The Spire

Bryce Maloney ‘26

Opinions Edition

Donald Trump is president, again… Whether this makes you happy, sad, angry, reassured, scared, or something in between, there is one universal truth which reigns supreme: The next president of the United States will be someone completely new. While I would hardly seek to suggest that I might be able to predict the outcome of the next presidential election, I think that there are a number of factors and issues which will surely impact its result. Likewise, it is abundantly clear, even now, that a number of hopefuls are already vying for the top job.

First, let us set our sights on the incumbent party: the Republicans. Although President Trump will be term limited, it is entirely fair to say that his personage will play a bigger role in the nomination process than any singular candidate.

This being said, nearly half of the party base is what we could call “Non-MAGA” Republicans, who will have been begrudgingly been voting for Trump and his proxies for more than a decade at the time of the next election—and are now ready to turn the page. 

Regardless of what happens in the primary, they will need to make some serious inroads with non-Trump conservatives, especially when launching a campaign against a democratic party that will have time to revamp its image and messaging. I would say that in the current field of usual suspects, there are already a few candidates who are attempting to do this. Nikki Haley has seemingly come to terms with the Trump world once again. Haley understands that the first Post-MAGA Republican Nominee needs to be someone who has reformed the party’s rhetoric from within the base. Trump, after all, brought millions of new voters to the cause—something that Republicans for generations will do well to capitalize on. 

That being said, anyone within the party who has deliberately denounced Trump in order to gain more credibility as an independent thinker, outsider, or genuine “Never-Trumper” is already out of the race. Others taking the Haley route are probably Rubio, DeSantis, and Cruz. They’re all gambling that their continued prominence in MAGA era politics and past identities as political up-and-comers will help them. 

Then, there are the MAGA true believers. People who genuinely believe in the MAGA movement, or who owe their entire political careers to it. They are willing to bet that Trump is not in fact the only person who can do what Trump does. How they do in the primary will help to determine Trump’s legacy as a whole, as well as his hold on the party. They might also crowd the field and split the MAGA vote, allowing for a consolidated Moderate candidate to slide to the nomination. 

Now, for the Democrats, it’s an entirely different story. It is safe to say that the next few years will most likely be spent doing some serious soul searching. The Democrats have a serious image problem—people quite simply do not appreciate what they have been selling all this time.

Seeking to build a large umbrella, the Democrats have strewed away from taking hard lined decisions, which might divide their heavily divided base and isolate moderate voters. By taking more rigid stances, Republicans won constituencies which were for generations out of reach with the argument that they were “saying what has secretly been on people’s minds.” And, for all intensive purposes, provoking many while enticing more seems to be the winning strategy in modern elections. When Democratic insiders do this most-important inflection, they will realize that there are really only two ways forward in order to win back voters lost, or unlock new bases of support altogether. 

The first route is to pick a candidate from the moderate/conservative branch of the party. Isolating the leftist fringe, these people could help to bring back working-class voters from America’s heartland. These candidates speak much of the same language on a number of different issues as members of the moderate branch of the Republican party. These are your Buttegiegs, Kloubachars, and Kellys. 

Then, there are those who feel as though Democrats have too extremely isolated their base in order to appeal to moderates. These people will undoubtedly want to push the party to the left, using a liberally branded form of populism in order to bring back similar voter blocks.

As outlandish as it may seem to think of now, 2028 is less far away than we think. Stay active and engaged, and finally when the time comes, fulfill your responsibility as a citizen of our nation and exercise your right to vote.

Featured image courtesy of Cable News Network

Copy Edited by Annamaria DeCamp ’27

Web Edited by Zexuan Qu ’28