June 30, 2025 - 7:00pm
Thom Tillis’s Senate career looks to be the first political casualty of the One Big Beautiful Bill. After saying that he would not support the legislation, the two-term senator from North Carolina was pummelled by President Trump and his allies over the weekend, and he announced on Sunday that he would not be running for reelection in 2026.
Tillis’s retirement not only reinforces the power of the President’s personality in his party, it also outlines a tension at the heart of the uneasy MAGA coalition. One powerful faction of MAGA is essentially a hyper-charged Tea Party: pursuing maximal rhetorical escalation, obsessed with slashing government spending, and championing all-out war against the political establishment. In the opening months of the second Trump administration, DOGE and the war on the administrative state are proof of this.
However, one of the distinctive elements of Trump’s own political career has been a rebuke to the austerity politics that dominated the GOP during the Tea Party years. He has repeatedly pledged to avoid cuts to federal entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare. Tilting against the Randian tendencies of the GOP of the early 2010s has helped make Trump seem more moderate and has drawn working-class voters into his coalition. This economic moderation is perhaps one of the reasons why some blue-chip members of the Republican establishment, such as Susan Collins, have been at times unexpected allies of populism.
Tillis now finds himself at the heart of the moderate MAGA paradox. With his emphasis on bipartisanship and corporate sympathies, he has clear affinities with the traditional establishment of the Republican Party. Yet, in terms of policy, he has at times moved the ball in favour of populist policies. He backed both the 2021 infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act.
Tellingly, moderates like Tillis and Collins have raised some of the same concerns as populists (most notably, Missouri senator Josh Hawley) about the version of the One Big Beautiful Bill that is now on the Senate floor. Both these moderates and populists argue that the Senate bill’s changes to Medicaid would hurt working families.
In a fiery speech after his decision to retire from the Senate, Tillis said over 600,000 North Carolinians would be pushed off the Medicaid programme under the bill and warned the White House that supporting it would “betray the very promise” made by President Trump to preserve healthcare benefits.
For the North Carolina Senate race in 2026, the effect of Tillis’s retirement remains unknown, and much will depend on who would replace him as the GOP standard bearer. He won narrowly both times, and every election for that seat since 1972 has been within 10 points. Even while Trump won the Tar Heel State, Republicans lost the 2024 governor’s race by a big margin because of a deeply unpopular nominee.
More broadly, though, Tillis’s exit highlights a challenge facing a realigned Republican Party. A populist GOP still needs some moderate voices, and Trump needs to show he can handle mild dissent otherwise he risks looking weak. To have a durable Senate majority, Republicans will need to be able to play in a range of swing states. Leaning too hard in the direction of cuts to government programmes could turn off both working-class voters and political moderates, threatening the very mechanism of that realignment.
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