Last night wasn’t just a blue wave or a blue tsunami, it was a nationwide collapse of the Republican Party at the state and federal level — an historic defeat, far worse than 2006, that will have repercussions for the GOP for decades to come.
And it is overwhelmingly President Donald Trump’s fault.
Anyone watching election coverage Tuesday night, or following it on X, heard all kinds of coping from conservative and neocon commentators, blaming poor candidates or botched campaigns or inadequate GOTV efforts. But the overarching reality is that none of these things were determinative. The midterms were a referendum on the Trump administration, and above all on Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran.
That war, which as of this writing we have lost — with no real prospect of winning it anytime soon — had concrete, everyday effects on Americans’ lives. After February 28 of this year, they began paying more not just for gas but also for groceries and nearly everything else, anything that must be transported by a diesel-fueled truck. As National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty noted on X last night, “Running on the slogan of America First and then not even bothering to sell a war of choice to the American people that ended up changing almost every household budget in the country.”
This was a war that no Trump voters were asking for in 2024. In fact they were promised the opposite: no new Mideast wars. That, and mass deportations were the two things voters wanted from a second Trump term. He betrayed them on both counts, launching the Iran war and doing too little on mass deportations. And the result is that voters, clearly perceiving the betrayal, have rejected Republicans everywhere.
The war and the everyday costs it has imposed on the American people have driven this collapse, but it’s not the only factor. There were other self-inflicted failures by the Trump White House: the chaotic tariffs, the shameless corruption of Trump officials, the general megalomania of the president and his often-expressed contempt for ordinary people. Even his bizarre and defensive handling of the Epstein files was an indication that he was not focused on the necessary things.
These were all of course lesser causes of the defeat, and ones that might have been overcome or mitigated if it weren’t for the Iran war. But the war and its costs colored all these things, made them more visible and glaring. People noticed when they might have otherwise overlooked them.
And it’s a real shame, because Trump came into office in January 2025 on a glide path to an historically successful second term, then proceeded to waste two years in foreign adventures and desultory domestic policymaking. He accomplished little, yet repeatedly struck a defiant pose when anyone questioned him. That’s exactly what he did on Tuesday night, blaming the candidates and the voters instead of taking responsibility for his own abject failures.
For those who, like Trump, would try to conjure up some other explanation for Tuesday’s historic defeat — anything other than the war in Iran — there is precious little evidence to go on. Consider the refrain about “candidate quality.” In Texas, it’s no use arguing that Ken Paxton was a weak candidate to square off against James Talarico. Incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, a three-term Texas governor with a massive war chest, also lost. Before last night, Democrats hadn’t won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. They now have a U.S. Senate seat, the governor’s mansion, and perhaps the office of lieutenant governor and attorney general (both statewide elected offices in Texas).
In South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham — recklessly appointed to succeed her brother Lindsay Graham after his death earlier this year — lost to Annie Andrews, a Democrat. In the Iowa Senate race, Democrat Josh Turek defeated Republican Ashley Hinson. In Maine, five-term Republican Senator Susan Collins lost to Democrat Troy Jackson. In the Ohio governor’s race, Democrat Amy Acton defeated Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. All over the country, in key races, Democrats pulled off upset victories. Deeply weird and radical Democratic candidates like Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan ousted or defeated Republicans. As results come in this week in Alaska and elsewhere, the picture will likely get worse for the GOP.
It is not hyperbole or over-simplistic to lay this historic catastrophe at Trump’s feet. He chose to go to war in Iran — the one thing he didn’t have to do, the one thing that would be deeply unpopular with both his base and the Democratic base, demoralizing the one and energizing the latter. No one, as far as we know, forced him into that decision. He went to war willingly, with no plan and no theory of victory, and then refused to do what was necessary to win — refused even to try to sell the American people on the war or even make a serious case for it, at any point in the conflict.
It’s not too much to say that for Trump to do this, at this point, having conquered the GOP of George W. Bush largely by repudiating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, means he has destroyed the party he took over and remade. Or at least he has destroyed it for now.
Whether Trump is capable of seeing what he’s done, and salvaging what remains of his once right-populist party over the next two years, remains to be seen. He appeared to be aware that the Iran war was a problem in his remarks on Fox News Tuesday night. But he also wanted to blame the candidates and credit Democrats. “I don’t think it was the war. I think it was the gas prices,” he said, apparently not recognizing the relationship between those two things. Asked whether he’ll make any cabinet changes, he said, “I don’t think so. It had nothing to do with my cabinet … It’s just a point in time. There was a mood in the air, I guess.”
Yes, there was a mood in the air. The mood was anger at Trump’s historic betrayal. He ran and won in 2016 and 2024 on a widely popular America First agenda that consisted of no new foreign wars, nation-building at home, no more illegal immigration, pro-tradition and pro-family policies. That agenda is popular with a clear majority of American voters. It’s a winning agenda. It will be again someday. But right now it lies in ruins, destroyed by the one person voters had entrusted to carry it out.
