A widespread loss for the Republican party
This set of midterms has produced some of the worst results in modern history for the GOP (Republican Party). Losses stretched into some of the reddest states, including Texas, where Democrats won a Senate seat for the first time since 1988. There was no single cause of the widespread election loss, but one thing is for certain, Trump played a large part in those losses.
The scale of the losses was far from a pretty picture for the party. If you were to paint the results on a wall, then the DIY store would probably run out of blue paint and give you a huge discount on the red paint just to get rid of it.
The Democrats managed to flip seven Senate seats, nearly 30 House districts, five governorships and up to 12 state legislative chambers.
Then amidst all the upset and confusion of the Republican Party, Trump’s instinct wasn’t to reflect, but rather to deflect.
Perhaps the most controversial president ever?
Trump has always been an incredibly controversial president, even in his first term. Mix that with divisive policies such as the tariffs, approach to Ukraine and the Iran war and there’s a whole load of reasons to either love, or hate, President Trump.
Though Congress is a different body to the presidency, the Republicans were all tarnished under Trump’s MAGA brush and they didn’t help themselves either. Several candidates boasted proudly that they were ‘endorsed by Trump’, but in this election, that was a risky strategy and has widely proven to have been the wrong one.
Trump’s approach to politics and political communications did no favours either. The comms from the White House for his entire second term have often been perceived as insensitive and of bad taste. Take for example the Macarena over footage of the Iran war, or Sabrina Carpenter playing over videos of deportations, which led the pop star to call the video evil and disgusting, or even the AI-generated video of him fighting a tiger more recently just after a man was mauled to death by a tiger at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. And we know from previous ‘behind the scenes’ of the Trump operation that these have probably come directly from the top; the tiger video certainly did, as Trump posted it himself on Truth Social.
How Trump reacted on Tuesday revealed one of the many reasons why the Republicans lost
As the Republicans’ devastation swept across the US, Trump reacted badly: refusing blame, lashing out at allies and boasting about his supposed successes. These were the exact qualities that many voters were rejecting at the ballot box. The reaction was not a footnote to the defeat, but was rather a live demonstration of the cause.
Trump’s ego was on full display, he told his followers on Truth Social ‘I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’ and told Fox News ‘I don’t view it as a hit on me’. But, he spent the last month flying from state to state on Air Force One encouraging voters in red states to ‘pretend I’m on the ballot’.
And as if the loss hadn’t been enough for Republican candidates and campaigners to swallow, on media rounds, they had to try and defend Trump’s incredibly controversial record as he came out and claimed that he has had ‘the greatest two years in the history of the presidency’, a wild claim for someone whose party lost the midterms on a vast scale.
Playing the blame game
Despite some of Trump’s own picks losing key elections, even in traditionally red states, Trump threw people he had previously thrown his support behind completely under the bus. He said ‘They [the electorate] didn’t like the candidates in most cases’.
As if the blame game couldn’t get any worse, he then blamed Fox News for supposedly giving Democrats too much coverage, despite the broadcaster being widely accepted to be a Republican-leaning outlet.
Despite his blame game, even his own Vice President broke ranks with a different (and far more realistic) explanation, blaming the sweeping losses largely on the war with Iran, something that Trump and Vance have quietly disagreed on for quite some time, but have now disagreed on publicly. In March, Trump himself admitted Vance was ‘philosophically a little bit different’ on the war.
And the data also leads to Trump…
Blaming Trump for the election losses isn’t some far-fetched conspiracy theory either. In fact, 44% of House voters said they were expressing opposition to Trump, whilst only 16% said they were expressing support for him. This is compared to the 38% and 26% who opposed and supported Trump in the 2018 midterms respectively.
According to a poll conducted by the Associated Press, after more than a decade with Trump at the centre of US politics, most voters appear exhausted and exasperated by him.
North Carolina also has proven to be a useful case study, as 6 in 10 voters said that Whatley was ‘too supportive’ of Trump. Voters seemingly punished loyalty to Trump rather than rewarding it.
Only 38% of voters approved of Trump’s performance, down from 45% in 2018, and about two-thirds said he does not have the right priorities. The overwhelming majority of those backed Democratic House candidates. Trump’s ego has proven to be his biggest hurdle: a leader who cannot hear criticism can’t act on the criticism to correct course.
We’ve seen this before
During the 2018 midterms, Trump offered bipartisanship, but those offers didn’t materialise. This time, the conciliatory words sat alongside a red MAGA-style ‘VETO’ hat which was posted to social media. It is hard to imagine swing voters reading that as a man ready to change.
But could the midterms results have been driven by other factors and not Trump?
Of course they could. But it seems less likely. 89% of voters said the cost of living was a major or crucial factor in how they voted, this could suggest the loss was about the economy rather than Trump, but the reality is that Trump’s temperament shaped how he has handled prices, especially when it comes to tariffs and the impacts of those on the cost of living and the wider economy.
Then there’s the Iran war, which 74% of voters reported to be a crucial or major factor in their vote. This is probably one of Trump’s biggest mistakes. The data revealed that 63% of those who said it was a crucial or major factor voted Democrat. The Iran war has essentially betrayed the ‘America First’ approach that so many voters bought into when they voted for Trump in 2024, it showed Trump to be far more interventionist than many thought and made America the ‘world policeman’ again, something that can hardly be considered an ‘America First’ approach.
Though midterms almost always punish the incumbent president’s party, the scale here was an outlier compared with previous elections where this has occurred. For example, in the 2022 midterms under a Democratic president, Biden, the Democrats only lost 9 House seats to the Republicans and actually gained a seat in the Senate.
Unlike after the 2020 presidential election, however, Trump did accept the losses. He told the New York Times that he was ‘absolutely willing’ to accept the results and congratulated the Democrats.
What it means for the rest of Trump’s presidency
With a hostile Congress and a president who must now negotiate rather than command, the question is whether Trump can actually navigate this difficult situation. Trump’s views don’t align with those of the Democrats in Congress. It’ll now become hard for the US to be effectively governed, as the President pulls one way and Congress pulls another. The Constitution? Well I suspect it will become increasingly relevant with vetoes, power struggles, investigations and more.
