Episode
Seth Masket, "The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
- Published
- Aug 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2822
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9259954596.mp3
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Summary
Political Scientist Seth Masket’s new book, The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders (Cambridge UP, 2026) is a companion book to his earlier work, Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016-2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In researching both these works, Masket spends time with party leaders throughout the United States, discussing the loss at the presidential level (for Democrats in 2016, for Republicans in 2020) and seeking to understand what the lessons might be for each party from their electoral loss. The Elephants in the Room focuses in on the idea and trajectory of nominating Donald Trump for the third time in as many election cycles, as the local party leaders of the Republican Party considered what to do in the lead up to the 2024 election cycle. Masket is able to regularly survey Republican Party chairs (state chairs, local chairs, county chairs) during the period leading to the 2024 nomination cycle. He also interviewed many of these same chairs, especially the ones in New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, and other early primary states. The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders analyzes the thinking among these party leaders—not necessarily at the national level, but certainly long-standing and engaged local-level leaders—and their concern that nominating Trump again would lead to another presidential election loss for the GOP. One of the key points Masket makes both in the book and in our conversation is that these leaders had built, over time, a political party that they could no longer lead. These leaders are also distinct from the voters themselves, who may be adherents to the party, but are not part of the political par…