President Donald Trump in Dearborn, Michigan, January 13, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The GOP's attempt to salvage the midterms by ginning up hysteria about minorities and marginalized fell horribly flat, but according to one top conservative pollster, it has also left the party caught in a "trap of their own making" that could further jeopardize its ability to rebuild.
Sarah Longwell is the publisher for the center-right anti-Trump publication, The Bulwark, and an accomplished focus group pollster, noted for her extensive study of how everyday voters conceive of the Trump era. In her latest piece on Sunday, she detailed how the GOP's effort to mobilize their base with fears about transgender people and immigrants failed miserably, but also left one portion of their base locked in on anti-Muslim bigotry that could leave the party imperiled going forward.
"But there were some voters with whom all the fearmongering about Muslims specifically really sank in," Longwell explained. "Some of this has already popped up in focus groups this year about Abdul El-Sayed and even Vivek Ramaswamy. Zohran Mamdani is occasionally also in the mix, natch. Islamophobia is now a major part of the Republican Triangle of Doom—the voters have heard it from the politicians (like Greg Abbott) and right-wing media figures, so now they’re going to demand to hear more and more of it. It’s going to make it incredibly difficult for the GOP to rebuild: They can either play into the bigotry and alienate people who would rather hear about things like the cost of living, or they can abandon the bigotry and thereby ignore one of their base’s growing concerns."
Longwell explained how this trend towards anti-Muslim sentiments among right-wing voters began to creep in during focus group sessions earlier in the year, especially in Texas, where party leaders have been leaning hard into islamophobia in recent years. Now, in the aftermath of the election, she noted that more "multi-time Trump voters" were expressing dismay about the impact of Muslim voters on the results.
One 75-year-old Texas resident called it "a little heartbreaking” that “people that maybe don’t have America’s best interest are able to vote and move in and begin to change our laws.”
“I’ve heard a little bit about some of the elementary schools, books they’re putting in front of little elementary kids," the respondent said "They call it a religion, but it’s the Muslim politics [that] are put in front of our school kids, and the sharia law, and the aspects of sharia.”
Conservative respondents from all across the country, from Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, at least, had similar concerns about Muslims in the U.S., which Longwell attributed to inflammatory rhetoric from elected leaders.
Moving forward, she concluded, this shift among Republican voters might make it extremely difficult for the party to shed the bigoted image crafted by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
"This is one of the essential difficulties for Republicans who might want to calibrate away from Trump’s brazenly racist GOP after getting annihilated in the midterms: Republican base voters won’t let them," she wrote.
