The Clash of Two, Distinct Republican Parties

Guest post by Paul Glumaz

We are now in the two-month volatile political period following the 2024 general election called “reorg-time,” where depending on the statutes governing political parties in any state, locally elected precinct officers vote on who will govern the State, County, State Legislative, and Congressional Republican party organizations. This reorganization period, following Trump’s election, is dominated by a battle for control between, if we can use the term, the legacies, who still control most of the party apparatuses, and the grass roots Trumpers committed to displacing them. The outcome will determine whether Republican state and county organizations and state legislatures act to support Donald Trump’s national agenda.  Success in changing the dynamic here will be invaluable in securing the 2026 midterms.  

Considering that a good portion of these grassroots activists were not previously committed Republican activists and were part of a migration into the Party of former Democrats, Progressives, and unaffiliated independent thinkers who answered the call of Donald Trump, there is much room for friction at these reorganization meetings.

Perhaps another way to describe the issue is that the America First grassroots have seized the citadel for Trump, but are they sophisticated enough to govern at the local level? If not, Donald Trump will have to rely on the legacies to govern, and since most of these legacy elements do not like Donald Trump, their support for Trump will be conditional and limited. This will make it harder for Trump to implement the necessary massive reorganization of our government, the physical transformation of our economy, and his promised antiwar, anti-globalization foreign policy.

The legacies’ dislike of the disrupter, Donald Trump, comes from static habits and traditions of a conduct of politics totally different and alien to Trump’s mass movement mobilization approach directed at defending and elevating the working and middle classes, which draws individuals passionately concerned about saving the nation. Their altruism does not mix well with the legacies’ election consultants, the pay to play, and posturing around issues and values, with no sense of a mission for the nation. The MAGA grassroots rightly see the legacies as corrupt, while the legacies see the grassroots as very naïve rubes who “don’t know how to play the game.” Both perceptions are true in significant respects; but the interaction resulting from Donald Trump’s interventions is  creating change.

So far, in many places, the legacies have been able to keep their party leadership positions by restricting the recruitment of new party members and activists, along with using a better mastery of Robert’s Rules to control party meetings. The most fundamental aspect of the change now underway stems from the simple fact that Donald Trump and his national organization won the presidential election by changing these dynamics through the shared mission of winning the election.  Trump  won decisively in states where the grassroots and the legacies, if left to their own devices, would have destroyed any potential for victory. 

Previously, if the grassroots took over a party organization, the legacies fought it. Traditional donors stopped giving, and the legacies ended their involvement, or more likely sought to sabotage the new grassroots leadership. In many cases the legacies spent far more in campaign contributions to defeat grassroots candidates in the primaries, than in the general election against the Democrats.

If a MAGA grassroots takeover of a party organization succeeded, its leaders had to find a way to survive financially and grow the party without counting on the larger established donors that had been giving to the legacies.  A fatal assumption was that the major donors, because they are wealthy, were the problem. They are often not the problem. Often the  problem is that the major donors tend to have relationships with a tight group of legacy fundraisers who influence the major donors on their views of the MAGA grassroots.

Now, the MAGA grassroots must do everything to reach out to these major donors to discuss their plans to grow the party, and support candidates, and not leave it to legacy fundraisers to determine the major donors’ perception of the grassroots.

To grow local party organizations, the MAGA grassroots need to shift from the top-down party structure of the legacies, which controls by keeping all the parts of the larger party disconnected and distrustful of each other. This system of control exists because there has been nothing to unify the party in the sense of a mobilization or a mission to change anything. Rather the legacies have historically tried to find an ideological or factional middle to keep things together.

Instead, the MAGA grassroots must move to establish a bottom up mobilizational structure where activists can be integrated into continuous mission-oriented activity, based on executing Donald Trump’s agenda. Only in such a mission is there actual unity. The typical MAGA activist tends to be self-motivated and independent and responds to being part of coordinated mobilizations, rather than a static structure that tries to least offend the ideological and other divisions in the party.

This is a huge change. It is based on individual activists assuming personal responsibility in their gut for the policies that Trump intends to implement, which includes the important current mobilization to get Trump’s nominees approved by the U.S. Senate. With the MAGA grassroots political content is intensely personal and a moral calling. With most of the legacies it is not. Our Constitution places the responsibility for government, and all the polices of the nation, the state, and the county, on each citizen. After many decades of corruption, this sense is dim within many of the legacies. But it is active in the MAGA grassroots, another cause for friction.

This clash of tendencies, the legacies versus the MAGA grassroots, is the unique American way, at the local and individual level, that the continuation of the American Revolution is taking place. It is raw, contentious, and messy. But out of it, the best of the legacies will rediscover their conscience and their morality as many of the elites now flocking to Donald Trump have done. In turn, the true leaders within the grassroots will escape whatever limitations now bedevil them by working to educate themselves and gaining the competencies necessary to lead.