Republicans emerged from their victory in 2024 with a rare chance to advance the cause of conservative reform and consolidate a new majority coalition. Voters rendered a crushing verdict Tuesday on their missed opportunity by sweeping them from power in the House and Senate.
Republicans may console themselves that midterm defeats in second presidential terms are common. But this was more than a normal defeat. The loss of Senate seats and governorships in states that had become GOP redoubts will have ramifications for years to come. So will the cascading losses down ballot in state legislatures.
True to form, President Trump is already blaming everyone else, but he is the main architect of this rout. He'll say the Senate didn't break the filibuster or pass his Save America Act. But neither would have saved the GOP this year, even if there had been enough votes to do either. He'll blame Karl Rove and Texas Sen. John Cornyn for the shocking defeats in the Lone Star State, but failed Senate candidate Ken Paxton was his manand his choice helped bring down Gov. Greg Abbott too.
Mr. Trump is directly responsible for at least three Senate defeats: Mr. Paxton when he could have endorsed Mr. Cornyn instead; North Carolina, where he drove Sen. Thom Tillis from running for re-election; and Darline Graham, whom he pressed to run to replace her late brother, Lindsey Graham, despite her lack of political experience or policy knowledge.
Throw in Georgia, where his war on other Republicans divided the party and kept Gov. Brian Kemp from running for Senate. Mr. Trump has now helped Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff win twice, first with his special-election fiasco in 2021.
More broadly, the President's erratic and self-indulgent second-term governance has alienated much of the coalition he assembled in 2024. He won a second term on the promise to repeat the economic success of his first. But this time he insisted on imposing universal tariffs, often willy-nilly, that have raised prices for many goods and been especially damaging in Iowa, Kansas and the Farm Belt. His senseless trade war with Canada hurt Republicans in Michigan, Maine, even Texas.
. In the first term he stuck mostly to the traditional GOP policy mix of tax cuts and deregulation, with a smattering of tariffs. It worked. In the second he went all-in on tariffs in April 2025, and even after his tariff defeat at the Supreme Court he continued to impose them in different ways. The public didn't approve from the start, and among Hispanics the disapproval for tariffs in October was 81%.
As former Sen. Phil Gramm warned on these pages, Republicans have suffered many similar defeats over the decades when they have resorted to tariffs. Oof, they did it again.
The Iran war added to the cost problem on fuel prices in particular. But the bigger trouble with the war is that Mr. Trump has never explained his strategy or been consistent in his war aims. He changed, sometimes by the day, on whether peace or more war was at hand. Voters have stopped supporting the war because they aren't sure Mr. Trump knows how to win it.
Voters also rebelled against Mr. Trump's seeming preoccupation with his pet personal causesthe ballroom, the archand how he and his family have grown richer during the second term. No less than 88% of voters mentioned "corruption" as their top concern in an October Fox News poll, a higher percentage than the 85% who said inflation.
Democrats linked costs and corruption in their ads to damaging effect. Even if the link isn't fair or true, it played to the frustration of voters that the President's family is doing well while they are not. The charge of corruption is likely to haunt Mr. Trump across the next two years, as Democrats in Congress investigate the deals and details.
Most important for the GOP Congress, the man in the White House failed to provide the leadership and salesmanship to help the party's narrow majorities do more than the one big tax bill. He was preoccupied with exacting revenge on his political opponents, attempting to vindicate his claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and promoting dubious worries about voter fraud this year. But the voters said in resounding fashion that the Presidency isn't about him.
Republicans tried countless times to refocus his attention, but he always veered into political retribution, or talking about the Reflecting Pool, or something. His only notable proposal for the next two years was a political bribe$5,000 to every American if Republicans kept the House and Senate. Republicans in turn had nothing of note to say that they wanted to accomplish in the next two years.
The Republican wreckage left by this defeat doesn't foretell what will happen in 2028. But it does call for soul-searching. Tariffs and mass deportation are no substitute for rising real incomes. Playing to the bro MAGA base is no substitute for persuading Hispanics, independents and suburban swing voters who abandoned the party on Tuesday.
Note to Vice President JD Vance: The "working class" coalition that is supposed to be the GOP's future can't be bought off with child subsidies, support for the Teamsters, or industrial policy corporatism. They want the broad-based prosperity of the first Trump term.
Going into 2028, the GOP needs a debate about what it stands for after Donald Trump, and let's hope it starts this week.
Copyright 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/2026-midterms-gop-democrats-donald-trump-c5ef5cb2?st=MGDjW2&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Cults don't end well. Think Jonestown.
