The 2024 nomination of Donald Trump was both predictable and wildly unusual. Parties almost never nominate someone who has previously lost the presidency – let alone a candidate who helped organize a riot and faced dozens of criminal indictments. Why, then, did Republicans nominate Trump for a third time? In this fascinating follow-up to Learning from Loss, leading scholar and political analyst Seth Masket conducted surveys and interviews with local Republican leaders across the country between 2021 and 2024. He finds that most were deeply wary of nominating Trump again but had lost any control they once had over their party to a passionate core of voters. The Elephants in the Room captures a political party in the act of making a fateful decision; attempts to understand what has happened within the Republican Party in recent years by focusing on the people most critical to it; and looks at how the party has changed, what we should be learning from it, and how the US political system has changed as result.
Uses Donald Trump’s 2024 nomination as a lens for understanding how Republicans interpret election losses and adjust for future elections
Illustrates that voters, not party leaders, are the ones really in charge of decision making in the current Republican party
Shows that transformations in the Republican Party largely occurred before Trump ever ran for office
Seth Masket is a professor of political science at the University of Denver. He has written five books on political parties, including Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016–2020 (2020). He was the Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University (2024–2025), and the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress (2018). He writes regularly at his ‘Tusk’ newsletter.
Masket will be in conversation with Hans Noel, a Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. His research is on political coalitions, political parties and ideology, with a focus on the United States. He is the author or co-author of four books, including Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (with Martin Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller) His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, among other journals. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2006.