Republicans at the Heritage Foundation’s Forum debated Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s leadership, the GOP’s midterm defeats and a widening field of potential 2028 candidates.
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When the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, started planning this week’s event, The Forum, at the Gaylord Resort at National Harbor in Maryland, organizers could not have known how catastrophic the midterm elections would be for Republicans. But as Kevin Roberts, the organization's president, told Fox News Digital, "I think it makes it even more important."
The order of the day consisted of two basic questions: Why did the GOP get blown out last week, and how can the losses be recovered?
When it came to the blame game, one name stood out: Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., was battered like a piñata and jeered by a crowd that looked too austere for jeering.
From his opening remarks, Roberts accused Thune of engaging in "watered-down conservatism," and in my conversations with attendees, the rhetoric only got nastier.
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"For decades now, we’ve had a Senate leadership whose game plan is losing slowly," Dan Schneider, vice president of the Media Research Center, told Fox News Digital, adding, "they see the bottom of Hell and just want to delay entrance into those chambers."
Things didn’t get much better for Senate leadership when I spoke with Yoram Hazony, a leading intellectual in the national conservatism movement, who said, "People are so frustrated by the Save Act … If you had to pick one thing that just kind of broke everybody, it’s you’ve got this 80/20 issue, let’s get election integrity, there’s basically no Republican who doesn’t want it, so it just makes it inconceivable [that it wasn’t passed]."
The SAVE America Act floundered because of Thune’s unwillingness to even hold a vote to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, an excuse that Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told attendees he was frankly sick and tired of.
"No more excuses. No more garbage about filibuster this, filibuster that," Roy railed from the podium. "I don’t want to hear any of the nonsense out of this town. I want delivery of freedom. I want delivery of limited government. I want delivery of security on our border, delivery of security on our streets, and I want everybody to shut the hell up if they’re not doing those things."
At this point, with much steam having been blown off, everybody was ready for some lunch.
As for how to reverse the losses suffered during the recent unpleasantness, some important points were made. Fox News contributor Ben Domenech said sensibly of courting the youth vote, "Stop making fun of guys in their basement playing video games, these are your voters."
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Mary Katharine Ham, of the "Normally" podcast, urged attendees to understand that now, "every election is a vibes election, voters look for a party to punish. This time it was Republicans," which speaks to the lackluster performance of so many GOP candidates.
One question I asked everyone I spoke with at the forum was whether the big midterm losses opened the door to a wider array of potential 2028 GOP presidential nominees than we thought we were looking at two weeks ago. Universally, the answer was yes.
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For months, even years, the names Vance, Rubio, Cruz and DeSantis have dominated the primary buzz. But on Wednesday, I heard names like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, New Hampshire Gov.-elect Kelly Ayotte, former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and even Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
As one older gentleman in attendance, a retired banker, told me, "When you get your ass kicked that badly you have to look far and wide to fix it."
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For his part, Kevin Roberts and the Heritage Foundation he leads are ready to work with all Republicans to get out of the political wilderness, even the much-maligned John Thune.
"Heritage will of course work with anybody," Roberts told Fox News Digital.
"President, vice president, leader Thune, even members of the other party if they want to focus on kitchen table issues," he said, adding that Republican senators need to "gum up some of the really radical legislation of the left."
If the Heritage Foundation Forum is any indication — and let's face it, it is — then Thune has an enormous amount of work to do to win back the good faith of the conservative movement and Republican voters. A huge first step toward that would be to show some fire in his belly.
With the loss of the House and Senate, the chance for Republicans to nuke the filibuster and make generational change in Washington has passed. Now, they can only hope that if Democrats win the presidency in 2028, they will show similar restraint.
For now, in this period of political purgatory in which President Donald Trump will wait out his final two years in office, Thune needs to fight, albeit on defense, harder than he has ever fought. He has to show Republicans some spirit and no longer accept the leftward ratcheting of our governance.
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One can say that amid the midterm gloom, a funny thing did happen at the forum: a sense of hope, a feeling that Republicans have been here before and always get up off the canvas. Everyone I spoke with seemed ready for the fight.
David Marcus is a columnist living in West Virginia and the author of "Charade: The COVID Lies That Crushed A Nation."