When does a conservative lawmaker become moderate? After they disagree with Trump

What do you call a Republican lawmaker who’s too conservative for folks on the left and not conservative enough for some on the right?

Some people might say “a moderate.” But these days, it’s just as likely to be “retired.”

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis announced he would not seek reelection after voting against the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the sweeping legislation poised to slash social programs such as Medicaid to pay for tax cuts and increased immigration enforcement.

Tillis said the Medicaid provisions in the bill would force states such as North Carolina to spend billions of dollars to fill the gap in federal funding to provide health care to millions of Americans.

His opposition drew the ire of others in his party who called him a RINO, a “Republican In Name Only,” as President Trump threatened to back a primary challenger to Tillis in the 2026 midterms.

“I agree I’m a RINO, I’ve just got a different take on it,” Tillis said in a CNN interview last week. “I’m a ‘Republican In Need Of Outcomes.’ And the thing that most of these so-called true conservatives have in common, whether they’re elected or party leaders — they’ve never legislated, they haven’t scratched the surface of what I’ve been responsible for.”

Tillis blasted what he called an “amateurish view of how this world works,” while ticking through a laundry list of conservative legislative victories he helped achieve over his career on gun rights, abortion restrictions and spending cuts, among other issues.

Changing the definition of conservatism

Before coming to Congress, Tillis helped lead the GOP takeover and dominance of the North Carolina state legislature in the 2010s and was viewed as one of the state’s most successful conservative lawmakers in recent years.

But in today’s Republican Party, Tillis’ ideology may be viewed as moderate instead of conservative.

“If we’re defining conservatism as following Donald Trump’s whims and wills, then I agree,” Western Carolina University political scientist Chris Cooper said. “If we are defining conservatism as somebody who wants free markets, who wants school choice, who wants traditional issues that we used to think of as conservative prior to the Trump era, he is as rock-ribbed conservative as they get.”

The changing definition of conservatism is backed up by data of how Republican lawmakers cast their votes in Congress.

A political science method known as DW-NOMINATE attempts to quantify how liberal or conservative a lawmaker’s ideology is, based on how they vote, with a primary dimension using a scale of -1 for most liberal and 1 for most conservative.

Tillis’ ideology score is a solidly conservative 0.389, close to the 0.403 the political scientists who created the method estimate Trump’s score to be. But in the decade since he joined the Senate, the GOP caucus has marched steadily to the right, nearly three times as much as the Democrats moved left.

Cooper says that political polarization is not a new concept, but Trump has changed the meaning of polarization itself for the Republican Party, making loyalty to Trump the litmus test for “conservative” labeling.

“It’s almost as if party has overtaken ideology to be the key factor for how we define moderation or for how we define people’s behavior once they’re in office,” he said.

The increasing demand of conservatism to be in total alignment with Trumpism is why occasional deviation from party loyalty can end up a liability, even in swing state elections, Cooper said.

“You’d like to believe this fiction that purple states are states where if you have a little bit of moderation, you’re rewarded,” he said. “It’s quite the opposite. You’re actually penalized in some ways even more.”

Even in safer Republican seats, there are primary challengers looking to unseat Sen. John Cornyn in Texas and Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana who say these objectively conservative senators aren’t conservative enough.