CNN data analyst Harry Enten went on air this week and did something we never expected from the network that spent a decade trying to destroy Donald Trump — he admitted the Bush-era Republican establishment is dead, buried, and not coming back. Enten declared, "the George W. Bush era of the Republican Party is simply put, it is dead."
Imagine being a RINO in 2026 and finding out your own obituary ran on CNN.
The numbers are absolutely savage. Before Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, George W. Bush enjoyed a net favorability of +58 points among Republican voters. Today? He's cratered to just +17 — a 40-point nosedive. Meanwhile, Donald Trump went from -45 among GOP voters pre-2015 to +61 today. That's a 100-plus point swing in Trump's favor. The realignment isn't a theory. It's arithmetic.
And the body count keeps piling up. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, first elected back in 2002, just got steamrolled by Ken Paxton in the Republican primary by a 28-point margin. Enten called it "the worst for a Republican senator since at least World War 2." Senator Bill Cassidy fared even worse in raw terms, pulling just 25% of the vote — the lowest share for an incumbent Republican senator anyone can remember.
These aren't close calls. These are political executions.
Enten then dropped the number that really tells the whole story: 80% of GOP voters want congressional Republicans to do more to work with Trump. Just 13% want them to "stand up" to him. As Enten put it, "When 80% plus of the party is with you... you know you own the party."
Here's the thing the establishment never understood. They thought they were the party and Trump was the interloper. They spent years waiting for the "fever to break," running candidates who checked every donor-class box and wondering why the base kept picking the guy who actually fights. Turns out the base was the party all along. The Bushes and Romneys and Cheneys were the guests, and their invitation got revoked.
"Donald Trump, it's his party across the political map," Enten said. Even Kate Bolduan seemed to grasp the finality of it, asking "How much has the party shifted from the Bush era... since Trump has come into the..." before trailing off, as if the answer was too obvious to finish the sentence.
As reported by LifeZette, this CNN segment is basically the establishment wing's death certificate — signed, notarized, and delivered by the last network on earth they'd want reading it. Enten wasn't spinning. He wasn't editorializing. He was just reading the scoreboard, and the scoreboard says the MAGA realignment won.
The RINOs didn't lose a battle. They lost the war. And the enemy's own scorekeepers just confirmed it.