The elec­tion of 2020 end­ed for Repub­li­can Par­ty lead­ers a lot like the elec­tion of 2016 began: As much as they may want to move on from Don­ald Trump, he won’t let them — and nei­ther will the voters.

After los­ing the White House to Joe Biden and the pop­u­lar vote for the sev­enth time since 1980, and fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of once-unthink­able defeat in Ari­zona and Geor­gia, Repub­li­cans were grap­pling with how to untan­gle the man from a move­ment that is like­ly to dic­tate par­ty pol­i­tics for years.

Even in defeat, Repub­li­cans saw clear indi­ca­tors of the endur­ing pow­er of Trump-style pop­ulism. By the time Biden gave his vic­to­ry speech Sat­ur­day evening, Trump had received 7.4 mil­lion more votes than he did in 2016 — 1 mil­lion more in the bat­tle­ground of Flori­da alone. Repub­li­cans cut into the Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty in the House with wins in sev­er­al swing dis­tricts from Iowa to New York, where they fol­lowed Trump’s slash-and-burn play­book of brand­ing his oppo­nents as far-left hysterics.

No one seems to be under the illu­sion that Trump will fade qui­et­ly. All week, as he launched an extra­or­di­nary, base­less attack on the integri­ty of the elec­tion, few in his par­ty chal­lenged claims that he was being cheat­ed of a vic­to­ry. Pri­vate­ly, some began dis­cussing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that he may not con­cede, which would put them in the awk­ward posi­tion of hav­ing to choose whether to defend him until Biden’s inau­gu­ra­tion in 2 1/2 months.

This dynam­ic presents a prob­lem for the Repub­li­cans who will run for office after Trump is no longer the leader of the par­ty — on paper, at least. In par­tic­u­lar, Repub­li­cans in their 30s and 40s see a road map to the big­ger and more diverse coali­tion that the par­ty has tried to build for two decades, if they can sal­vage the more pop­u­lar aspects of the president’s appeal to mid­dle-class Amer­i­cans while jet­ti­son­ing the racial griev­ances he fanned.

From Sen­ate offices, think tanks and off-the-record salons, the con­ver­sa­tions about what’s next have grown in urgency now that the final months of the Trump pres­i­den­cy are at hand.

“He is sort of the king with no heirs,” said Oren Cass, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Amer­i­can Com­pass, a group that hosts month­ly online hap­py hours of Capi­tol Hill staff and pol­i­cy experts to debate the suc­cess­es and fail­ures of the Trump agen­da. Cass said Trump’s defeat sets up a clash between more con­ven­tion­al Repub­li­cans who, on one hand, took the atti­tude of “This too shall pass, and we can go back to doing to what we were doing before,” and those who think the pres­i­dent “called atten­tion to a cer­tain set of issues and vot­ers that cer­tain­ly the cen­ter-right wasn’t pay­ing enough atten­tion to.”

Sen. Mar­co Rubio of Flori­da, who said he has tried to reimag­ine Trump­ism with “a mute but­ton” for the pres­i­dent, expressed a view that had tak­en hold among con­ser­v­a­tives — one that would seem to rule out any reflec­tive, autop­sy-style self-assess­ment of how they lost.

The fact that Trump’s defeat was not the blowout crit­ics had hoped, Rubio said, means that the antic­i­pat­ed repu­di­a­tion of Trumpian pol­i­tics was wrong. “Trump was going to get wiped out. The GOP was going to get wiped out,” he said, run­ning through often-repeat­ed pre­dic­tions. “Mean­while, Repub­li­cans are going to prob­a­bly hold the Sen­ate and make up to a 10-seat gain in the House.”

While Rubio said he can­not imag­ine a sce­nario in which Trump was not in the pic­ture — “He’s not going to just van­ish into a build­ing” — the president’s strong sup­port among Lati­no vot­ers in Flori­da (47%) and Texas (40%) showed how the par­ty could expand a “mul­ti­eth­nic, work­ing-class coali­tion” that did not fit neat­ly inside the left-right paradigm.

Nav­i­gat­ing the unavoid­able, dis­rup­tive force that is Trump com­pli­cates an already dif­fi­cult job for con­ser­v­a­tives like Rubio, 49. First, Repub­li­cans need to per­suade more vot­ers of col­or that they are wel­com­ing, despite embrac­ing Trump and his divi­sive rhetoric.

They also need to demon­strate that Repub­li­cans can be the par­ty for Amer­i­cans who are strug­gling eco­nom­i­cal­ly — many of whom were won over by Trump’s mes­sage — not just the par­ty that cuts tax­es for cor­po­ra­tions and dis­man­tles gov­ern­ment regulations.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)A “pro-work­er” Repub­li­can Par­ty, as described by the likes of Sen. Josh Haw­ley, 40, of Mis­souri, would require a sea change in the way its mem­bers tend to balk at spend­ing when there is a Demo­c­ra­t­ic president.

Haw­ley, like Rubio, has been vocal about the need to pass a sec­ond coro­n­avirus relief pack­age, break­ing with Repub­li­cans who have expressed con­cerns about grow­ing deficits. Some con­ser­v­a­tives have pro­posed less con­ven­tion­al ways of appeal­ing to vot­ers on the party’s tra­di­tion­al issues like fam­i­ly val­ues, paid fam­i­ly leave and child tax credits.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)Yuval Levin, a schol­ar with the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute who has been con­ven­ing dis­cus­sions with lead­ing con­ser­v­a­tives about the post-Trump land­scape, said it would be unwise for Repub­li­cans not to embrace the pro-mid­dle-class parts of the Trump agen­da that he cam­paigned on in 2016 but then large­ly aban­doned. “It’s not real­ly even Trump’s mes­sage,” Levin said. “He’s been pres­i­dent for four years, and his only leg­isla­tive accom­plish­ment is a per­fect­ly tra­di­tion­al tax cut bill.”

If Trump did any­thing, Levin said, it was to shat­ter the notion that vot­ers want Repub­li­cans to talk about small­er gov­ern­ment. “A lot of peo­ple have been instinc­tive­ly, reflex­ive­ly say­ing, ‘We can’t be spend­ing this kind of mon­ey right now.’ And I’m think­ing, what vot­ers want that? Who’s say­ing don’t give us mon­ey?” he said.

For starters, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. He, Nik­ki Haley and oth­er Repub­li­cans who want a star­ring role in the party’s post-Trump reboot have revived Tea Par­ty-like cri­tiques of gov­ern­ment stim­u­lus. Ear­li­er this year, Haley resigned from the board of Boe­ing after the com­pa­ny asked for fed­er­al aid to help weath­er the pan­dem­ic-induced reces­sion. She cit­ed her “strong con­vic­tions that this is not the role of government.”

Oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives say that Repub­li­cans need to accept that Trump realigned the party’s coali­tion away from wealthy, well-edu­cat­ed peo­ple in the sub­urbs and that they should not obsess over win­ning those vot­ers back.

“We are, by and large, no longer the par­ty of white-col­lege grad­u­ates,” said Rachel Bovard, senior direc­tor of pol­i­cy at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute. “That was the Rea­gan coali­tion, and the Rea­gan coali­tion doesn’t exist anymore.”

Flori­da pro­vid­ed a mod­el for what the future could look like. Trump eas­i­ly won there, two Demo­c­ra­t­ic mem­bers of Con­gress lost their seats, and vot­ers approved a mea­sure to increase the min­i­mum wage to $15 an hour by 2026 — with 61% sup­port. In a post­elec­tion memo, the Trump cam­paign not­ed how its improve­ment over 2016 came not from sub­ur­ban or rur­al coun­ties but “from larg­er, more urban counties.”

Gov. Lar­ry Hogan of Mary­land, a Repub­li­can elect­ed twice in a heav­i­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic state, is cred­it­ed with show­ing how his par­ty can appeal in Black com­mu­ni­ties and with oth­er tra­di­tion­al­ly left-lean­ing con­stituents by focus­ing on a mid­dle-class mes­sage. He has one of the high­est approval rat­ings of any gov­er­nor in the coun­try, with equal sup­port from white and Black voters.

Unlike oth­er Repub­li­cans, Hogan has been pub­lic in his crit­i­cism of the pres­i­dent and said he cast a write-in vote for Ronald Rea­gan. Reflect­ing on 2020, he argued that when Repub­li­cans look at how they lost, the answer won’t be vot­er fraud but rather a pres­i­dent who insist­ed on mak­ing his reelec­tion about resent­ment and blame instead of how he would make the U.S. econ­o­my work for every­one. “One, he didn’t focus on the things that he ran on the first time. And he didn’t accom­plish a lot for those folks,” Hogan said. “Two, the tone of anger and divi­sion turned off vot­ers who might have been recep­tive to that message.”

Still, Hogan said, the elec­tion was nei­ther a total repu­di­a­tion of Trump or an embrace of Democ­rats. “It wasn’t a rejec­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty,” he said. “It was not an accep­tance of the far-left.”

Repub­li­cans dis­agree on how deeply Trump has changed the par­ty. In their most hope­ful assess­ment, they argued that his influ­ence was most notice­able in mat­ters of style and tone, and that was not per­ma­nent. Dwin­dling are the days, some said, of Repub­li­can can­di­dates bring­ing card­board cutouts of Trump to cam­paign events, curs­ing in their ads and com­pet­ing for the hon­or to claim they first embod­ied his bel­liger­ent style as some­one who was “Trump before Trump.”

“We’ve got to fig­ure out again how to be hap­py war­riors like Rea­gan,” said Scott Walk­er, the for­mer gov­er­nor of Wis­con­sin who lost his seat in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic rebound of 2018. He is now chief exec­u­tive of Young America’s Foun­da­tion, where he is focused on col­lege stu­dents, a group that has recoiled from the Repub­li­can Par­ty under Trump.

Repub­li­cans, he said, need to do a bet­ter job of set­tling on a mes­sage that is more inclu­sive and begins “with the premise that even those you dis­agree can be inher­ent­ly good.”