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The big result to watch for now is what lesson Trump and the GOP will take from Tuesday night. Recovery depends on taking the right ones.
As was mostly expected, the Republican Party had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad night on Tuesday. Democrats took control of the U.S. House and Senate, winning seats in the latter from states like Iowa, South Carolina, and Kansas that President Donald Trump won by double digits two years prior.Predicting a bad night for the GOP — even if not quite that bad of a night — narrative-setters were already rushing to assign blame for the results before Election Day votes were cast. On and after Tuesday night, the blame game continued. Republicans in Congress and campaign consultants are eager to deflect blame from themselves for their personal losses, for obvious reasons. Trump haters in the media and in both major political parties are equally eager to use Tuesday night’s results to attack their enemy in chief.
The big result to watch for now is what lesson Trump and the Republican Party will take from Tuesday night’s trouncing. Plenty of people are urging them to take exactly the wrong lessons — and resulting course corrections — from their midterm setback. Whether they can recover depends on them taking the right ones to heart instead.
Good Explanation: Historical Trends
Historical trends alone aren’t enough to explain the wipeout that extended to states like Texas, Iowa, Kansas, and perhaps even Mississippi. But they do provide helpful context and a baseline from which to evaluate Tuesday’s results.
It’s conventional wisdom that the president’s party loses seats in a midterm election. In every midterm election since 1938 except two, the president’s party has lost seats in the U.S. House (the two exceptions are the 1998 and 2002 midterms, under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush). Not always, but more often than not, the ruling party also loses seats in the Senate.
The pattern applies further when one party enters the midterms with a trifecta — control of the White House as well as both houses of Congress — as Republicans had entering Tuesday’s elections. When Republicans had a trifecta in 2018 under Trump, they lost the House. When they had a trifecta in 2006 under Bush, they lost House and Senate. Democrats entered the 2022 midterms with a trifecta under Joe Biden and lost the House, as they did in 2010 under Barack Obama.
Bad Explanation: Deportations
The media and other Democrats want very badly to convince the White House that delivering on Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to enforce immigration laws is now costing his party.
“Backlash to Immigration Crackdown Creates a Challenge for Republicans,” The New York Times decreed on Monday, setting up the narrative before the polls even opened on Election Day. By deporting aliens who are illegally present in the United States, many of whom have committed violent crimes, Trump is turning voters away, the argument goes. (To testify that “Republicans are really out of step” on immigration, the Times turned to a Democrat member of the Senate.)
But that narrative is hard to square with the fact that voters gave Trump a clear mandate in 2024 in favor of deportations. The Biden border crisis, by which Democrats welcomed millions of illegal aliens to break immigration laws and flood into American cities, was consistently ranked one of voters’ top concerns in polls leading up to Trump’s victory. In June 2024, a CBS poll found more than 6 in 10 registered voters supported the idea of deporting all aliens “living in the U.S. illegally.”
In polling just days before Tuesday, NBC News found voters favored Republicans on the issue of immigration by double digits. In exit polling, the outlet found that voters still leaned toward Republicans over Democrats on the question of which party was “better able to handle immigration,” although the number was closer (44 percent to 41 percent). Among voters who said immigration enforcement policies were a “crucial or major” factor in their vote, the majority went Republican.
For every swing voter the corporate press can dig up who claims to be turned off by Trump’s deportations, there is almost certainly a young Republican voter who is demoralized that deportations aren’t happening faster. To back down on fulfilling the deportation mandate voters gave Trump in 2024 would be exactly the wrong lesson to take from the midterms, especially because so many of Americans’ affordability concerns are negatively affected by mass immigration — and because every illegal alien Trump doesn’t deport is a future Democrat voter waiting to be granted amnesty. If you want to know how immigration policy does shape elections, look at the demographic changes in Texas in recent years before its blue flip on Tuesday.
Better Explanation: Senate GOP Leadership Failures
Republicans who ran the party before Trump became its leader have long been eager for an opportunity to wrest back control. They ran to Politico in the days leading up to Tuesday to proactively — and anonymously — attack Trump for their own losses.
Unfortunately for the GOP, fighting Trump is about all that Senate leadership has done over the past two years. It’s no surprise voters punished them Tuesday for doing more to undermine their own party than they did to govern with their two-year trifecta.
The GOP held majorities in both the House and Senate for the first two years of this Trump term, but accomplished little. Trump and other election integrity advocates urged Senate leadership to pass the popular SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, and explained how it could even be passed by the slim GOP majority without ditching the filibuster. So opposed were longstanding Republicans senators to the SAVE Act that when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton offered to drop his challenge to Sen. John Cornyn in exchange for its passage, he was met with a shrug. --->READ MORE HERE
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