On the menu today: As bad as it was and as frustrating as it was, the 2025 election debacles for Republicans were baked in the cake long ago, and while President Trump has his share of flaws — more than his share of flaws — a lot of factors in the Democrats’ romp were beyond the president’s control. Read on.
Were the Election Results Baked In?
West Palm Beach, Fla. — Eh, cut the president some slack.
Perhaps it is my location and its proximity to the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate, for National Review Institute’s William F. Buckley prize dinner. Perhaps it was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and First Lady Casey DeSantis talking up the right-minded renaissance that their state is enjoying last night. Or maybe it’s that in this wealthy and glamorous corner of the state, everyone on the streets seems cheery, tanned, and perhaps a bit surgically enhanced here and there.
Whatever the reason, as the sun rises over the Sunshine State, I find myself uncharacteristically sympathetic to the president. Yes, the Republicans had a downright abysmal 2025 off-year election cycle. But it isn’t just Donald Trump’s fault.
If the GOP is going to have a bad year, the party would much rather have it in the first off-year in a four-year cycle, where they’re likely to lose governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, or the third year in the cycle, where you could lose governor’s mansions in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, rather than a midterm election or a presidential year. As I noted in summer, there are better and worse times for a party to be unpopular, and this is only a mildly bad one. If, one year from now, voters in other states perceive Republicans better than the voters in New Jersey and Virginia did, the GOP should be in okay shape.
But with that said . . . flopping just about everywhere, including in red states, is an ominous indicator for next year’s midterm.
When a party loses, there are recriminations. One of the few upsides of a year where seemingly everything went wrong is that when the party forms the circular firing squad and starts pointing fingers is just about every theory for Republican electoral failure is likely to be at least a little bit right — but insufficient by itself.
Trump’s first assessment, posted on Truth Social on Election Night, was “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT.”
He’s correct enough on both counts. Presumably there will not be another government shutdown before the 2026 midterm elections. But Republicans have good reason to be frustrated with how they’re getting scapegoated for the current government shutdown — now the longest in U.S. history — when the shutdown is caused entirely by Senate Democrats refusing to pass a continuing resolution. Before Election Day, there was some buzz that Democrats might cash in their winnings on the shutdown fight and then quickly seek a deal to end it. Now it’s not quite so clear.
And if government shutdowns work as a political weapon for Democrats, Chuck Schumer and company are going to want to have them as frequently and as long as possible. In this circumstance, the Democrats have bizarrely turned into the anti-government party. Make the federal workers show up to work without pay forever! Who needs air travel, right?
Yes, the government shutdown hurt Republicans in Virginia. But look at those polling numbers between Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican Winsome Earle-Sears. Long before the government shutdown began October 1, Spanberger was leading by a lot, sometimes double digits. Had Republicans made a half-trillion dollar capitulation and kept those “emergency” Obamacare insurance subsidies in place and avoided a shutdown, Earle-Sears would still have been a particularly weak gubernatorial candidate, and the GOP still would have had a lousy year in Virginia.
In political analysis, there is this desire to conclude, “[This bad thing that happened] is because of [this thing I have never liked].” In a classic example, Steve Bannon blames Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin for the GOP’s bad year in Virginia, calling his ally Winsome Earle-Sears “an unmitigated Trump-hating disaster.”
There’s this perception in some MAGA circles that Winsome Earle-Sears is anti-Trump, which is an over-simplification. She supported Trump as the national chair of Black Americans to Re-Elect Trump, then opposed him after January 6, and then, like many Republicans, came around to supporting him again.
One glaring problem with Bannon’s blame-Youngkin strategy is beyond Youngkin’s high approval rating in pre-election polls, exit polls Tuesday found that 53 percent of voters approved of the job Youngkin was doing, while 43 percent disapproved. Roughly one out of every five Virginia voters who liked the job Youngkin was doing voted for Spanberger.
Trump’s job approval in the Virginia exit poll was 39 percent, with 59 percent disapproving and 52 percent strongly disapproving. It’s extremely difficult for a Republican candidate to win in the face of political headwinds like that. As you’d expect, 94 percent of those who approved of Trump’s performance voted for Earle-Sears, while 92 percent of those who disapproved of Trump’s performance voted for Spanberger.
(One other point: In a race between a Democratic white woman and a Republican black woman, black voters went 93 percent to 7 percent in favor of the Democrat. Identity politics doesn’t work for Republicans.)
As for “Trump wasn’t on the ballot” . . . yes, fact-check, true. But Trump will never be on the ballot again, unless he runs for some non-presidential office.
We saw the phenomenon of Trump supporters being not-so-interested in voting for non-Trump candidates in 2017, 2018, and 2022. (For what it’s worth, in 2024, the number of people who voted in the presidential race and skipped voting in the Senate race “was smaller than many other recent cycles.”)
So, if there’s a big swath of Trump voters who will never show up to vote unless Trump himself is on the ballot, Republicans need to stop catering to those voters and come up with plans to appeal to the voters who do show up on a regular basis. Trump is an amazing get-out-the-vote force, but only for himself. The loyalty to him doesn’t transfer to other Republicans.
Nor is this a matter of Trump not supporting the GOP candidates loudly or enthusiastically enough. None of the places holding major elections in 2025 were places where Trump holding a rally or making more overt efforts to help would do much good for a Republican candidate. In New Jersey, the exit poll Tuesday showed Trump at 42 percent approval, 56 percent disapproval, with 48 percent strongly disapproving. In New York City, just 26 percent of voters approved of the job Trump was doing, while 71 disapprove, and 62 percent strongly disapprove. And out in California, where they passed the “Gavinmander,” 34 percent approve of the job Trump is doing, 65 percent disapprove, and 59 percent strongly disapprove.
(So glad Republicans quadrupled the state and local tax deduction in the Big Beautiful Bill, huh? Just bask in all that gratitude and appreciation from those suburbanites in those high-tax states!)
There was nothing Trump could have done to help GOP candidates this week, short of some sort of reverse-psychology gambit where he endorsed the Democrat.
There was also never going to be a way for the president and congressional Republican to enact a Trumpian agenda in his first year in office that was going to put Republicans in a strong position to win in places like Virginia and New Jersey.
Liberal parts of the country were never going to accept stricter and tougher ICE enforcement. The elimination of U.S. Agency for International Development offended their sensibilities. A lot of voters in places like this were never going to like what the Trump administration was going to do in the Department of Education, or trans issues, or withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, again.
(And New Jerseyans, I’m sorry, when 35 percent of you say “taxes” are your most important issue and then 37 percent of that demographic votes for Democrat Mikie Sherrill, I don’t believe you really care about your taxes. Or perhaps your top issue is that you feel like your taxes are too low.)
In other words, the moment Trump set out to achieve what he wanted to achieve as president, it became just about impossible for a Republican to win in New Jersey and Virginia.
ADDENDUM: The next National Review Institute dinner will be held October 29, 2026, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. As my illustrious colleague Charlie Cooke observed last night, NRI’s selection of that date and location is “optimistic” that the Big Apple will still be functioning after ten months of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.