Analysis: Why Trump's hold on the GOP Congress may threaten its hold on power

CNN

2 days ago

Back-to-back retirement announcements last week from a Republican representative and senator represented a victory for President Donald Trump that could yet become a revealing liability for him and his party.
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, two of a bare few congressional Republicans who have sought any independence from Trump, joined a long list of other GOP legislators in recent years who have either retired or been defeated in primaries after crossing Trump, including former Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker and former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
The choice by Tillis and Bacon to announce their retirements during the final throes of debate over the party's budget and tax legislation underlines Trump's success at eliminating almost all tolerance in the party for dissent from him and his agenda.
By stepping away, Tillis and Bacon have made clear that 'their style of Republicanism, that seeks some level of pragmatism and bipartisan compromise, is unwelcome,' says Charlie Dent, a centrist Republican former representative who retired in 2018 after resisting key elements of Trump's agenda. 'Because they have heterodox views on some issues, they feel that they're not particularly welcome within the broader Republican conference.'
But while the twin retirement announcements testify to Trump's success at mastering the GOP, they leave open the question of whether a party reshaped so completely in his image can consistently win majorities in the House and Senate. With the roster of congressional Republicans displaying any separation from the president dwindling, the GOP is testing whether at least 218 House districts and 50 Senate seats will accept candidates offering themselves as unalloyed Trump acolytes.
Few strategists in either party believe that question has a definitive answer. But many on both sides agree that the GOP's path to maintaining its majority in both chambers is narrower if even candidates in swing states and districts feel compelled to endorse the most polarizing aspects of Trump's agenda.
'In a post-Trump world, 100% loyalty is the party litmus test,' said GOP consultant Ken Spain, a former communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. 'There is very little room for nuance, even if it means putting the House and Senate majorities to the test.'
For most of the 20th century, it was common for members of Congress to break from their party's dominant position on key votes — even when that placed them in opposition to a president from their own side. That tendency was visible for years among Republicans from the East and West Coasts, and even more pronounced among the Southern and rural Democrats who became known as 'blue dogs.'
But tolerance for defection on big congressional votes has waned over the past generation. The engine of the change has been the ideological re-sorting of the electorate, which has left each party with a voter base that holds more uniform views on major issues.
In both parties and in both chambers, that has encouraged a transition toward a quasi-parliamentary system, with legislators from each party voting more in lockstep with their own side, and in opposition to the other. When Democrats held a narrow congressional House majority during President Joe Biden's first two years, only one of their members (Maine's Jared Golden) voted against Biden's version of 'One Big Beautiful Bill' — his 'Build Back Better' plan.
In this environment, legislators who break from their side on big votes, as Tillis did on Trump's agenda bill, have faced greater pushback. Republicans sympathetic to Trump's iron-fisted approach to party loyalty point out that liberal interest groups also now regularly attack Democrats who vote too often against their party; during the Biden years, both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two Democratic senators who defected most often, ultimately chose to identify as independents and not to seek reelection in 2024.
But the pressure for conformity from Trump on Republicans dwarfs the coercion that liberal groups can apply to Democrats. 'It's orders of magnitude worse for Republicans,' said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for external affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. Left-wing interest groups 'are a problem for our moderates without question and occasionally they can beat them or hurt them. But Trump is an extinction-level event for Republican moderates.'
Dent, now the executive director of the Aspen Institute's congressional program, believes independent thinking is under siege in both parties. But he agrees that no source of pressure in the Democratic Party approaches Trump. In fact, Dent argues, no president has ever been as relentless as Trump about crushing internal dissent.
'We haven't seen that, because most presidents … understood that today's dissenter is tomorrow's ally,' Dent said. 'They recognize there's always another vote. But Trump always treats the next vote as the last. Everything is a litmus test with him.'
In a critical shift, the Republican congressional leadership is mostly reinforcing Trump's pressure, Dent noted. Historically, he said, congressional leaders from both parties worried intently about how to protect their members in marginal seats and tried to structure votes that reduced their risk of backlash from swing voters.
But now, Dent went on, the GOP leadership seems more focused on pacifying Trump — and more attentive to the demands of senators and representatives from reliably red areas who fear the president and his allies will launch primary challenges from their right. 'It seems,' Dent said, 'the Republican leadership is more interested in protecting the president than protecting their most vulnerable members.'
Trump doesn't appear totally unaware that Republicans running in swing areas may need some flexibility in their votes. Maine Sen. Susan Collins is the only GOP senator left from the 19 states that voted against Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns and he has not publicly attacked her for voting against the budget bill last week. (She, in turn, did not criticize the bill nearly as sharply as Tillis did.)
Trump has also indulged hardline conservatives in both chambers who have delayed the package to tilt it further to the right, as long as they vote with him in the end — which explains why Trump has promoted a primary challenge against Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has opposed the measure at each step.
But, as the floor debates in both chambers over the budget bill showed, virtually no congressional Republican feels comfortable criticizing any significant aspect of Trump's agenda, much less voting against it, no matter the effect on their own constituents.
Trump is 'not worried about what a bill means to somebody's home state or district,' said longtime Republican pollster Glen Bolger. 'It's his way or the highway. You cannot cross the president because he will cross you off.'
Over the past several decades, voters' attitudes toward an incumbent president have increasingly shaped how they vote in House and Senate races. But Trump may push that trend even further. His unrelenting demands for loyalty have created an environment in which GOP candidates are running with his logo stamped on them as visibly as if they were one of his hotels or office buildings.
Can Republicans win enough seats with that positioning to consistently control the House and Senate? The party's electoral performance since Trump's emergence gives them some reason for optimism, particularly in the Senate.
Trump has won 25 states in all three of his presidential campaigns, and Republicans incredibly now control all 50 of those states' Senate seats, up from 42 in 2017. Democrats have high hopes next year of contesting one of the 50 (the North Carolina seat that will become open with Tillis' retirement announcement). But until they can compete for more, in places such as Ohio, Iowa or Texas, Republicans will have the easier path to a Senate majority, notes Kyle Kondik, managing editor for the Sabato's Crystal Ball election newsletter of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
At first glance, the trends in House races may seem equally encouraging for a Trump-stamped GOP. Trump won 230 House districts in 2024 (the same number he did in 2016), which would provide the GOP a relatively comfortable majority by modern standards if their House candidates also won those districts. But it may be harder for a uniformly Trumpist GOP to hold the House than the Senate. In the more difficult electoral climate of 2020, Trump only won 202 House districts, and even last year, he won about 40 of the districts he carried only by single-digit margins. To Kondik and other analysts, that suggests Democrats could recapture enough of those seats to flip the majority in a more favorable national environment — which widespread public disapproval of the 'big beautiful bill' might help create for them.
'Basically, by all the vulnerable Republican members voting for the bill, you are making it easier for the opposition to nationalize your race, which is what Democrats are going to want to do,' Kondik said.
By falling into line behind Trump so reliably, Republicans in more competitive areas (apart from maybe Collins) have denied themselves one of the most common arguments legislators from such places have historically used to win reelection: that they will support their party's agenda when it helps their constituents and oppose it when it doesn't. Dozens of House Republicans whose districts face big losses from the budget bill's Medicaid and clean energy cuts voted for it anyway.
Democrats see that as a huge vulnerability, particularly in the House seats they plan to contest. 'They make a ton of noise, but at the end of the day they are not going to step out of line with Trump and DC leaders, and for the districts we are competing in that is the worst type of thing you can do,' said Courtney Rice, communications director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Dent agreed the pattern is a grave risk for the GOP majority. Pressuring swing district Republican representatives to fall in line on every major issue 'is a recipe to elect a Democratic House,' he said. 'Trump might want to get used to that now and get ready for all the subpoenas and aggressive oversight that will come with it.'
Bolger said he long believed that, too, but now has doubts. 'I'm a guy who always said you've got to win independent voters to win. I don't know if that's true anymore,' he said. Legislators who 'show independence' from Trump, Bolger said, risk depressing turnout among his core supporters, which could offset any gains they might see among independent voters by distancing themselves from the president. 'That's a math thing they are all going to be doing in those swing seats,' he said.
No matter the national environment next year, the Senate map will make recapturing that chamber very tough for Democrats. And the sorting out of the electorate — combined with the growing sophistication of gerrymandered Congressional districts — makes it highly unlikely that Democrats in 2026 can win as many House seats as the opposition party captured in other midterms characterized by a backlash against the sitting president's agenda (including 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018).
But more than enough swing seats remain in play to give Democrats a very plausible chance of overturning the GOP's historically narrow House majority. In the provisions of their budget bill, Republican leaders made extraordinarily few concessions to the political needs of their representatives in those marginal seats (or vulnerable senators such as Collins and Tillis). They placed much higher import on cramming in as many of Trump's priorities as possible and meeting the demands of the hardcore conservatives in safe seats who constitute a much larger share of GOP legislators in both chambers.
If that increases the odds some of those swing-district Republicans lose next fall —endangering the GOP majority in the House and conceivably, though less likely, the Senate — that seemed a price Trump and Congressional leaders were willing to pay. 'They want to get as much as they can in the bill,' Dent said, 'and these guys are going to be the collateral damage.'
In the long arc of Trump's career, the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' may stand as yet another transaction in which he claims the rewards and others around him pay the price.