Can a Bannon-Groyper Alliance Derail Vance?

We're already seeing glimmers of what a post-Trump GOP will look like

JD Vance is likely to be the 2028 Republican nominee. Betting markets give him about a 50% chance, and I would recommend buying at that price.

In forecasting, the first thing you usually do is look at base rates. Here, the relevant question is, when a vice president runs after serving under a two-term president, how often does he get the nomination?

In the last hundred years, we’ve had four such cases:

1. Nixon in 1960 (and again in 1968), after Eisenhower (1953-1961)

2. George H.W. Bush in 1988, after Reagan (1981-1989)

3. Gore in 2000, after Clinton (1993-2001)

4. Biden in 2020, after Obama (2009-2017)

In each of these situations, the current or former vice president won his party’s nomination. This alone gets you to at least 50% odds, even with the small sample size, using a generous threshold of statistical significance. The further back we look the more questionable the relevance of the data becomes. Still, you have to go all the way back to Charles Fairbanks’ failed 1916 campaign to see a break with the pattern.

Moreover, Vance has even more going for him than the typical VP of a two-term president. Trump’s cult-like grip on the Republican Party gives him a lot of say regarding who his successor will be. I don’t expect Vance to end up like Mike Pence, because I can’t imagine a scenario in which Vance stands up to his boss. He appears to have recast all of his views and even adjusted his personality in the service of playing the subservient role to Trump.

Vance also has a good relationship with Elon Musk, so much so that the former DOGE-king is considering shelving his new political party in order to maintain their alliance and remain influential on the Republican side into 2028 and beyond.

Given all of this, anyone who is not starting out with Vance as the presumptive favorite is not seeing the world accurately. But it’s worth thinking about what might derail his nomination, partly as an exercise in figuring out what the post-Trump GOP will look like.

The Based Arc of Conservatism

The way I see it, for Vance to lose you need the introduction of some kind of wild card. This is what makes the anti-Vance attacks that have popped up in recent weeks so intriguing.

There seems to be one influential constituency in the Republican Party that is unhappy with Vance. I’m of course talking about the Groypers. Don’t laugh! The entire history of politics over the last twenty years is people going “Come on, that’s just an internet phenomenon,” and then we wake up one day and again learn that the internet is where real life happens now. We’ve seen this pattern with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr, etc. The Groypers themselves have already had an influence on mainstream politics, having made it practically impossible for Republican influencers to be friendly even to legal immigration.

For those who are unaware, Groypers are followers of Nick Fuentes who prioritize identity issues. They believe Jews have too much influence in America and emphasize the need to oppose Israel. They also are racist in the classic sense, talking about group differences in crime and IQ and all that, but are less passionate about blacks than Jews. There are also theocratic Catholic and incel elements. So a weird combination, that is kind of like the Trump movement itself in being shaped by the eccentricities of its leader.

The story of the 2019 “Groyper War” is instructive here. Followers of Fuentes would ambush mainstream conservative figures, most notably Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA events, and pepper them with questions about topics like immigration and Israel. Kirk, who had once openly supported legal immigration and “stapling green cards to diplomas,” shifted toward a harder line, demonstrating how a fringe online movement could bully one of the GOP’s most connected influencers into changing his tune.

The Groyper War was in compressed form a demonstration of what has happened on the right more generally. Weird internet subcultures have shown that they can transfer their energy into real-world leverage over the broader conservative movement. Fuentes’ followers lacked institutional power, but they could humiliate establishment conservatives online, generate viral moments, and move the conversation in their direction.

Few Republican stances have seemed more solid than being pro-Israel, with the Trump administration deporting people for writing the wrong op-eds and refraining from putting pressure on the Netanyahu government over what is happening in Gaza. Yet support for Israel is dropping among young Republicans. Marjorie Taylor Greene now puts out long rants attacking Netanyahu on Twitter, and Megyn Kelly, a relatively mainstream figure, suggests Jeffrey Epstein might have been connected to Mossad during a TPUSA conference. Her YouTube channel includes a recent clip with the title “Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk Push Back Against Israel Supporters Demanding Their 100% Israel Support.” Seems like baby steps, but if you watch the discourse, you know that more mainstream figures did not talk like this three years ago.

I think the way to understand modern conservatism now is as a dialectic in which the arc of the discourse bends towards Based. On immigration, we went from a consensus against illegals, to a complete consensus among major right-wing influencers against legal immigration. Discourse about white people being the only true Americans has become normalized. There’s also been a move towards conspiratorial thinking, with the Epstein issue dominating the aforementioned recent TPUSA conference. We now have a member of Congress whose public profile revolves around promising to release various “files” hiding nefarious government actions on topics like UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, and Martin Luther King.

In this environment, it is unrealistic to think that the taboo on antisemitism will be the one to hold. I don’t expect most Republican presidential candidates to openly talk about the “Jewish question” in 2028, but they will be increasingly friendly to those that do, and dogwhistle to them when they can on issues like Epstein and Israel. Supporters of the Jewish state in Washington have done a good job of holding onto positions of influence at the upper reaches of the GOP even as the ground under them has shifted. But every trend is against them. A movement that makes racism, anti-foreigner paranoia, and conspiracy theories central to its worldview will always exist uncomfortably alongside any form of philosemitism, if it isn’t simply overrun with Jew hate.

The Populist Axis

If Vance is going to face a serious challenger, we should expect it to come from where the energy in the party is. All the attacks on Trump from the base have been about him not doing enough to satisfy racists and conspiracy theorists. The greatest pushback he has faced has been on the Epstein issue, and the conservative media space has recurrent freakouts every time he says something positive about immigration, like maybe farmworkers should stay or we’d like more Chinese students.

Is there a silent majority, or even substantial minority, of the Republican base that would like the party to be more moderate on immigration and vaccines? It doesn’t seem like it. Looking back at the 2024 primaries, the only person who ever got close to Trump was DeSantis, and he ran on being Trumpier than Trump, attacking him from the right on issues like the Covid vaccine and abortion, while making a name for himself as the king of anti-woke wonkery. When at the end everyone else but Trump had dropped out, Nikki Haley was polling at around 15%, which seems to be about the size of the constituency within the Republican Party that wanted something more mainstream.

While writing this, I almost said that Haley was to the left of Trump, but that’s not true on say attitudes towards capitalism. Instead of right-left being the key division within the Republican Party, it makes more sense to talk of a populist-nonpopulist axis, which relates mainly to how much a figure is anti-immigration and expresses a belief in conspiracy theories. Given that framework, we can say that Trump’s domination of the 2024 primary and DeSantis having been the only significant challenger indicates that the vast majority of Republicans want something more towards the populist end of the spectrum.

Moreover, the trends indicate that we’ve gone even further down that path since, with RFK being brought into the conservative fold, the priority placed on deportations and tariffs, and government agencies now posting like edgy teenagers.

The energy of the party, polling data, and current trends all suggest that Vance can only be attacked by a candidate or movement that is further along on the populist end of the spectrum.

As I write this, prediction markets put Rubio and DeSantis as the second and third most likely individuals to be the 2028 nominee. While they may be able to win, I can’t imagine them effectively attacking Vance, as they are on the wrong side of him on the populist-nonpopulist axis.

All of this is what makes the reports that Bannon is likely to run so notable Bannon has always done a good job of skating where the puck is going, and shown keen insight into what makes the Republican base tick. In 2016, Breitbart while under him captured alt right energy by emphasizing black crime, immigration, and the Trump candidacy itself. By the time 2020 rolled around, he had noticed that racism was less powerful than the Trump cult, and became a major figure in the Stop the Steal movement. He’s setting himself up for 2028 by attacking Elon and big tech, pushing Epstein nonsense, criticizing Medicaid cuts, demanding a harder line on immigration, and, most intriguingly, speaking out against Israel. When asked about reports he was running, Bannon responded “Trump 2028,” which is exactly what you would expect from someone who is going to run on a Trumpier than Trump platform.

The rise of Trump highlighted the degree to which national Republican politics has become a reality show. As I’ve written, “Trump’s cultural predecessors are not previous Republican politicians like Bush or John Boehner. They’re talk radio hosts and TV personalities, except he’s better at their jobs than they ever were.” The reality show aspect of Republican politics is why Scott Walker and Jeb fizzled out early in 2016, and DeSantis likewise went down in 2024. Bannon is a highly charismatic figure who has one of the most popular political podcasts in the country. I don’t know how he’ll play with the median Republican voter – even having a popular talk show is no guarantee of appeal to normies – but he’s well positioned to do well in a primary where candidates will largely be judged on their ability to draw eyeballs.

One can imagine Bannon playing footsie with the Groypers. Fuentes will attack Vance for having an Indian wife, while Bannon will say he didn’t enact a complete immigration moratorium and is too friendly with transhumanists like Elon and Peter Thiel.

Another figure who might be able to attack Vance from the populist end of the spectrum, or at least capture its energy, is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Over on Polymarket, I’ve bought over 37,000 shares betting he will be the nominee at 0.9 cents. This seems too low to me, and probably has to do with people underestimating the degree to which populism has taken over the GOP (also, bet NO on aliens).

If Bannon is the Fuentes candidate, then Kennedy can be understood as playing to the Rogan wing of the party. Voters might see him as the less angry and more unifying alternative to people like Bannon.

To intellectual conservatives, Kennedy looks like a liberal, while to the GOP base, which by now has clearly shown it doesn’t care much about ideology, he’s the kind of brave truthteller standing outside of the system that they have come to know and love. When I wrote my update to “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV,” I noted that the major change was that as of 2025, Republicans were relying on Rogan to an even greater extent than they listened to Rush Limbaugh six years earlier. Bannon on Polymarket is about 3%, which I think is about right, but I would give RFK an about equal shot. Kennedy is a dumb person’s idea of an intellectual and faithful public servant, and the conservative movement has seen a consolidation of dumb people under its banner.

How Vance Might Be Derailed

It’s possible that Vance walks to the nomination. Imagine he announces he’s running in early 2027 and gets Trump’s endorsement. With that, he rockets to the top of the polls. Like Trump in 2024, maybe his position becomes so secure he refuses to even debate other candidates, not creating an opportunity for any punches to land. As he’s still part of the administration, any attack on Vance is portrayed by his supporters as an attack on the president himself.

Best case scenario for Vance then is that Republicans don’t even have a real primary in 2028. But it might be too much to expect that he can walk to the nomination like Trump did. If there’s a real primary, I can imagine Vance getting derailed by a sequence of events in which he is first torn apart by a pincer attack by Bannon and Groypers. As the frontrunner, he has a major target on his back, and must deal with both online racism and more standard boomer-coded attacks about him being a Silicon Valley elitist or somehow not loyal enough to Trump.

Sensing where the base is and enjoying the spectacle, Trump pulls back and doesn’t do much to defend Vance. If Bannon starts spreading conspiracy theories about Vance undermining Trump and being the reason he can’t run for a third term, does Trump attack Bannon or smile and imply that there may be something to what he’s saying? All of this is of course setting aside the scenario in which Trump himself does actually run, which I think is unlikely but not impossible.

Bannon perhaps doesn’t himself get the nomination under most versions of this scenario, but the fight turns ugly, and Vance loses his composure at some point. That creates an opening for Kennedy, Rubio, or DeSantis. The Bannon-Groyper alliance is much more likely to derail Vance than it is to actually shoot Bannon to the nomination. But I wouldn’t completely discount the latter possibility either. Both the 2008 and 2012 races were sort of like this, when fringe candidates kept rising and falling, before the party settled on McCain and then Romney. But Vance himself is the obvious focal point establishment candidate this time, and something weird has to happen for him not to end up the nominee.

I used to believe that there was a hope of the Republican Party going back toward a more normal state after Trump was gone. But if there’s ever going to be a nonpopulist GOP alternative, it’s going to need media figures, and intellectual and cultural energy. While The Dispatch has a large audience, and there are DC think tanks still keeping the flame of classical liberalism alive, everything that seems to have cultural relevance within the modern GOP is either part of the Trump cult, or breaks with the Trump cult for it not being populist enough. It feels like it has to be this way, as audiovisual content and social media completely dominate the conservative media ecosystem, and people who don’t read are more into racism and conspiracy theories than finding constructive solutions to problems. I don’t see how a more intellectual movement even establishes a beachhead to try to build something new after Trump is gone.

We have seen pushback from conservatives against Trump. But no one on the right who has a large voice cares that the federal government took a 10% stake in Intel. Rather, Trump is always too friendly to immigrants or hiding something about Epstein. Practically everything we have seen indicates that on the right today, there is a lot more demand for post-Trump figures like Bannon and RFK than Nikki Haley or a MAGA-lite version of Marco Rubio. Trump if anything is keeping the party grounded closer to what used to be Republican principles.

Most likely scenario is still that Vance wins the nomination. But we’re already seeing glimmers of what the post-Trump GOP will look like, and if he doesn’t it will likely be due to the forces he himself has helped unleash.