The Republican Party’s next phase can’t come soon enough.
President Trump wanted voters to behave like he was on the ballot in the 2026 midterms, and he sure got his wish. Voters delivered a massive repudiation of Trump and Trumpism as they understand them, and the resulting wave washed away essentially every congressional Republican thought to occupy a competitive seat and many more besides.
Republicans certainly earned the rebuke: This second time around for Donald Trump has just been an awful presidency so far, significantly worse than his first, which is saying something. And the broader Republican Party has mostly enabled it all, or at least has behaved as though it has all been fine, and so has earned the rebuke it got, too.
That’s not to say this presidency has entirely lacked for achievements. The Trump administration really seems to have gained control of the southern border, for instance, and has effectively pushed back on some of the excesses of Covid-era wokeism, both of which were (rightly) high priorities for many 2024 Trump voters. Some lower-profile but still important measures have advanced in some agencies, too.
But these have been overwhelmed by the broader tenor of this administration, which has utterly lacked any public-spirited vision or direction and has allowed itself to be defined by Trump’s own vapid impulsivity and thuggish narcissism, and to descend into shameless personal corruption. The president’s uses of power have tended to involve starting risky and complicated ventures that he has had neither the patience nor the strategy to finish and then moving on from them, as if it hardly matters how they might end up, and any bad news that results can just be overwhelmed by the next big thing. This has often been his path through life, of course, but the stakes of failure are awfully high when what’s at issue is a war or trade policy rather than an ill-conceived casino project. And at this point, the president just seems to have grown tired of his job, seeking escape from its burdens in ridiculous vanity projects while real problems (often of his own creation) fester.
In fact, sheer exhaustion now defines the public’s responses to Trump, too. Many Americans who had a lot of tolerance for him and once found his antics entertaining are tired of it all. His silly nicknames and his petty whining haven’t gotten any dumber — they were always this dumb. But many people who thought they were funny have grown sick of them, and Trump’s sheer unseriousness now strikes some of his former supporters as inadequate to the office and the moment.
That this exhaustion is what drove the midterm wave is crucial to understand if we want to learn some lessons from an election that harbors a lot of them.
These lessons aren’t new, despite the scale of the outcome. There is always a tendency in the immediate wake of an election to see its results as a stark change of direction launching something wholly unprecedented. But it seems to me that the message of this election is pretty much the same as the message of all of our national elections for at least a decade now. The message is: “No, thank you.”
The American electorate has been repudiating the status quo again and again, but our political leaders have refused to offer something different. Trump’s election in 2016 was a rebuke of the increasingly culturally radical Democratic Party of Barack Obama’s final years. Joe Biden’s election in 2020 was a rebuke of Trump and his ridiculous approach to governing. But in its place, Biden offered a return to exactly what voters had rejected by electing Trump to begin with. So in 2024, voters rejected that cultural progressivism yet again, but all they were offered in its place was literally the return of Donald Trump. Now they’re rejecting that again, and presumably the next two years will only make them more eager to put it behind them.
In each case, the public rendered a negative verdict on the loser, not a positive verdict on the winner. We have been living through what you might call a politics without winners.
As I wrote two years ago, in the immediate wake of Trump’s win, which his supporters hailed as ushering in a grand new Republican coalition for the ages:
This is the trap that our 21st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.
This election should teach both parties that lesson again, but it will still be hard to learn.
The Democrats will resist it because it’s hard to learn anything from your own election victories. It just feels too good to win. You would think it should be obvious that this was not a public endorsement of anything about the Democratic Party: The party remains exceedingly unpopular, and its politicians didn’t even run on anything in particular in this election. Voters can’t stand the Democrats, but this election was not a referendum on the Democrats. It was a referendum on the Republicans, whom voters clearly also cannot stand.
To the extent that Democrats look into the details for more subtle lessons, I do think they would find that candidates who steered toward the median voter and away from antisemitic socialism outperformed those who did the opposite. But anyone who really needs to scrutinize election results to encounter that insight probably isn’t ready to accept it. The Democrats will overreach in the next Congress, but their ability to actually accomplish anything legislatively will be so limited that they probably won’t pay much of a price for just trying unpopular things. So for the time being, they are shielded both from learning lessons and from paying the price for failing to learn them.
But what about the Republicans? Losing big is pretty much the only way that political parties can ever be moved to make significant change, and this was certainly a big loss. So what should Republicans take away from it?
President Trump’s failures have been so comprehensive that they offer nearly all the factions of the GOP something to cling to. Some will say that voters turned on Trump because he launched the war with Iran, and there is certainly truth to that. Others will say it happened because the president failed to prosecute that war successfully, and there is truth there, too. Some might argue that Trump’s protectionism and industrial policy haven’t worked out well, and others will say he has been too cozy with the tech billionaires. Did fascistic internal immigration enforcement turn off some former Trump voters? Did brazen graft seed disillusionment? Very likely, yes.
In one sense, the range of explanations is so broad, and the public rebuke so overdetermined, that it might make it hard to decide where and how to change course. But in another sense, the comprehensive character of the problem makes it easier to define: The problem is Donald Trump. And the way forward for Republicans must begin by putting Trump behind them and asking themselves what they have to offer the country in his wake.
To be plausible, answers to that question cannot just add up to the pre-Trump Republican Party. The past decade has had a lot to teach us all about the country and its 21st-century circumstances, and some of those lessons are plainly in tension with what were the GOP’s political assumptions and policy priorities in the Bush and Obama eras.
But plausible answers must also acknowledge the increasingly inescapable fact that the Trumpian response to those inadequacies has not succeeded. And they must somehow come to terms with the ways that the political culture of the Republican Party in the Trump years has sometimes descended into cynical, sycophantic power worship and a nihilistic, post-constitutional Caesarism utterly unworthy of a free people. No one who has taken part in that spectacle is likely to openly disavow it and atone. That’s not how people work. But moving on in ways that embrace a more honorable politics would be a start.
A party that really learned the lessons of our era of repudiation elections could put itself in a strong position to build a genuinely durable majority coalition. If nothing else, putting the results of this election alongside the last one should show us that there are actually many potentially movable and persuadable voters in America, even in lots of places we would not have imagined. The idea that these voters are now committed Democrats is no more plausible than the notion that they were committed Republicans two years ago.
Add up even just the Americans who have gone back and forth between the parties over the past 15 years, and it looks like it ought to be possible for a broadly appealing presidential candidate to win a much bigger victory than anyone has won in a generation. The electorate may not be as stuck as the political class. And, ironically, it is the party that loses big and learns from its loss first that stands a chance of reaching for that durable majority coalition.
And yet, it won’t be easy for Republicans to do that in the wake of this loss. Donald Trump will still be president for the next two years. It isn’t clear if there is anything Republicans can plausibly do to apply the lessons of this week that would save them from the sheer fact of a disastrously unpopular (and unfit, and unhinged) president who is eager to define the battle to succeed him.
Anything is possible. This election shows that, too. But for Republicans, it looks increasingly likely that the Trump era — even as a purely political matter — will turn out to have been a costly, failed experiment that will leave behind a much bluer map than it started with. The party’s next phase can’t come soon enough.