Say SCOTUS, POTUS, or FLOTUS at nearly any kitchen table in America, and no one will ask you what you mean. Washington shorthand has become part of the way we talk, so I am adding one more acronym to the list: POTER, which stands for the Party of the Extreme Right. It aptly describes the remnants of the organization that still goes by the name of the Republican Party.
Many Americans believe that once President Trump and the people around him leave office in January 2029, the Republican Party will somehow return to the form it held for most of the last century. Those Americans are dreaming of a bygone age, which reminds me of a line from an old ’70s song by Bread: “Dreams, they’re for those who sleep.”
The party of Dwight Eisenhower is gone, and it will not come back when this presidency ends. Donald Trump did not build POTER. Donald Trump took temporary command of POTER. And POTER will not dissolve when he departs in January 2029. POTER was built piece by piece, by driving out the moderates and creating institutions designed to outlast any president.
Start with what the Republican Party used to be. In my recently published book, The Opening, I describe the party of the 1950s and 1960s as a big tent that held Northeastern moderates who supported civil rights, Midwestern conservatives who wanted small government, and Wall Street Republicans who cared most about free trade.
They argued constantly, and that was the strength of the arrangement, because a moderate and a conservative could both call the party home. That home has been emptied. Congressional voting data from Voteview, which I cite in the book, show that about 40 percent of Republican senators in 1951 voted in the moderate middle. By 2024, that share had fallen to about 4 percent.
Those moderates did not simply drift away. Many were pushed out through the primary, the party’s own nominating election, where the most committed partisans do most of the voting.
Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming voted her conscience after January 6, 2021, and lost her next primary by 37 points to a challenger backed by Mr. Trump. This year in Texas, four-term Senator John Cornyn lost the primary runoff to Ken Paxton by 28 points, a result Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution said signals the end of the Bush-era Texas GOP.
Others have chosen not to wait for the verdict. The New York Times reported in March that the number of Republicans leaving the House this cycle is among the highest since 1930, surpassed only by 2018. The message to Republican officeholders is clear: reaching toward the center can carry a serious political cost.
The clearest evidence that this movement can outlast Mr. Trump is the infrastructure built to carry it forward. Project 2025 was a 920-page plan written by more than 400 conservative scholars and former officials, backed by a database of pre-screened loyalists ready to fill 50,000 federal jobs. Independent trackers found this summer that more than half of its proposals had been started or completed.
When polling in late 2025 showed the Project 2025 name had just 7 percent favorability among Republican voters, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts did not drop the agenda. As The Independent reported, he renamed it Heritage 2.0. A movement that rebrands its plan rather than abandoning it is not preparing to fade away in January 2029.
The voters themselves are telling both parties that something has broken. A Wall Street Journal poll, reported on October 2 by Aaron Zitner and Neil Mehta, found that 21 percent of voters now hold an unfavorable view of both the Democratic and Republican parties. That share was 13 percent in the 2022 midterms and about 12 percent in the past two presidential elections.
The Journal calls these voters “double haters,” and their verdict on the Republican Party is blunt. Asked for a word to describe the Republican Party, double haters most often answered “corrupt or dishonest,” followed by “ineffective.” The Democratic Party fared little better, drawing “weak,” then “corrupt,” then “ineffective.” Ninety-two percent of these voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Amy Walter, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told the Journal that “there is a deeper structural anger that is coursing through this body politic, and it isn’t going away after November.” Structural anger does not end when one president leaves office, and voters who feel it will not be won back by a party that simply waits for Mr. Trump to leave.
The old Republican Party is not coming back, and the reason runs deeper than any one president. As I describe in my book, The Opening, five forces reshaped both parties over the last fifty years and pulled each one away from the center.
Campaign money flowed to the intensity of the edges, and the internet replaced the neighborhood party organization with targeted messages. Partisan cable news sold outrage for advertising dollars, and sweetheart gerrymandering, where the two parties quietly cooperate to draw district maps that protect their incumbents, made most seats impossible to lose. The primary became a trap that punishes any member who governs from the middle.
No single force broke the system. Together, the five forces remade both parties so completely that the center became a place neither party can return to without destroying itself.
The old Republican Party is long gone, POTER has taken its place, and millions of moderate Republicans have been left behind. What happens to them now?
Troy Evans is one of them. Evans is 59, a lifelong Republican who lives in a suburb of Houston and works in sales for food companies. “I want the Republican Party and Democratic Party to wake up and start doing what they say they’re going to do,” Evans told the Journal. “I haven’t seen it in 40 years.”
Evans has voted in nearly every major election for four decades, and he plans to sit out this year’s midterms. Kimberly Keener, a 52-year-old bookkeeper in Florida and a longtime conservative, told the Journal that she may sit out as well. Evans and Keener are not stepping away because they stopped caring about their country. They are stepping away because neither party has given them a reason to show up.
Evans and Keener are not alone. Gallup reported in January 2026 that 45 percent of Americans now call themselves neither Republicans nor Democrats. The Journal found that double haters are not disengaged, either, since just under two-thirds of them say politics is important to their personal identity. Those voters have not disappeared. They have lost their political home.
These voters are also not loyal to either party. According to the Journal, double haters sided with Democrats in the 2018 midterms and with Republicans in 2022, and more than 40 percent of them are undecided or not fully committed in this year’s races for Congress. A voter who keeps switching sides is not a voter who has found a home. That voter is still looking.
The Centercratic Party was built for these voters. As I write in The Opening, what both parties discarded, the Centercratic Party intends to welcome. Most of the moderates who lost their seats were not rejected by voters for the work they did. They were removed by their own side for the offense of working with the other party, and what they lost was not their skill or their judgment but a place to belong.
Several of the Centercratic Party’s nine principles would sound familiar to Republicans from the Eisenhower tradition: fiscal discipline, limited but effective government, equal application of the law, strong alliances, and the defense of free nations. Those principles are not slogans to be raised in a good year and set aside when they become an obstacle to winning an election. They are lines the party has promised never to cross.
For moderate Republicans who have been pushed out or made to feel unwelcome, this is the moment to stop dreaming that the old party will somehow return. The Centercratic Party offers them something they no longer have: a political organization in which governing across ideological lines is an expectation rather than a liability.
A conservative who believes in sound budgets and a moderate who believes in compromise can both find a home in the Centercratic Party, the same way they once could in the party of Eisenhower.