Will midterm losses clear the way for MAGA’s next generation?

After Republicans absorbed a broad midterm defeat that erased their Senate firewall and handed Democrats a large House majority, BlazeTV host Jonathan Keeperman is determined to "make lemonade out of the lemons."

The original MAGA in the 2010s and early 2020s, he says, was hugely successful because it was run by the kind of “outsiders and weirdos and misfits” necessary to “[disrupt] the political stasis.” He suggests that lasting success will require a “suite of experience” and “management skills” the early disruptors largely lacked.

Keeperman hopes the midterms, as brutal as they were, will force a hard discussion about what it will take to make the movement “sustainable” and actually “execute on these promises over the long term.”

“Can we construct an environment where, despite everything that's gone on here, we can bring on really good people, convince them to stay and build something that's durable?” he asks political data analyst Jeremy Carl.

Carl is also positive about the future of MAGA.

“I've been talking a lot with my second oldest son who's looking to maybe try to work in Washington, and what I've sort of told him is actually right now is the best time because all the time servers, all the political hacks, all those guys are going to be running for the hills,” he says.

People often forget, he says, that “the Trump movement is only a decade old in terms of its reshaping of the GOP,” and in that span of time, it’s already “cleared out so much of the dead wood.”

“Now look, in a brush fire like we just had, everything gets cleared out — the dead trees and maybe some healthier green ones,” Carl acknowledges.

Many of those dead trees, he notes, were in favor of the Dignity Act, which would have granted legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.

“I'm not trying to sugarcoat what was really, really bad, but it disproportionately hit some of the bad guys in our party, cleared them out,” says Carl.

“I had a sort of viral tweet on this, where I said, ‘Look if you're a young guy and are interested, politically motivated, there have never in my lifetime ... been as many GOP-leaning congressional seats or state House seats or whatever that are going to be out there for the taking than in this next election cycle coming up,'” he continues.

“That’s the really positive end of the vision.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

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