The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 49
Dec. 2, 2024
This week:
- 18 months to change the nation: How will Trump 2.0 start?
- Where Senate Republicans will play defense in 2026
- Vance’s, Rubio’s replacements will have to defend seats in the 2026 midterm
Outlook
The Trump agenda: In the lame-duck period of Biden’s term, Washington is preoccupied with the question of the personnel for Trump 2.0. We have no special insights there as to who can be confirmed, but President-elect Donald Trump has done well so far in choosing very loyal people. He has clearly learned from the experience of having leakers and backstabbers nearly destroy his first term. His precautions against disloyalty and leakers have gone so far as to exclude State Department translators from his calls with foreign leaders. This is causing some bed-wetting among Washington’s professional class, but that’s sort of the point. Besides, between this and Kash Patel as FBI director, this is what the people just voted for.
The road ahead for Trump 2.0 involves a very compressed timeline for accomplishing as much as possible while Trump still has a friendly House and Senate. He is right to be preoccupied with the quick confirmation of his Cabinet because the clock is already running.
If history is any guide, Republicans are very likely to lose control of the House or Senate or both in 2026. This means Trump has about 18 months from inauguration (basically until campaign season kicks off again) to enact any major legislative changes that can’t get a supermajority in Congress.
Trump should assume that at least the House will be in Democratic hands thereafter, that his administration will be investigated to the hilt, and yes, that they will probably impeach him for a third time.
Judiciary: Trump may face a similar timeline to get as many judges confirmed as possible, and possibly to replace one or two (or even three?) Supreme Court justices. Justices Clarence Thomas (76 years old and 33 on the court) and Sam Alito (74 years old and 19 on the court) are expected to take retirement, probably in that order. Chief Justice John Roberts (age 69) is more likely to stay on for one or two more presidential terms, but even he might decide it’s been long enough.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor (age 70), an Obama appointee, reportedly has health problems. Her ideological preference would be to wait to retire, either until after Trump’s presidency or at least to see whether Democrats manage to retake the Senate in the 2026 midterm. (After Trump’s election victory, there was a brief mad scramble by online leftists to get Sotomayor to step down, so that Biden could snap-appoint Kamala Harris to the high court, but such things usually don’t happen in real life.)
Trump’s people should treat judicial appointments with great urgency, as if they were certain he is going to lose the Senate in 2026. Granted, however, the Senate does not always change hands, even in wave-year midterms — this is simply because of the accident of which seats are up for grabs in any given year. For example, in 2018, Republicans actually gained a net of two Senate seats as Democrats took the House and claimed a “blue wave” election.
Deregulation, taxes: During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised a wide variety of changes.
One of the first things Congress will do is repeal several late Biden administration rules and regulations using the Congressional Review Act, since this does not require a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate.
After that, a new round of tax-cuts will be in order. The basic goal will be to preserve Trump’s 2017 tax law, but in all likelihood Republoicans will also seek to expand that bill’s provisions.
Here, it is very likely that Trump will work for some kind of grand bargain with the Democrats in order to make the new tax code changes permanent with a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. And believe it or not, Democrats might be willing to go along with such a thing. In order to sweeten the deal, Trump will likely (as he promised or at least suggested on the campaign trail) offer Democrats a higher or even unlimited state and local tax (SALT) deduction. This is something Democrats have been pressing for ever since 2017. Trump’s first tax reform bill limited that deduction for the first time, driving up tax bills for high-income earners in high-tax states and (mostly liberal) uber-rich counties around cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington.
Any new tax cut will also have to honor Trump’s promise to service workers to treat tips as tax-free. This could potentially limit what Trump does with top marginal rates, but it is also very much in tune with the new Trump-era Republican Party and its attitude toward economic issues and the working class.
Dictator for a day: Some of Trump’s proposals, such as tariffs, can be implemented unilaterally by executive action under existing statutes. Trump is already successfully leveraging the mere threat of tariffs for diplomatic purposes in order to bring illegal immigration and cross-border drug-trafficking under control.
Other proposals can be implemented unilaterally but will take more time to go through the regulatory process. For example, Trump will likely reverse Biden rules on permitting, independent contracting, electric vehicles, DEI, California’s right to set its own environmental standards, and oil and gas production on federal lands. Trump has also signaled that he would like to revive drilling in ANWR and the Keystone Pipeline. These will depend in part on the will of the industries involved to follow through.
Trump also made a lot of strange off-the-cuff promises on the trail that he may not be able to fulfill, such as taxpayer-funded IVF. It is anyone’s guess how such a thing could be implemented, even assuming the votes are there to do it.
Senate 2026
This week, we will look specifically at relatively competitive seats where Republicans will have to play defense in order to protect their majority in 2026. At stake will be not only legislative priorities, but also (independent of Republicans’ performance in the House) whether President Trump is able to appoint judges and other officials freely during the second half of his second term.
In each case, it is worth remembering that the president’s party tends to lose both House and Senate seats in the midterm, although this is not a universal rule. Loss of the House is probably a 90 percent probability, just given how close the margins are. But given the seats that are up this year, a Republican Senate hold seems quite attainable, if not likely.
Florida: As we noted previously, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) will have to appoint a replacement for Sen. Marco Rubio, who will almost certainly be confirmed as secretary of State.
The replacement, whether or not it is first daughter-in-law Lara Trump, will have to face the voters in 2026.
Democrats have a very depleted bench in Florida, which has moved past even Ohio in its Republican leanings. Barring a politically disastrous 2025 for Trump, this should be considered an unlikely pickup for Democrats.
Iowa: Sen. Joni Ernst (R) will run for re-election, and she is doing so in a state that used to be a lot more competitive than it is now. In her 2020 race, Ernst had the advantage of Trump at the top of the ticket, but he only ran one point ahead of her, winning by 8 as she won by 7 points.
The Democrats’ bench is pretty badly depleted in Iowa. The state has taken a hard right turn in the last 16 years. They have been shut out of the state’s four House seats and there is only one remaining Democratic statewide official, Auditor Rob Sand (D), who appears to have his heart set on running for governor instead.
Maine: Sen. Susan Collins (R) will run for re-election. So the only question is whether voters will be angry enough about Trump 2.0 by the time of the midterm to defenestrate even this durable long-term Republican icon. And of course the third question is whether any credible Democrat jumps in.
Collins, a moderate, is nothing if not resilient, having survived the 2002 midterm and the 2008 Democratic sweep. She also made it look easy in 2020, defeating her Democratic opponent by 9 points despite Trump’s loss in Maine and a mistaken belief by many that she was in a close race against Sara Gideon (D).
Maine has been just on the edge of competitive during the Trump era. In 2016, Trump lost it by just 3 points. In 2020, he lost it by 9 points. This year, he lost by 7 points.
Maine’s ranked-choice voting system could also come into play if there is a sufficiently close race.
North Carolina: In 2020, Sen. Thom Tillis (R) avoided any serious primary challenge. But then he only just barely scraped by in the general election in 2020 by less than 2 percentage points, after his Democratic opponent imploded due to revelations of his affair with a married woman.
Tillis could be in some real trouble in 2026, especially if exiting Gov. Roy Cooper (D) gets in. So far, only Rep. Wiley Nickel (D) has announced that he will be announcing for the seat. Even he could just as easily give Tillis a run for his money in what will likely be a tough midterm year for Republicans.
Ohio-Special: In the next cycle, Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R) appointment to replace Vice President elect J.D. Vance (R) will have to face the voters in order to finish out his term. The Daily Wire compiled a pretty decent summary of who’s who in the contest to succeed vance.
Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R), who lost to Senator-elect Bernie Moreno (R) in the 2024 primary, is probably the safest choice. DeWine will not likely pick anti-Trump former state Sen. Matt Dolan (R), who also ran in that contest. Rep. Warren Davidson (R) is the dark horse conservative. Lt. Gov. Jon Husted (R) wants to run for governor instead. There is an off-chance that DeWine could pick Jane Timken, the former Ohio Republican chairwoman and a staunch Trump ally.
As for Democrats, the just-defeated Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) has not ruled out a political comeback. It might be a lot easier for him to do in a low-turnout midterm year, which will under normal circumstances cut against Trump and the Republicans. There probably aren’t any other Democrats in the state who could make this race competitive. One could, however, imagine Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D) being running out of fears that her Toledo and coastal Erie district has become too competitive — she quite nearly lost her race last month and will probably face a repeat challenge.
South Carolina: You have probably noticed Rep. Nancy Mace (R) leaning hard into the transgenderism issue. One theory going around is that she intends to primary Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) in 2026 and this is the beginning of her campaign.
Democrats don’t have much going on in South Carolina.
Texas: A Republican primary between four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) could well be in the offing. Back in 2022, polls were taken showing Paxton winning such a contest by an astonishing 20 points. It remains to be seen whether that is still the case.
Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, and they haven’t won an election for a U.S. Senate seat since Lloyd Bentsen’s last race in 1988. They have struggled over the years to find anyone competitive to run statewide. Their closest show in a long time was former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D), who spent a fortune but came up short twice.
Paxton is a relatively divisive figure in a way Cornyn is not, but his survival of impeachment makes him more powerful and probably more popular than ever before. Paxton’s electoral success even under fire has been impressive — he won his 2022 race by 10 points despite having been under federal indictment for 7 years at that point (the charges were finally dropped in March 2024).
