Most conservatives are as interested in voting for Kamala Harris as they are in eating a bowl of tofu marinated in motor oil.   After all, the Democratic nominee has vowed to legalize abortion nationwide, ban assault weapons, regulate prices, and increase federal spending. As Donald Trump — in his own wildly exaggerated fashion — would put it, she wants “this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.” And yet, some on the right are quietly rooting for Trump’s defeat. To this contingent, preventing Trump and JD Vance from remaking conservatism in their image takes precedence over keeping Harris out of the White House.  Their reasoning is simple: Trump has revised GOP orthodoxy, to the detriment of core conservative interest groups. His contempt for NATO and affinity for Vladimir Putin have incensed national security hawks. His enthusiasm for tariffs has dismayed economic libertarians. His gestures of moderation on abortion have dispirited the religious right. And his affection for mobs that threaten to kill Mike Pence has alienated Mike Pence. All this might not amount to a case for Harris were it not for Trump’s running mate. With the notable exception of abortion rights, JD Vance is even more ideologically hostile to traditional conservatism than the GOP nominee is. The Ohio senator has advocated for (some) labor unions, expansions in social welfare benefits, industrial policy, steep tariffs, stricter antitrust enforcement, and choking off aid to Ukraine. A Trump victory would make Vance the GOP’s heir apparent, thereby rendering traditional conservatives politically homeless for a decade or more. A Harris presidency, by contrast, might be a fleeting irritation. Even if the Democratic nominee wins, Republicans are likely to take the Senate. In that scenario, conservatives could block all of her judicial nominees and partisan legislation, build large congressional majorities in the 2026 midterms, and claw back the presidency two years later. Summarizing the perspective of unnamed anti-Trump conservatives in his orbit, the right-wing commentator Erick Erickson posted on X, “We can hold off Harris for two years and get more reinforcements then fight in 2028 for the White House. If Trump gets in, we set back the pro-life cause and free markets by a generation at least.” Various anonymous Republicans have expressed similar sentiments to Politico.  Such conservatives, though, are at once too optimistic about their ideology’s outlook should Trump lose and too pessimistic about its prospects should he win.  On the first count, right-wing purists rooting for Trump’s defeat overrate the contingency of his heresies. Many of Trump’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy derive not from personal whims but rather from political realities that any future GOP nominee would also confront. On the second count, Trump’s hostility to traditional conservative policy goals is often exaggerated. For better or worse, the differences between Trumpism and traditional conservatism are largely ones of degree rather than kind.  A Trump defeat could change the ideological trajectory of American conservatism, but any shift would happen at the margins of Republican thinking. The GOP is all but certain to remain a party of, by, and for reactionary business interests and social conservatives.   Much of what conservative purists disdain about Trump’s ideological positioning has less to do with his personal impulses than the electorate’s preferences. For this reason, it’s plausible that some distinctive aspects of Trumpism will outlive his political career. This dynamic is clearest on the issues of reproductive rights and entitlement spending. Trump has insisted that questions of abortion policy should be left to the states, while in-vitro fertilization (IVF) should be accessible and publicly subsidized nationwide. The religious right opposes both these stances, as it considers fertilized eggs to be persons entitled to full constitutional rights, and IVF sometimes involves discarding such eggs.  Trump is therefore less aligned with the anti-abortion movement than any Republican nominee in recent memory. In theory, his willingness to defy the Christian right might stem from his personal irreligiosity and less-than-traditional sexual morality. But then, Trump has run for president twice before and in neither instance did he put so much distance between himself and abortion prohibitionists. The more likely explanation for Trump’s current posture is that the right’s position on abortion has become much more politically toxic since he last ran for president. The overturning of Roe v. Wade dramatically increased the salience of abortion policy while triggering a leftward lurch in public opinion on the issue. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, both Gallup and Pew polling found support for abortion rights jumping to its highest point on record. Meanwhile, voters in red states like Kansas and Ohio have backed referendums ensuring abortion’s legality. Many political operatives have argued that the GOP’s vulnerability on reproductive rights drove its mediocre showing in the 2022 midterms. In this context, any Republican nominee would recognize a tension between honoring the Christian right’s demands and maximizing their own odds of victory.  It is possible that future GOP nominees may champion federal abortion bans anyway. Some Republican politicians are true believers in fetal personhood and others may see indulging the religious right as indispensable to their primary campaigns. Liam Donovan, a former Republican consultant, told Vox that he believes future GOP candidates would have a harder time defying anti-abortion activists, as Trump’s cult of personality renders him uniquely capable of defying core Republican interest groups. “He singularly has the ability to basically tell the base to pound sand and do whatever he wants,” Donovan said. “Yeah, there might be a marginal penalty, but he has the standing to do that in a way no one else does.” Nevertheless, it is far from certain that Republican triangulation on abortion would end with Trump’s defeat. The incentives for moderation on the issue are only liable to grow stronger, as the less-religious millennial and zoomer generations continue displacing their more socially conservative forebears.  Trump’s position on entitlement spending is also dictated by political expediency. An overwhelming majority of Americans oppose reducing Medicare or Social Security benefits. Trump is scarcely the first Republican nominee to bend to the popular will on this subject. In 2012, Mitt Romney (misleadingly) criticized Barack Obama for cutting Medicare.  Forthrightly championing entitlement cuts isn’t going to get politically easier. As the nation ages, those with a direct stake in sustaining Medicare and Social Security benefits will increase. In the past, Republicans have sought to mitigate blowback to entitlement cuts by maintaining existing benefit levels for current recipients. Yet the modern Republican coalition is disproportionately composed of Americans between the ages of 45 and 64 – a group that tends to be highly conscious of entitlement policy and would stand to lose out from any Medicare or Social Security cut that began with the next generation of seniors. Trump losing in November would do nothing to eliminate these political realities. It is therefore unlikely that the GOP’s next nominee would be an unabashed proponent of entitlement reform.  Trump’s old-school conservative skeptics have raised few complaints with his militantly nativist positions on immigration. That aspect of Trumpism, though, is likely to endure due to popular demand. Republican primary voters were mobilizing for a more restrictionist party long before Trump launched his first campaign. They are all but certain to reject any future Republican candidate who attempts to revive comprehensive immigration reform.  Other aspects of Trumpism owe less to political expediency than personal instinct. For this reason, a second Trump loss would give conservative purists a fighting chance to restore their movement’s orthodoxy on certain fronts. Even in such areas, their victory would be far from assured.  Trump did not become a nationalist skeptic of free trade merely because he wanted to win an election and saw protectionism as politically expedient in 2016. Rather, he has argued since the late 1980s that America’s trade partners were taking advantage of the United States. Likewise, Trump did not embrace a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports this year because doing so was necessary to win the Republican primary or general election. The GOP nominee could have appealed to protectionist sentiment in the Midwest through myriad less-extreme policies. The extremity of his avowed hostility to trade is more ideological than pragmatic.  For this reason, a Trump loss in 2024 could clear the way for a less protectionist Republican Party. In any scenario, the GOP is liable to remain more trade-skeptical than it was under Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. So long as Rust Belt states crown the Electoral College’s winner — and Democrats continue their Biden-era turn toward economic nationalism — Republicans will find it difficult to fully repudiate Trumpian sentiments on trade. The prospects for a full reset on foreign policy are more favorable. The American public remains too intolerant of US casualties to countenance a return to the imperial misadventures of the Bush era (at least, barring another foreign attack on US soil). But no mass constituency has ever demanded Trump’s idiosyncratic skepticism of NATO or sympathy for various authoritarian strongmen. “Find me a voter that is voting specifically on Trump’s foreign policy,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster with the Republican firm Echelon Insights, told Vox. “The fact is that voters like Trump’s style, his demeanor, his aggression toward what they perceived as encroaching liberal elites,” as opposed to his perspective on US-Russia relations, Ruffini argues Thus, were voters to repudiate a Trump-Vance ticket, Republicans could plausibly return to conventionally conservative positioning on foreign affairs. This is not guaranteed. If GOP primary voters aren’t passionately opposed to aiding Ukraine, they also aren’t passionately supportive of Ukrainian democracy, either. After a second Trump loss, the Republican nominee in 2028 would likely have leeway to chart their own course on foreign affairs, though of course, that nominee might well be Donald Trump. (Officially, Trump has no intention of running in 2028 should he lose in 2024, but the Republican nominee is not exactly a man of his word.) Perhaps Trumpism’s most alarming innovation is the extremity of its contempt for liberal democratic norms. The GOP standard-bearer has cultivated distrust in the democratic process, attempted to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power by fomenting an insurrection, declared that the Justice Department’s first loyalty should be to the president, encouraged his supporters to beat up protesters, and committed myriad other affronts to (small-l) liberal values.  Republican primary voters in some areas eventually came to demand complicity in Trump’s election denialism. Trump, though, did not dispute the legitimacy of the 2020 election because Republican voters agitated for such authoritarian conspiracy theorizing; rather, Republican voters agitated for authoritarian conspiracy theorizing because Trump denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election.  Some partisans have always responded to electoral defeat by grumbling about alleged cheating by the other side, but it took presidential leadership to put such paranoia at the very heart of Republican politics.  Meanwhile, Trump has further fueled right-wing contempt for democratic institutions by amplifying the “great replacement” conspiracy theory: the idea that Democrats are in the process of permanently disenfranchising “real” Americans by creating an artificial majority through unfettered immigration.  Promoting the idea that Republicans’ votes might not count — as the election could be stolen — is not a political imperative for the GOP. If anything, it is counterproductive to the project of winning elections. Thus, should Trump lose in November and retire from politics thereafter, Republicans may nominate someone with an iota of civic responsibility.  It is worth noting that Trump’s authoritarianism is not a chief concern for the conservative purists who are secretly rooting for his defeat. There is a small but substantial cohort of Republicans who’ve publicly endorsed Harris, on small-d democratic grounds. Among conservative purists who remain actively involved in Republican politics — and are thus only willing to root for Harris in secret — Trump’s appetite for autocracy is not especially disconcerting; neither Erickson nor Politico mentioned Trump’s authoritarianism as a source of concern for this contingent.  That reality, combined with the pre-Trump Republican Party’s forays into blocking vote counting and targeted disenfranchisement — and the fact that much of the conservative media is now invested in election denialist narratives — should temper optimism about its post-Trump posture toward the republic’s bedrock norms.  There is no question that Trump’s ideological positioning is distinct from that of previous GOP standard-bearers. He is more demagogically anti-immigrant, protectionist, putatively moderate on abortion, supportive of entitlement spending, anti-democratic, and hostile toward America’s European allies.  Yet even on many of these fronts, the practical distinctions between Trumpism and conventional conservatism are often exaggerated.  During his first term in office, Trump did impose a variety of tariffs on America’s geopolitical allies and adversaries alike. He also made marginal changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), renamed it, and then gave largely open trade with Canada and Mexico his stamp of approval.  In a second term, Trump would surely pursue more restrictive trade policies than free-market economists would recommend. Whether he’d actually follow through on imposing a de facto 10 percent sales tax on all imported goods, however, is far from clear. After all, Trump failed to act on a great many of his more radical campaign pledges during his first stint in the White House. On reproductive rights, meanwhile, there is little doubt that Trump will continue to appoint anti-abortion judges, perhaps even forging a Supreme Court majority that deems the procedure unconstitutional. During his debate with Harris, Trump pointedly refused to say that he would veto a national abortion ban were one to reach his desk.  As Trump’s noncommittal remarks on that subject indicate, the real obstacle to national abortion restrictions is not Trumpism so much as Congress. To get a ban ready for a Republican president’s signature, the GOP would need to find either 60 votes in the Senate or 51 votes for abolishing the legislative filibuster and restricting abortion nationwide. The party is unlikely to find either in the near term. As Ohio’s and Kansas’s recent abortion referendums made clear, the religious right’s views are unpopular even in solidly red states. Plenty of Republican senators would prefer to dodge a vote on an issue that cleaves their base from the median voter; the filibuster gives them cover to avoid such a vote. Abortion prohibitionists who believe Trump is the one thing standing between them and total victory have fallen prey to wishful thinking.  Likewise, the obstacle to entitlement cuts is that idea’s political toxicity, not Donald Trump’s unshakeable commitment to seniors’ welfare. What Republicans need to cut Medicare and Social Security is not a more conventionally conservative standard-bearer but a forcing mechanism. Trump’s fiscal priorities would help provide them with precisely this. The Republican nominee is committed to slashing federal revenue across the board and has repeatedly flirted with payroll tax cuts that would gut funding for Social Security and Medicare. These measures would expedite the programs’ insolvency. If Republicans control Congress when the conflict between avoiding all tax increases and sustaining entitlement benefits becomes irreconcilable, they will be liable to cut the latter, no matter how “Trumpist” the party remains.  Finally, during his first term, Trump’s rhetoric about foreign affairs was decidedly more heterodox than his policies. This gap was especially pronounced on matters concerning Russia. For all Trump’s expressions of affection for Putin, during his tenure, the United States assented to NATO enlargement, armed the Ukrainian military, and bombed Syria, a Russian client state. His administration still made some deferential gestures toward Moscow, and it’s plausible that a second Trump administration would chart a more unconventional course on foreign affairs. But whether Trumpism constitutes a drastic break from traditional conservative foreign policy in practice (rather than rhetoric) remains unclear. It is true that JD Vance’s policy positions diverge from conservative orthodoxy much more significantly than Trump’s. Were Vance to inherit leadership of the party following a second Trump administration, that could plausibly change the Republican Party’s economic and foreign policy positioning, at least marginally. And yet, given how radically (and, arguably, opportunistically) Vance has revised his views since 2017, it’s far from clear that he would stick by more heretical populist ideas if they became an impediment to his political ambitions.  Ultimately, American conservatism’s precise trajectory in the event of a Trump defeat or victory cannot be known. In any event, its core commitments are likely to remain the same. It is, and (almost certainly) will be, an ideology dedicated to maximizing the after-tax income of the wealthy, restricting immigration, and advancing as much social conservatism as an increasingly secular electorate will allow (in part, by outsourcing social policy to a democratically unaccountable judiciary). Whatever else Trumpism does and does not entail, these objectives give doctrinaire conservatives cause for supporting the Republican nominee — and everyone else reason to hope for his defeat.

Donald Trump is struggling with female voters and occasionally acts like he knows it.  With the November election fast approaching, Republican political consultants have been bemoaning the fact that their presidential candidate continues to publicly boast about overturning Roe v. Wade — something a majority of Americans oppose. Trump’s openly anti-abortion pick for vice president, JD Vance, also continues to attract attention for his deeply unpopular insults of women who don’t have biological children.  These dynamics are exacerbated by the fact that the economy — typically Republicans’ strongest issue — continues to improve; the Fed recently cut interest rates and inflation has fallen to its lowest point in three and a half years, with gas and grocery prices plunging.  To help improve his chances, Trump has been trying to dispel fears. At the September presidential debate, when asked if he would veto a national abortion ban, Trump repeatedly dodged the question, insisting it wouldn’t be necessary since abortion rights are now under state control. This is only half-true: Trump is right that he’s unlikely to face a national abortion ban from Congress in the next four years.  But most anti-abortion leaders weren’t counting on that, anyway. The anti-abortion movement has been banking on more appointments of friendly federal judges and taking control of key federal agencies that could use executive power to heavily restrict reproductive freedom.  “We don’t need a federal abortion ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, the legal architect behind a 2021 law in Texas that effectively banned abortion, told the New York Times earlier this year. Mitchell was referring to the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law that could prohibit anything associated with abortion from being sent in the mail. Such a ban could mean not only restricting abortion medication, the most common method used to end a pregnancy in the US, but also any medical equipment used during surgical abortion, like speculums, suction catheters, and dilators.  The Comstock Act was rendered moot by Roe v. Wade in the 1970s but never formally repealed, and now, with Roe gone, some conservatives, including Mitchell and JD Vance, are pushing for its revival. “I hope [Trump] doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Mitchell added, urging anti-abortion groups to also “keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.” Things seemed to be mostly going according to Mitchell’s plan, with Trump avoiding answering reporters’ Comstock Act questions and publicly insisting abortion was now a state duty. That is, until August, when Trump — seemingly more nervous about his election chances — announced on Truth Social that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He also finally told the media he would not use the Comstock Act to ban mailing abortion drugs, and on top of that, announced his administration would mandate health insurance companies cover the hefty cost of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Trump’s new stances have not been clarifying or convincing enough for most voters — indeed, on the heels of him promising free IVF, he said he thought Florida’s six-week ban was too strict, and then announced he’d be voting against Florida’s proposed abortion rights ballot measure in November. That measure would legalize abortion up to viability to protect the patient’s health, as decided by their provider, and polls show most Floridians back it. Still, Trump’s new rhetoric of (somewhat, sometimes) embracing reproductive rights has antagonized parts of his conservative base, who feel he’s taking the anti-abortion movement for granted and that he’s having his “Sister Souljah moment” with the segment of the electorate that helped deliver his victory in 2016. The immediate question is whether these conservatives will sit out in protest in November, and if they do, whether Trump can make up for it by drawing in more voters elsewhere. The larger, more enduring question is whether this portends an emerging split in the Republican coalition on the question of abortion, just a couple of years removed from the anti-abortion faction’s greatest victory. While opposition to abortion has been a fragile part of the GOP coalition for years, IVF emerged this year as a new point of tension among conservatives.  After Trump announced in late August that he’d back free IVF, anti-abortion groups immediately urged him to retract his stance. At first glance, it may seem puzzling that a faction of voters who identify as “pro-life” would oppose technology that helps people with infertility become parents. About 2 percent of births in the US are done through IVF, which involves fertilizing eggs outside of the body and then transferring embryos to a womb.  But the opposition makes more sense when IVF is understood as conflicting with “fetal personhood” — a core goal of a faction within the anti-abortion movement that seeks to grant fetuses (and embryos) full human rights and legal protections. “Human embryos are created and discarded or frozen by dozens in most IVF procedures,” Matthew Yonke, a spokesperson for the Pro-Life Action League, told me. “It’s no way to treat human beings, and the federal government should not subsidize it.”  (Louisiana remains the only state to outright prohibit the destruction of embryos, requiring patients to either pay forever to store their unused embryos, or donate them to a married couple. Most states allow patients to decide what to do with any excess genetic material.) Some social conservatives also lament that contemporary IVF treats parenthood like an individual right instead of a responsibility or privilege for committed couples, and others object to the ethical implications of sex selection and optimizing for certain characteristics, such as eye color or intelligence.  Ever since February, when Alabama’s Supreme Court issued its unprecedented legal decision that invoked God to claim frozen embryos count as “children” under state law, policymakers and prospective parents have been realizing how vulnerable IVF is in the United States, even as politicians scramble to assure voters it’s not actually at risk. For religious conservatives who oppose IVF, the last seven months have provided a fresh opportunity to make their case against the assisted reproductive technology. In some states they’ve made political gains: the North Carolina Republican Party adopted a platform in June that opposes the destruction of human embryos. Also in June, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, approved a resolution against IVF.  Anti-abortion leaders are prepared to fight for their long-term goal of fetal personhood, just as they did for decades to overturn Roe v. Wade. In many ways, these new IVF battles are just beginning: This past spring, a supermajority of justices on Florida’s Supreme Court signaled openness to a future fetal personhood challenge, suggesting that “pre-born children” are “persons” entitled to the right to life under the Florida Constitution. Regardless of whether Trump wins in November, these fights over reproductive technology will continue to embroil conservatives and the Republican Party. It’s not just the ethics of IVF that are causing fissures — Trump’s promise that the government would foot the bill has also sparked concern among conservative budget hawks. The average out-of-pocket cost per IVF cycle stands at $24,000, according to a federal fact sheet, or $61,000 in total per successful live birth, since people often need multiple IVF cycles. While Trump’s team has refused to provide any financing details for his plan, some experts believe it would require significant new Congressional spending.  Ira Stoll, a prominent conservative columnist, tried to make the fiscally conservative case for Trump’s IVF policy in the Wall Street Journal. He argued the proposal would be less expensive than it seems since the costs of low birth rates “far outweigh the costs” of adding IVF to insurance companies. “The roughly $15,000 price of an IVF procedure is nothing compared with the priceless potential of an individual human being,” Stoll added, though existing research suggests IVF would not significantly increase the birth rate. However, for most conservatives concerned with federal spending and rising deficits, the government mandating taxpayer-funded IVF treatment feels like a bad joke. National Review editor Philip Klein argued that the expensive Trump proposal would amount to a significant expansion of Obamacare and drive up health insurance premiums for all.  Vance Ginn, the chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration, came out to blast the IVF proposal. “I’m for IVF, as we’ve used it for two of our beautiful kids, but nothing is ‘free,’” he wrote on X. “Can we stop handing out things to win votes like it’s candy when we’re running $2T[rillion] deficits and not abiding by the limited roles outlined in the US Constitution?” Fiscal conservatives in Congress have also been concerned. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) rejected the free IVF proposal on ABC News, saying there would be “no end” to its cost. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) was more restrained with NBC News. “I’m a little bit hesitant on an insurance mandate. Is there some other way that we could incent[ivize] these sort of coverages through the private sector?” he asked. “We got a lot of things we’ve got to pay for next year by extending the tax provisions.”  Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) opted to be less diplomatic, calling the idea “ridiculous.” The “government has no money,” he said. “We’re $2 trillion in the hole, so I’m not for asking the taxpayer to pay for it.”Even before his promises for free IVF, fiscal conservatives were growing increasingly frustrated with Trump, as he’s been virtually silent on the mounting federal debt, and issuing new campaign pledges like ending taxes on overtime pay and Social Security benefits, and exempting tips from taxes. Trump’s disregard for deficit spending could turn off some of these budget hawks in November, too.  Evangelical voters were a critical part of Trump’s path to victory in 2016, and his campaign in 2020, and most political strategists say he’ll need to earn at least 80 percent of white evangelicals nationally to win in November.  A recent Fox News poll showed him at 75 percent with this group, a number that could sink lower given his recent flip-flops. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, has been warning — in recent op-eds, speeches, and podcast interviews — that the Republican Party is making a huge mistake by potentially motivating religious voters to stay home. Mohler has been urging Trump to clarify how he’ll restrict abortion in the Oval Office, just as Trump promised evangelicals before that he would work to overturn Roe v. Wade if elected.  Tony Perkins, president of the right-wing Family Research Council, has been making a similar argument that Trump needs to give religious voters something to be genuinely excited about. “It’s just on the margins, but it’s the difference in many elections,” Perkins argued in Politico.  For now there’s no clear survey evidence on whether Evangelicals really are planning to stay home in November, though Lila Rose, a prominent anti-abortion activist, has been urging her followers to withhold their votes unless Trump changes his tune. But Mohler, for his part, said he’s likely to stick with Trump in November because he trusts that Trump will ultimately stack his administration with anti-abortion leaders, regardless of what he says on the campaign trail. “I have a high degree of confidence that a lot of people in crucial roles in a Trump administration would reflect that pro-life sentiment,” he told the New York Times. “I believe the opposite about a Kamala Harris administration … I have to look at a longer-term strategy. And I think the most responsible pro-life figures in the United States think similarly.” IVF in particular is popular in the US, with 70 percent of adults supporting access to the treatment. Even among Christian and Republican voters, clear majorities believe IVF access is a good thing.  That’s why, even as Republican lawmakers continue to vote against federal bills to protect access to IVF, they have been publicly stressing their support for the technology. Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick is running on a $15,000 tax credit for fertility treatment, and in September, a conservative super PAC started funding a major ad campaign in support of IVF. Public backing for abortion rights also continues to loom over Trump and the Republican Party; polls show voters have grown even more supportive of abortion rights than they were before the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Among women in particular, many say abortion rights are their top issue this November. A recent New York Times poll found that for women under 45, abortion is even more important to them than the economy. Another poll by Galvanize Action showed that 82 percent of white moderate women specifically plan to factor in a candidate’s stance on abortion when voting. Whether this late-stage gamble by Trump to send mixed messages on reproductive rights pays off is anyone’s guess, but even if it does, the internal fights within the GOP coalition will likely remain — unresolved, festering, and ready to resurface after November. 

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