Trump lost the race. But Republicans know it's still his party.

“He is sort of the king with no heirs,” said Oren Cass, the 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. Mr. Cass said Mr. Trump’s defeat set up a clash between more conventional Republicans who, on the one hand, took the attitude that “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.”…

While Mr. Rubio said he could not imagine a scenario in which Mr. 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 percent) and Texas (40 percent) showed how the party could expand a “multiethnic, working-class coalition” that did not fit neatly inside the left-right paradigm.

“I think that a lot of people just don’t realize that when it comes to identity,” Mr. Rubio said, “the identity tied to your employment, your culture, your standard of living, your values, is much more powerful than the pronunciation of your last name.”