The Midterms Were Bad for Republicans. 2028 Is Going to Be Even Worse.

If you’re looking for evidence that the right isn’t sure how to respond to the Republican Party’s historic collapse in Tuesday’s midterm elections, you could do worse than a graphic Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasted to her audience on Thursday. Below pictures of four young Democratic politicians—recently reelected Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—were three words: “Hunks of Junk.” https://t.co/DpcRyhKi9U— Acyn (@Acyn) November 6, 2026 That’s what passes as an attack on the right now: Don’t be fooled by these very attractive Democratic stars! But let’s not be too hard on Ingraham. She and her fellow Republicans have suffered a collective shellshock from the worst midterm defeat since Watergate. President Trump only wants to talk about his tacky building projects. Vice President JD Vance is nakedly trying to salvage his own presidential ambitions by throwing everyone else under the bus. Racist goon Stephen Miller is the new chief-of-staff. It’s a terrible time to be a Republican, and it will only get worse. All you can do is lash out. If you want the full picture of Republican panic, however, you’ve got to look at another Fox graphic, this one built out of a tweet from former speaker of the House—and architect of the GOP’s 1994 midterm massacre of the Democrats—Newt Gingrich. Gingrich’s list of potential 2028 candidates includes Hegseth https://t.co/9eYLj3HKOz— Acyn (@Acyn) November 5, 2026 Whatever you can say about this cast of characters, no one is going to call them “hunks.” If you discount physical attractiveness, it gets even more dire. This is an astonishingly bleak list of potential Trump successors. There is obviously a lot that can happen between now and 2028, but if you want to feel good about the future, just take a look at this roster. It’s worth examining Gingrich’s thinking. Yes, he is a fossil. But he has managed to remain a consummate Republican politician in his semi-retirement, and his wife, airbrushing enthusiast Callista Gingrich, is Trump’s ambassador to Lichtenstein. Gingrich led one revolution in the 1990s and survived another. He knows his party. He also knows his party’s in trouble. The scale of the Republican defeat is so great that it makes the race for the GOP presidential nomination wide open. If the administration had won a big victory, Vice President J D Vance would have had an enormous argument to be the inevitable nominee. Now, with this go-slow strategy blowing up in Iran and his defense of Vivek Ramaswamy's horrible, inhumane ad featuring his opponent's mother attacking her own daughter, a good bit of the luster has come off the bloom. The number of people who want to draft Secretary of State Marco Rubio is staggering. In addition, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, Pete Hegseth, Glenn Youngkin, and a surprising number of people may decide this is their chance to take advantage of the chaos of the shocking defeat and seek to be the champion who can rescue the party and the country.— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) November 4, 2026 Gingrich doesn’t quite stick a knife into Vance, but he comes as close as he can. He shrugs off the vice president’s weaselly attempt to avoid blame for Iran, which is fair enough: As vice president of an administration overseeing that war, it is going to be very hard for Vance not to be saddled with the political and economic fallout, which will likely extend until 2028. Gingrich goes further, though, blaming Vance for defending Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting, failed gubernatorial bid in Ohio—essentially saying Vance not only has lousy instincts, but is a bad person too: “A good bit of the luster has come off the bloom.” Well, what about the luster of the other blooms? It’s clear that Gingrich is eyeing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a safer and more competent successor, writing, “The number of people who want to draft [him] is staggering.” This may be true, but it’s also absurd, given that Gingrich has already (rightly) acknowledged just how important a role the Iran War played in the GOP’s midterm meltdown. Rubio is arguably the third most prominent public face of that war, ahead of JD Vance and behind Trump and... Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is also, absurdly, included in Gingrich’s list. For one thing, Hegseth is the most likely fall guy for the administration if two scalps are deemed necessary after Tuesday’s defeats (Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was cut loose on Friday, in favor of Stephen Miller). His department has been embroiled in more controversies than any other during this administration—some of which of unfathomably stupid, like his imposition of grooming standards, and others that are unfathomably horrific, like the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug runners in the Caribbean. Hegseth is a TV host, not an agency leader; he’s fit to start culture wars, not oversee actual wars. He also has a wealth of personal problems, including infidelity and allegations of substance abuse.There have been rumors that if Hegseth gets dumped from the Pentagon, the administration could try to save face by getting him appointed to replace Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, should she retire. But if you look at Tuesday’s blue wave, it would be hard to feel confident about Hegseth’s chances of holding that seat. If a Republican would struggle to win a statewide election in Tennessee, could you really count on them winning a presidential election? Looking outside the administration, the options are hardly any better. Trump humiliated Ted Cruz in the presidential primary in 2016, running the simplest attack one can against the Texas senator: Nobody likes him. (Cruz may have another issue: He has four years left in his term runs. So if he were to somehow win the presidency in two years, then Democratic Governor Gina Hinojosa would be able to appoint his replacement.) From there, it may get even worse. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has the charisma of one of those 12-foot Home Depot skeletons (and kind of looks like one, too). Former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is slightly less stiff, but it’s hard to see his gee-whiz vibes—not to mention his relative moderation—gaining traction in a Republican primary. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis looked like the natural successor a few years ago, but Trump hates him for trying to run against him in the 2024 primary, and there’s little reason to believe that the bad blood between them has gotten any better. It’s hard to imagine him winning a Republican primary while Trump is still kicking. And that gets to the biggest problem, which Gingrich doesn’t mention: Donald Trump. He will exert a huge amount of influence over whom the Republicans chooses as his successor—not only because he will still be president, and thus remain the party’s leader, but he will also likely wield a massive war chest that Republican presidential hopefuls will fight over like children scrapping in the dirty for candy after the piñata pops. Republicans are delusional right now if they think they can turn the page. Gingrich’s list of possibilities is so pathetic in part because it bows to this reality, without explicitly saying so. There’s maybe another lesson here. Trump won in 2016 in part because the Republican field—which included Cruz and Rubio—was so weak. He was able to pitch himself as the uncorrupted outsider the party needed, a supposedly successful businessman and reality TV star who could say and do things that “politicians” couldn’t get away with. That field has only gotten weaker in the last ten years. It’s possible, of course, that another charismatic outsider could emerge and win the day. But Trump had been sniffing around the GOP presidential nomination for years before 2016—there’s no one out there like that now. Even if there were, it would be hard to believe that after more than a decade of the Trump show, anyone would vote for a reboot of it.