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What's more, the 172 B.T. Republicans no longer in office were, on the whole, a bit more moderate than the 121 who remain. DW-NOMINATE is a metric that quantifies the ideology of members of Congress using their voting records, placing them on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal). The average DW-NOMINATE score of the 172 departed members was 0.480, but the average score of those who remain is 0.493. And while 59 percent of B.T. Republicans overall are no longer in office, over two-thirds of those who had DW-NOMINATE scores under 0.300 are now gone.

But the departure of this generally more moderate bloc of Republicans is only half the story. Equally important is how conservative their replacements are. In addition to the 121 holdovers, 150 Republicans have been elected to the House or Senate since 2017.* Thirty-two of them were just elected for the first time in 2024, so they don't have a DW-NOMINATE score yet because they haven't taken enough votes, but the other 118 of them have an average DW-NOMINATE score of 0.544 — significantly more conservative than not only the 172 Republicans they replaced, but also their 121 longer-tenured colleagues.

This group includes 21 recently elected Republicans with DW-NOMINATE scores above 0.700, including firebrands like Reps. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Tommy Tuberville. It includes only 10 Republicans with DW-NOMINATE scores under 0.300. This is virtually the mirror image of the B.T. Republicans they replaced: 10 of them had scores above 0.700, while 23 had scores below 0.300.

More conservative voting records don't necessarily equate to \"Trumpier\" (although the term \"conservative\" has been redefined in recent years to be basically synonymous with pro-Trump), but this new cadre is pretty Trumpy, too. Trump endorsed 69 percent (104 of 150) of them in their most recent Republican primaries, compared with 74 percent (89) of the 121 holdovers from before his first term. Granted, Trump is not stingy about handing out endorsements — especially to incumbents who are already virtually guaranteed to win their primary — but he does bestow them only on people who are in his good graces. So it's fair to say that a majority of these newcomers, and of Republicans as a whole, are at least tolerant of Trumpism — if not full-throated fans of it.

With Republicans in full control of the federal government, Trump's opponents are basically powerless to do anything but hope that people within his own party will check his power. But the days of former Sens. Mitt Romney and John McCain standing up to Trump are largely over, because people like Mitt Romney and John McCain aren't in Congress anymore. The Republican caucus is mostly not the same as it was in Trump's first term, so don't expect the president to meet the same resistance.

Footnotes

*The remaining 22 B.T. Republicans from 2017 were replaced by Democrats.

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