The president’s party is always expected to do poorly in midterm elections, just not this poorly. The results arriving tonight are a disaster for Donald Trump—the kind of complete repudiation that the president’s opponents have spent a decade pining for, but never quite achieving. On current trends, Democrats are not just poised to claim a large majority in the House of Representatives. They are also on track to capture the Senate by winning seats they hoped for, as in Texas, and others that they had no business hoping for, as in South Carolina.
The rebuke looks too ubiquitous to be confined to the gripes of any particular subset of voters. In Miami-Dade County, in Florida, for example, the impressive Latino support that Trump built up in his 2024 win appears to have totally evaporated. Kansas is on the verge of electing a Democratic senator—for the first time in a century. Democrats in Ohio seem likely to flip both the governor’s mansion and a U.S. Senate seat. Earlier today, a (Never Trump) Republican operative in the Midwest texted me, saying, “Our party badly needs an acid lava barbed-wire enema and I’m hoping we get it tonight.” Voters heard this wish.
How did the GOP’s situation get so bad? A moralizing account might say that Trump is getting just deserts for his precedent-breaking behavior in office—the great personal enrichment, the weaponization of the justice system against his enemies, the dismantling of agencies without congressional consent. But this assumes too much about the propriety of American voters—who, after all, returned the president to office after he had tried to overturn his election loss in 2020.
The more obvious explanation for Republicans’ poor performance is economic. Having come to office by exploiting discontent with inflation under Joe Biden, Trump seemed to think that the same rules would not apply to him while in office. The president has launched trade wars against the rest of the world, increasing the costs of imported goods, in addition to passing a massive tax cut and encouraging the AI-spending boom, which have pushed up interest rates. Most disastrously, he launched a war of choice against Iran that has raised the cost of gas and diesel.
[Read: The beginning of the end for Trump]
Only 38 percent of Americans now say that they approve of the president’s job performance. Trump and his allies attempted to juice their odds of holding the House by having Republican-led states aggressively gerrymander their districts. This strategy did not work.
Unlike the president, Democrats learned the lessons of the last election: both that incumbents were vulnerable to attacks over the cost of living and that they had veered too far to the left on immigration and social-justice issues such as trans rights. The party has many sects—urban socialists, rural populists, “abundance”-pilled technocrats—that converged on a common message: the issue of “affordability,” on which Republicans were weak.
All of these factions can be expected to jockey for credit in the party’s election victory, but Democrats’ all-terrain overperformance suggests that it was Republican actions in leadership that lost the election. The president’s predilection for underwhelming candidates, including the scandal-ridden Ken Paxton as Senate nominee in Texas and the underqualified Darline Graham in South Carolina, was a factor. But most of the problem seems to have been the president’s own policy making—a drag so serious that it imperiled experienced and established Republicans such as Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas.
The imminent demise of Trumpism has been predicted many times in the past decade. Even now, it cannot be guaranteed. The repudiation of Trumpism at the ballot box does not spell its demise even in the Republican Party. Such is the president’s hold among his loyal base. Democrats will be able to stymie the White House with budget battles and constant investigations, and will likely be in a position to block any Supreme Court nominees.
Tonight’s outcome does not so much foretell a powerless president as it does an angry and perhaps even more disinhibited one. All of the president’s signature policy decisions of this term—the Iran war, the trade wars, special military operations in Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea—were launched without any congressional input whatsoever. Although Congress will more jealously try to guard its power under Democratic control, the imperial presidency is well entrenched. Trump’s power will eventually end—but only after one more election.
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