Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and Democrats are feeling buoyant. In August, they notched wins with legislation on veterans health, bipartisan passage of a bill to boost semiconductor chip manufacturing and a sweeping bill to address climate change and lower prescription drug costs. Biden also oversaw the killing of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and this week fulfilled a campaign promise to forgive student debt.

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The Senate is currently deadlocked at 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris wielding the deciding vote.

Democrats are now favoured to expand their majority in the upper chamber, according to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. But Republicans are still favoured to win the House, given how those races are decided in carefully gerrymandered districts in favour of the party that controls the state’s legislature.

The danger for the GOP was made publicly clear when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said last week that “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome” of the Senate. It was an implicit acknowledgment that in competitive states a Trump-endorsed candidate faces a strong Democrat and could lose.

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It also sparked the latest public war of words between the one-time allies, whose seminal achievement was the reshaping of the Supreme Court. Trump took obvious umbrage with McConnell’s remarks, issuing a statement that said “a new Republican Leader in the Senate should be picked immediately!”

“If you can’t win as a Republican in this cycle then you have some real issues,” said Terry Sullivan, a strategist who ran Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.

But there is a palpable and vocal base still enthralled with the 76-year-old Trump and want him back. Yale and Harvard Law-educated DeSantis, 43, offers a more methodical take on the Make America Great Again mantra. Cheney, 56, represents a party that might not exist anymore and has been refashioned in Trump’s image.

Occupying space between DeSantis and Cheney are Republicans trying to win public attention on other issues. That includes Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton presenting themselves as the anti-China hawks; Texas Senator Ted Cruz and his governor, Greg Abbott, focusing on immigration and Florida Senator Rick Scott lining up culture war issues to entice conservative voters.

Republicans are increasingly worried that they squandered a winning hand in the form of Biden’s poor approval rating and anger over decades-high inflation and crime. The tide there is already turning too. Biden’s popularity is rebounding, gasoline prices are receding, inflation is showing signs of cooling and unemployment remains low.

To Republican political consultants like Sullivan, the very fabric of the GOP has changed. By its wholesale adoption of a more populist identity, they sacrificed highly educated, upper-middle-class suburbanites who became the independent voters.

That slice of the population is now up for grabs for both parties, but it’s more challenging for Republicans in places like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania to square the circle.

“It’s a real patch-work,” Sullivan said.

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Republican strategist John Thomas said that the GOP’s identity was now fully cemented in Trump’s image with the August FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort. Up to that point Thomas had been working on a pro-Desantis political action committee, with donor commitments in the “mid-seven-figures,” he said.

“That was a pivotal, hinge moment in the Republican party,” Thomas said. “To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man.”

“Right now, no Republican has beaten Trump. Ron has to take it from Trump and right now I just don’t see it.”

Bloomberg