By Ned Parker, John Shiffman, Mike Spector, Peter Eisler and Linda So
DALLAS, Nov 8 (Reuters) – As Republicans faced a nationwide drubbing in Tuesday’s midterm elections, supporters streamed out of a Dallas ballroom where they’d hoped to toast a win for US Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a favorite of President Donald Trump.
In the hotel bar, Michael Little, a 59-year-old businessman and three-time Trump voter, stared at the president’s image on a television screen. “People are pissed off at Trump. Trump has cost us,” he said, capturing a sentiment rippling through the president’s Make America Great Again movement after the Republican Party’s worst electoral defeat in decades.
Across the coalition, some supporters who once viewed Trump as MAGA’s greatest asset are beginning to question whether he’s become its biggest liability.
Still, the midterm losses amounted to more than a repudiation of Trump. They were a referendum on the political and cultural movement he built. A defining force in American politics that began as a campaign slogan during Trump’s 2016 presidential run now faces a potentially existential reckoning after voters disillusioned with soaring fuel prices, the Iran war and Washington corruption delivered Democrats decisive congressional majorities.
Trump’s first major response to the midterms came on Friday. Instead of changing course, he doubled down on the movement’s core. He promoted Stephen Miller, the main architect of the administration’s hardline immigration crackdown, to chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. Wiles was seen as a stabilizing force inside an often chaotic White House.
The move was celebrated by some of MAGA’s most ardent influencers, who saw it as a return to the anti-immigration agenda at the movement’s roots. “Exactly the energy we need,” right-wing influencer Benny Johnson posted on X to his 4.1 million followers. “Solid move. It’s Miller Time.”
The White House did not directly answer Reuters’ questions about why Republicans lost, the defeat of candidates who embraced Trump’s false 2020 election claims, or where MAGA goes from here. Instead, it pointed to Trump’s remarks on Wednesday, when he said, “If I were on the ballot, we would have won.” He also said it was “largely true” that the Iran war had cost Republicans because “it drove the gasoline up,” but that he’d do it again.
For nearly a decade, MAGA has reshaped the Republican Party and transformed national debates on issues such as trade, immigration, race and gender. The movement installed loyalists throughout federal agencies, cracked down on immigration and pressured corporations and public institutions to retreat from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. MAGA survived the fallout from the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and propelled Trump back to the White House. Now, the Democrats’ sweeping victory has forced the movement to grapple with an unexpected question: Is MAGA over?
Reuters interviews with more than a dozen MAGA activists, influencers, party strategists, Christian nationalist leaders and researchers who track right-wing politics, along with a review of MAGA supporters’ posts and podcasts since Tuesday, show a movement turning its anger on itself.
The stolen-election claims that have driven MAGA since Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election have mostly gone quiet. Instead, supporters are blaming Republican leaders and Trump’s advisers, and in some cases the president himself, for broken promises on living costs, the Iran war and the government’s decision to redact or withhold major portions of its investigative files on late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
MAGA’s factions also disagree about what comes next. Some want a return to populist and nationalist basics. Some want a movement less tied to one man. And a vocal minority say MAGA is already dead.
“We have to rebuild,” Steve Bannon, a prominent MAGA proponent, podcaster and former Trump White House adviser, told Reuters. He urged the party to double down on an aggressive populist and nationalist agenda and praised Trump for elevating Miller. “Miller’s appointment as chief of staff underpins my point,” he said. “There is no more hardcore MAGA proponent than Stephen.”
As pro-Trump internet forums digested the election results, a notable slice of self-described MAGA loyalists – more than 20% – raised doubts about the movement’s leadership and direction, according to an analysis of social media traffic done for Reuters by PeakMetrics, a data intelligence firm. About half of that cohort remained supportive of the MAGA movement but no longer backed Trump as its leader. The other half remained loyal to, though critical of, the president himself.
The analysis was based on 12,850 posts sampled from a universe of 4.6 million Trump-related comments on X and Reddit from 9 p.m. on Election Day to 8 p.m. the next evening. It found broad concern among MAGA supporters as the results became clear. Of the posts that assigned blame for the rout, nearly a third said concerns about the Iran war and Israel’s influence over US policy had overshadowed Trump’s message. A quarter said Republicans not fully committed to the MAGA agenda had undermined the movement.
The results left Trump facing large Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. In the Senate, Democrats could control as many as 56 of the chamber’s 100 seats, more than enough to block Trump’s future judicial picks. Republicans might not be able to recapture the Senate until 2032, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the morning after the election.
“It’s the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States,” DeSantis said at a post-election briefing.
Democrats will now control governorships in seven battleground states Trump won in 2024 and, strikingly, they won every statewide race in Texas, which hasn’t backed a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976.
‘MAGA IS STALE’
Since Tuesday, talk of election fraud has virtually vanished among right-wing influencers.
“I have been banging the drum of rigged and stolen elections since 2020, but that is not why we lost the midterms,” Rogan O’Handley, a MAGA influencer who posts under the name DC_Draino, wrote on X to his 2.3 million followers. “We lost because we failed to fix the things voters sent us to do.” He didn’t respond to a request for comment.
After the 2020 election, Trump supporter Isabella DeLuca was among thousands who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. She was charged with five crimes, including theft of a table from inside the Capitol, and pleaded not guilty. Her case was dismissed after Trump returned to office and pardoned her.
This time, the 26-year-old conservative influencer directed her anger toward what she described as out-of-touch Republican leaders who failed to appeal to Gen Z voters on affordability, avoiding foreign wars and other key issues.
“Republicans were just lazy. They felt like that they were entitled to people’s votes and that people would vote for them no matter what,” DeLuca told Reuters. “It goes to show you that you do have to earn people’s votes, and that even in a super red state like Texas, you’re not untouchable.”
The MAGA movement this year appeared “tired,” she said.
That sentiment was echoed in online right-wing forums, said Jennifer Golbeck, a University of Maryland professor who has analyzed MAGA-related posts since 2016. She said engagement by Trump’s most loyal backers has steadily declined since January, including a 27% drop in posts and comments on Patriots.Win, a popular MAGA forum.
”The enthusiasm and the passion even among this hardest core group of supporters hasn’t really been there,” Golbeck said. “They are saying that ‘MAGA is stale.’ It’s not new and exciting like it once was.”
Fox News, a cable network that has long been a key platform for MAGA voices, saw a sharp decline in viewership ahead of the midterms, with its total daytime audience down 27% in October from a year earlier, according to Nielsen, the audience measurement firm. In a statement to Reuters, Fox said it drew more viewers than its cable-news rivals on election night. “FOX News has been the number one network in cable news for a quarter century,” spokesperson Caley Cronin said.
Some prominent right-wing influencers blamed the president’s advisers or Republican lawmakers – but rarely Trump himself – for ignoring key voter concerns. In posts, online broadcasts and interviews with Reuters, many blamed dissatisfaction with the economy, though they differed on other reasons for Tuesday’s results.
It wasn’t just failure to address affordability that “crushed” Republicans, said Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the conservative site Daily Wire, on his online show on Wednesday. “If you’re talking about an electoral catastrophe – a wipeout like we saw last night – you need more ingredients. Here are the other ingredients: chaos and corruption.”
Laura Loomer, an influencer close to Trump, wrote on X: “America is over and the American Dream is dead.” Yet she told Reuters the losses did not signal the end of MAGA, arguing that anyone seeking the 2028 Republican presidential nomination would need Trump’s base.
“The Republican Party belongs to President Trump,” Loomer said. “The MAGA movement is still the majority of the GOP base, and whoever wants to run for president in 2028 on the GOP ticket, they would be unwise to be dismissive of President Trump.”
On Thursday, Loomer put her podcast on hiatus, saying she had been “running on empty for too long” and needed to focus on her personal life and upcoming wedding. She’ll return in January, she added.
BROKEN PROMISES
The midterms also tested the beliefs that have held MAGA together, and some of them are giving way.
The Democratic sweep dealt a significant setback to the election denial movement, a central pillar of MAGA politics since Trump’s 2020 defeat. Candidates who embraced his false claims of widespread voter fraud lost heavily, including several who had worked to overturn the 2020 result. Election deniers will hold at least 41 fewer congressional and statewide offices next year, and they have lost 70% of the called races for statewide posts that oversee elections, according to States United Action, a nonprofit that tracks such candidates. Trump made no effort to contest the results and instead blamed Republicans for the defeat.
With few close races and no credible basis for a challenge, many prominent pro-Trump election skeptics dropped fraud allegations and urged supporters to keep organizing. A handful of allies still alleged, without evidence, that the vote was rigged. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and promoter of false claims that machines flipped votes in 2020, said he was not concerned by Trump’s pledge to accept the results. “That’s his opinion. I’ve got a different opinion,” Lindell told Reuters. “I think it’s all been stolen.”
But such claims stayed largely on the fringe, even among Republicans. Without contested races, the MAGA election denial movement risks losing the money, attention and momentum that sustained it. “Nobody’s going to be putting money behind it,” said Wendy Via, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech and extremism.
Retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen and is a popular figure in the Christian nationalist wing of the MAGA movement, accepted the defeat. He called the results “a massacre” and criticized Trump and his administration for failing to deliver on pledges ranging from lowering costs to releasing the government’s investigative files on Epstein.
Responding to Vice President JD Vance’s assessment on X that the Iran war was “the reason we lost,” Flynn wrote: “the sheer number of broken promises is why the blue tsunami happened.”
Flynn also criticized Christian voters for failing to show up. “As a Catholic and a Christian, I’m sorely embarrassed and disappointed,” he wrote.
Other prominent Christian nationalists were divided over whether MAGA can outlast Trump.
Douglas Wilson, a Christian nationalist pastor who was invited by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon in February, told Reuters that MAGA “is not going anywhere” but must become less personality-driven and more focused on border control, tax cuts and avoiding foreign wars.
Joel Webbon, a far-right Christian nationalist pastor from Texas, was far less sanguine. “Trump lost this all by himself,” he said in a video on X, arguing that the president abandoned his base by embracing Israel, launching the war in Iran and failing to follow through on releasing the Epstein files and mass deportations.
“MAGA is dead,” Webbon wrote in an accompanying post. “Forever.”
(Editing by Jason Szep)
