Welcome to today’s Morning Jolt. I’m John Puri, filling in for Jim Geraghty. Noah Rothman will take over tomorrow, and Jim will be back with you on Wednesday.
On the menu today: Having rummaged through the postmortem commentaries, I get the sense that conservatives have not fully absorbed Tuesday’s results, let alone reckoned with them. We are told this was a “blue tsunami”: a terrible loss for the GOP, but not completely unlike past midterm wipeouts in 2006 and 2018. But the reality was much worse than that. This was the kind of historic flood that makes Noah start gathering animals two by two. Republicans’ prospects are unlikely to improve in the next two years because the factors behind this meltdown are unlikely to change. Read on.
Assessing the Damage
Let me introduce you to Dr. Annie Andrews.
There are many women like Andrews in the country. A mother of three young children, divorced, a pediatrician. Andrews is the kind of Democrat who probably believes that American democracy has been in crisis for a decade, mostly because of one man. She lives in Charleston, S.C., a blue city in what was, until now, a bright red state. A bleeding-heart liberal, Andrews probably began #Resisting around 2017.
That may have led her to embrace various left-wing fads of the moment. In the summer of 2020, Andrews tweeted, “It is upon each one of us to listen, learn and be actively anti-racist.” She recommended that her followers listen to the 1619 podcast by Nikole Hannah-Jones and watch Ava DuVernay’s miniseries When They See Us about the Central Park Five. In 2021, she posted a list of “dangerous bills for trans youth” in the South Carolina legislature, including acts to ban “gender-affirming” treatments for minors, restrict school sports teams based on biological sex, and protect medical professionals from providing services that conflicted with their religious or moral beliefs. In 2022, she reiterated that her state’s Saving Women’s Sports Act “is shameful legislation that does nothing to protect or support women or children in SC. In fact, it is actively harmful.” She continued, “I will always support trans youth.”
A few years later, and Dr. Annie Andrews is the U.S. senator-elect from South Carolina. South Carolina.
Andrews beat her opponent, Darline Graham, by 4.5 percentage points on Tuesday. Six years ago, Graham’s brother won the seat by more than ten points. Now, Darline Graham did a terrible job of unearthing and publicizing Andrews’s old tweets, allowing her to present as a reasonable moderate. (Andrews told voters, “I want you to hear me loud and clear: I don’t support biological men playing in women’s sports, and I don’t support and haven’t ever performed gender surgery for minors.”) But even if every South Carolinian knew her full record, would Andrews have lost? Color me skeptical.
That’s because Republicans’ defeat was, as I projected very early on Election Night, of “epic proportions.” Let’s run through some statistics.
As of the current count, Democrats won the popular vote in House elections by 13 points — 55.74 percent to 42.78 percent — and California is still laggardly tallying votes. In 2006, another blowout year, Democrats won the popular vote by eight points. In 2018, the midterm of Donald Trump’s first presidency, they won by 8.6 points.
Now compare landslides by the other party: Republicans won in 2014 by 5.7 points; in 2010, what Barack Obama called a “shellacking,” by 6.8 points. Remember 1994, when the GOP gained 54 House seats and received a majority for the first time since 1952? That year, Republicans also won the popular vote by 6.8 points.
This year, as a reminder, Democrats won by 13 points. The last time either party crushed the other by that much was in 1974 and 1976, immediately after Watergate. Republicans were on the receiving end then, too.
Right now, Democrats are on track to win 259 House seats for an 83-member majority. That would be two more seats than Democrats won in 2008, when Obama was also elected, after two cycles of picking up 31 and then 21 seats. They just picked up 44 seats overnight. That’s after all the gerrymandering — from this year’s mid-cycle, but also in 2010 and 2020 — plus the geographical self-sorting and polarization that were supposed to make swings of this size impossible.
Democrats won seats that are rated by the Cook Partisan Voting Index as R+9. (Goodbye, Lauren Boebert. I’d say we hardly knew you, but we actually knew you a bit too much.) According to NBC, they took “virtually every seat that President Donald Trump won by less than 10 points in the 2024 presidential race, and they won a majority of seats that Trump carried by 0 to 20 points.”
In the Senate, Democratic candidates won their races in Ohio (R+5), Iowa (R+6), Texas (R+6), and Kansas (R+8). A Democrat will soon be declared the winner in Mississippi, which is rated R+11. In Louisiana, also rated R+11, the Republican won by less than two points.
Now we get to the down-ballot races. First, the big GOP winners: In Florida (R+5), the Republican for governor eked out his race by just over one point. In Tennessee (R+14), Marsha Blackburn was elected governor by two points. In Alabama, Tommy Tuberville won the same office by 4 points. In Oklahoma (R+17), the nation’s fifth-reddest state, the Republican won the governor’s race by six points. Of course, Republicans also lost the governors’ races in Nevada (R+1) by eight points, Georgia (R+1) by eight points, Ohio (R+5) by eight points, Iowa (R+6) by ten points, Texas (R+6) by seven points, and almost certainly Kansas (R+8) by less than a point.
After flipping six, Democrats are now set to hold 30 governors’ offices to Republicans’ 20. The last time they held that many was 1993. They picked up more than 500 seats in state legislatures and flipped at least twelve chambers. After picking up six, Democrats emerged with 22 state trifectas (governor, house, and senate), the most since 1984. They may be able to repeal and replace longstanding Republican laws on tax cuts, right-to-work, school choice, and more.
With Tuesday’s flips, Democrats swept statewide executive offices in five new states and came one short in Ohio. As of February, Ted Cruz will be the only statewide elected Republican from Texas. Everyone else, from the attorney general to the land commissioner, will be a Democrat. The Texas state house is now blue for the first time since 2002. In one day, the state supreme court went from 9–0 Republican to 5–4.
Kansas, a bastion of Republican politics since the infamous law that bears its name, last elected a Democratic senator in 1932. The senator, George McGill, was born when Rutherford B. Hayes was president and left office months before The Wizard of Oz came to theaters. Next year, a megachurch pastor will be the second Democratic senator from Kansas in over a century.
Finally, a truly insane statistic: In three traditionally red states — North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas — the Democratic candidate for Senate had already won before Election Day. How? In each race, Roy Cooper, Jon Ossoff, and James Talarico won more early votes than their Republican opponents received in total. All the votes they received on Tuesday were just icing on the cake.
Things Will Get Worse
I agree with Andy McCarthy’s conclusion as to why Republicans were obliterated: It was the tariffs and the Iran war. It was the open disregard for the cost of living, plus the contempt for law and basic decency. It was immigration enforcement that was thuggish and theatrical by design, which drove Hispanics away from the GOP in droves. It was tax cuts that were hardly promoted, paired with Medicaid cuts and expiring health-care subsidies that were. It was a Congress led by Republicans who stalwartly refused to do their job, to investigate any abuse, to impose any check. It was the elevation of candidates whom every rational person knew should be nowhere near the U.S. capital. It was chaos and incompetence throughout.
In short, it was Donald Trump’s second presidency.
Sure, the president is historically unpopular, conservatives may admit. But how much worse can things get from here? Once they are in power, surely Democrats will overstep and let the public see how terrible their policies are.
No, they won’t. They can’t. We are a long, long way away from Congress being the initiative branch of government from which policy springs. Under our distorted constitutional regime, the president sets the agenda and runs the show. Having surrendered the bulk of its powers to the legislative branch, Congress has the luxury of reacting. Donald Trump is still in charge — and over the next two years, he will only double down, becoming even more insular and self-obsessed as the illusion of his national adoration collapses around him. If you think he cares about the Republican Party’s future, or about any legacy beyond himself, you have not been paying attention.
Need evidence? Look at the man Trump just named his chief of staff, Stephen Miller. Apparently, Susie Wiles was too much of a moderating influence. Miller, by contrast, is the executor of Trump’s unbridled id. He is the architect of ICE’s fear campaign, of the attacks on universities, of the extrajudicial boat strikes in the Caribbean. He drove the internal purges of those deemed insufficiently loyal, and the branding of rivals and the press as enemies of the people. Miller’s promotion is no course correction. It’s Trump flooring the gas pedal.
At least Stephen Miller is serious. Trump also offered the job of press secretary to Dana White, the CEO of UFC. (After White turned him down, Trump says now he was “only kidding.”) As of now, pledge master Pete Hegseth still leads the most powerful military in the world. He and his buddies are busy posting all over social media.
What about the policy? We’re stuck in the Iran war, whether Trump likes it or not, and gas prices aren’t coming back down to $3 per gallon any time soon. ICE’s crackdown will continue as promised. The president will never rescind his tariffs, and Congress can’t remove them without veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers.
And therein lies the most severe problem: Republicans in Congress, with very few exceptions, still will not try to limit Trump. Most of them in swing districts have just been wiped out. Those who remain have little to fear but their primaries. (If they couldn’t lose a general election in 2026, they probably never will.) And, as he demonstrated with his revenge endorsements against Indiana lawmakers who prevented mid-cycle gerrymandering — a loss that probably saved Republicans six House seats, by the way — Trump still owns the GOP’s primary electorate. Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn can tell their remaining colleagues from experience: Cross him, and you’re done.
What is the scenario by which a Republican candidate for president in 2028 can hew so closely to Trump’s record and delusions that he wins his endorsement, and thus the nomination, and then distances himself far enough from Trump that he can win the general election while holding onto Trump’s base? In my humble view, no such scenario exists.
ADDENDUM: For a historical comparison, consider 2008. By the Republican nominating convention, everyone knew that George W. Bush’s legacy was politically toxic from the Iraq War and other failures. Yet the party could not help but choose a candidate, John McCain, who was undoubtedly in the vein of Bush’s presidency and an ardent defender of the war. He signaled minor breaks with the president on taxes, spending, and climate policy, but everyone in America knew that McCain represented far more continuity than change. Voters much preferred the latter and sent Obama to the White House with a filibuster-proof Senate majority. Unrelatedly, Republicans in 2028 will have to defend Senate seats in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Iowa, Alaska, Kansas, and — oh yes — South Carolina.