Ian Ward

I think you're seeing preliminary signs that those people are swinging away from the GOP.

The polling is not very good on this, so it's hard to peer into the electorate.

I think a lot these days about the sociologist Max Weber, actually, who wrote about the structure of charismatic movements and the way that charismatic leaders end up anointing successors.

And the process of anointment matters a lot for whether the charisma rubs off on a successor, right?

And so I think a lot of...

A lot of that question hinges on how exactly Vance ends up securing the nomination.

Is it an endorsement from Trump?

Does Trump throw it open to a factional fight in which someone like a Vance and someone like a Rubio and a Ted Cruz have to duke it out where some of the dirty laundry coalitionally is aired out?

Then it's a much, much harder task for Vance to consolidate the MAGA base behind him.

I think he's proved to be rather tech optimistic, and I think that's causing some friction within the movement.

Some of the tech skeptics in the movement were expecting or hoping that he would take a more forceful line on things like AI, and he's actually proven quite friendly to AI and some of the tech interests out in Silicon Valley.

I think he imagines a future in which the Republican Party

under a kind of populist nationalist banner can consolidate an electoral majority of somewhere between 60 and 70% of the electorate that provides the party with a kind of FDR era style consensus, right?

in which Republicans can carry out a really, really far-sweeping transformation of the country at both an economic, a cultural, and a geopolitical level.

That requires a type of consensus that is extremely, extremely rare in 21st century electoral politics.

And by hitching his wagon very closely to the MAGA coalition, he inherits all of that division and all that baggage.

And I think that makes it very difficult for him to realize the type of far-reaching electoral coalition that he wants to achieve.

I think a lot of this will depend on the next three years of the Trump administration.

And if people feel good about the direction of the economy come 2028, I think he has a pretty good chance of succeeding Trump and carrying that movement in the future.

If the current trends continue and people are discontent with the state of the economy, people feel like the administration has squandered its political capital on foreign entanglements and not done enough domestically, I think he's in a very, very difficult position.