing with the Tea Party. So this is not about to be a takeover of the Democratic Party, even though I expect many of these progressive candidates will do quite well this year.

It will have an influence on the party, to be certain. In many ways, that’s where the real energy of the party is right now. Assuming Democrats take control of one or both chambers of Congress for next year, I think you’re going to see a lot of demands put on it by the more progressive wing of the party, and that’ll shape it to some extent. But I don’t think we’re talking about a wholesale takeover of the political party. People like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will still be there and it will still exert a lot of influence over the party’s direction.

Anne Kim: Got it. Now we do not want, and we can’t really go back to a place where the establishment had this iron grip on the respective parties. It’s not a good idea to go back to the era of party bosses and that kind of thing. But do you have specific ideas in mind for how we get to a better balance between the establishment and the populists or a very loud and destructive fringe that wants to hijack power?

Seth Masket: One thing I would note is that as far as I can tell, the establishment still has some influence in Democratic Party politics. Maybe we’re not seeing that as much in the midterm cycle this year, but a big reason Joe Biden got nominated in 2020 was because of party insider influence, rallying around him, pushing other people out of the race. Then in 2024, when Biden didn’t want to leave that race, he was pressured out by leaders within his party to step off the ticket. And then those same people rallied very quickly behind Kamala Harris as the alternative. That’s still elite influence in that party there. I don’t know that that’s dead.

Anne Kim: But what about the GOP?

Seth Masket: The GOP, yeah. It’s very far from that right now. Even before Trump was running, they were having a hard time. I think it will be different post-Trump to some extent. There are some people who can still be influential within the party and advise people on who to vote for and things like that. But in terms of structural reforms, that’s honestly very hard to impose on a party from outside. One thing that could potentially change things would be a change in the way we finance our campaigns.

The Citizens United case from 15-odd years ago continues to have a strong effect on our political system. One of the big ways is that it has made it easier for people not in favor with the bulk of their party’s leadership to raise money very effectively. You can raise money from more non-traditional sources more easily than you used to. And that has contributed to I think a loss of party elite control. So we’ve seen some of that. That might be one way to control a few more things. 

I’ve seen ideas floated about adding some sort of peer review system to presidential nominations, which would essentially require members of Congress of this person’s own party to vote whether this person can run in their primaries or not. I have a very hard time imagining that being imposed. But I think people are open to the idea of at least some sort of insider control again.