I did not see the midterms as a rebuke necessarily of Donald Trump's Republican Party just as a message

that independent-minded voters and centrist voters and soft Republicans, so to speak, are over Donald Trump, are very much over Donald Trump.

But when it comes to a primary, I don't know that anything has changed post-November, but I'd love to know your thoughts.

You know, I could not agree with you more.

This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Mark Liebovich, staff writer for The Atlantic. I'm joined today by my colleague, Alaina Plott Kalabro, who is also a staff writer at The Atlantic, who covers politics.

Hi.

Okay, the Republican Party is in a strange place. The 2022 midterm losses stunned the GOP and created calls for a 2024 challenger to Donald Trump.

But can the party move past the man who dominated it for six years?

Now, we're actually going on seven years, almost eight years, right? It just keeps going and going and going.

So, Alaina, tell us everything.

Yeah, as I sit here, I am reflecting on the most recent midterm elections.

And I would say that for me, the biggest takeaway and what I'd love to hear your thoughts on is when we were counting down to see if somebody like Carrie Lake in Arizona,

also someone like Blake Masters in Arizona, would end up pulling it out for the Republicans, you know, what that would say about the party.

Masters in Lake, of course, were huge proponents of the stolen election theory, but it didn't work in the end.

And I think the kind of immediate takeaway, at least that I was seeing among centrist-minded people, but also people on the right who are vaguely anti-Trump,

was that this was a lesson that the party is very ready to move on from Donald Trump, that, you know, had somebody like Carrie Lake won, maybe the message would have been the inverse.

But I was a little reluctant to embrace that take for the reason that even if candidates who were all in on the stolen election theory ultimately lost their general election,

they still won the primaries, and in many cases quite handily.

Now, I mean, I'm quite amused, as I suspect you are, too, by the Republicans are ready to move on from Donald Trump notion that people like John Cornin, John Thune, Mitch McConnell, any number of political operatives, any number of, oh my gosh, what do we do now, people, because we so under-achieved in these midterms, let's scapegoat Ronald McDaniel, right, the RNC chair.

You know, Democrats were supposed to lose seats, they actually wound up gaining a seat, the House, you know, was a major under-achievement, what could possibly happen.

Okay, so what happens when Donald Trump goes and endorses Republican X tomorrow, I'm guessing he or she will win a decisive majority in Ohio district Y, right?

So, okay, Republicans have a terrible candidate quality problem. I mean, Mitch McConnell used those words explicitly, referring to the fact that Herschel Walker, like Masters and Arizona, what would have be good on the list, are not great candidates, and that will hurt Republicans.

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