Political analyst discusses GOP's future post-midterms

But I think Republicans still trying to figure that out. And they're also, there may be a desire to move on from Donald Trump, particularly because midterms do not have to be predictive of the next presidential election. You've had many instances where in 1994 and 2010, the Democrats did really poorly. They came back two years later and reelected their presidents, Bill Clinton in 96 and Obama in 2012. But the challenge this time is that Trump is in office. And I, I kind of doubt that his approval rating is going to get much better than it is now. I could be wrong about that. But if that's the case, Trump may very well be kind of a, kind of an anvil attached to the feet of whoever the Republican presidential nominee is. And you know, J.D. vance, if he's the, if he's the nominee, I mean, he is the vice president. I mean, it's hard to distance yourself from the president when you're in the administration. Similar to what we saw with Kamala Harris, with Joe Biden. That's exactly, that's exactly right. That they may need to really rethink where they're at. Because I think Trump was helpful to Republicans. I think he, I think he did kind of make the potential size of the Republican Party in the United States bigger because I think he, at its peak strength, I think he brought more people in than he pushed away, but he's now pushed away some people who had moved to him previously. And that's that, that is the danger. The other thing is that structurally, I mean, it seemed like in 2024, Republicans had built a Senate majority that it might have been hard for Democrats to dislodge. Obviously was not difficult. I mean, they needed, Democrats needed this incredible political environment to do it. But Democrats are now reestablishing themselves in the Senate. And now the Republicans are the ones who have to figure out what the path back is. So it's a big challenge for Republicans. Basically, if you were in a Trump, a district that Trump won by, by single digits, or if you were in a district that Kamala Harris won as a Republican, you lost. I mean, that there, there weren't any survivors. Think about some of the very electorally successful House Republicans. Brian Fitzpatrick in the Philadelphia area, Brian Stile in southeast Wisconsin, Mike Turner, longtime Republican House member from Dayton, Ohio, who had always had basically easy elections. They all lost, like all of, you know, so, so it was, it was really a wipeout below a certain level of Trump performance. And Republicans lost in a lot of double digit Trump districts too. And states. That's a lot of the Senate seats have flipped. You know, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, maybe Alaska, maybe Mississippi. If those come through, those are all double digit trump states. So that in.