On the menu today: You know darn well what we’re going to talk about today.
Republicans Transition from Admiring Bottoms to Hitting Bottom
A reader asked that I try to be cheerful in this newsletter today. That’s a tall order! But here goes. . . .
Trump’s second term has not been a good presidency. You may think that it’s been good, or you may want to believe that it has been good. Monday, Three Martini Lunch guest host Inez Stepman made a valiant effort to lay out what’s gone right.
But if you’re in the “things are going great” or even the “things are going okay” camp, you are in a distinct and small minority. The early rounds of the exit polls indicated that roughly three-quarters of voters nationally said they feel dissatisfied or worse with the way things are going in the country, with around four in ten describing themselves as angry.
The resounding message from the voters yesterday — clearly, explicitly, unmistakably — was that on the issues that matter most to them, they grade this presidency as a failure.
Most notably, they have graded this presidency, and its largely aligned — some would say subservient — Republican Congress, a failure on controlling the cost of living. That, more than any other, was the issue that drove Trump into the presidency two years ago. The tariffs and trade war were entirely self-inflicted wounds upon the American economy and the prices on store shelves. Whatever you think of the merits of the war against Iran, the result was astonishingly expensive unleaded gasoline and diesel, and high prices at the pump and transportation costs that stuck around month after month.
Michael Brendan Dougherty argues, “Everything contributed to Republican defeats tonight . . . but anyone who privileges other explanations than the Iran war is selling you a just-so story.” Indisputably, Iran is a big chunk.
We’re stuck in this nebulous not-quite-war, not-quite-peace conflict with Iran. We have a commander in chief who never laid out the case for the war to the country or to the world before it started, never went to Congress for an authorization of military force, and who kept flipping back and forth between declaring “a whole civilization will die tonight” and declaring the Iranian mullahs to be “reasonable people.” Our war against Iran is more on-again-and-off-again than Ross and Rachel.
Just about everyone would like to see the ayatollah’s regime driven from power and the Iranian people free to choose their own path, but the U.S. cannot successfully fight a war with a commander in chief who is as erratic as this one.
It’s not just the war with Iran that’s turned into a foreign policy mess. The administration has effectively switched America’s side in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine; as noted in yesterday’s Washington Post column, just 3 percent of Americans are more supportive of Russia than Ukraine. Every chance he gets, Trump gushes about what good friends he is with Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un and gets into irate feuds with the government of countries like the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada. Eighty percent of Americans think positively of Canada. No one was clamoring for a big trade fight with our northern neighbor — particularly not any Republican who had to run for office in a state that borders Canada.
The crypto scams, the shady pardons, the billions added to Trump’s personal wealth — this presidency made an unspoken deal with the American people that they were going to have to put up with all of that to get more affordable groceries. And then this presidency didn’t deliver the more affordable groceries. Just what did Republicans think was going to happen?
I suspect most leaders know that Trump’s personal style hits me like nails across a chalkboard. The stream-of-consciousness rambling, the derisive nicknames, the insults, the unpredictable obsession with minutia, the increasingly rare occurrences of a clear, coherent, or logical argument — this is not leadership or effective communication, and the fact that anyone thinks it is just reflects how much Donald Trump has reset our standards since he descended the escalator on June 16, 2015. A whole lot of Republicans convinced themselves that Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he had revolutionized politics. The accumulated evidence strongly suggests that Trump won because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris.
No voter really cares about Jon Husted’s posterior, other than maybe Mrs. Husted. Trump’s increasingly frequent discussion of it on the campaign wasn’t cute, or charming, or some innovative way to break through the noise. It was an indication that our octogenarian president, who never was good at holding his tongue, is getting even less inhibited as he ages, even more prone to bizarre tangents, and even less capable of staying on message. (A lot of Republicans explode in fury when the question is asked, but is Donald Trump really that different than his predecessor in his battle with old age?)
Some readers contended I made too much of a big deal of Trump’s focus on the White House Ballroom, the Victory Arch, and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Then Trump chose to spend his Monday making his closing message to the nation in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He began by joking, “We’re giving serious thought to changing the name to the Trump Reflecting Pool,” moved on to “the pool is now better and more beautiful than it’s ever been before, and we’re very proud of it,” and insisted “the vandalism was unprecedented. People don’t like talking about it.” Perhaps people don’t like talking about it because it isn’t true; in the filing to drop the charges against David Hearn, federal prosecutors stated there was no vandalism to the pool and accused employees of the Interior Department of misleading them about the cause of the damage. Trump spoke about the pipes and the algae and the reflecting pool for more than 15 minutes straight.
No one made Trump spend so much time on projects like the ballroom or the arch or the reflecting pool. He chose to do that. And presidential choices have consequences.
It all adds up to a top-to-bottom, coast-to-coast rebuke from the electorate. And of course, in keeping with his character, last night President Trump insisted the sweeping Republican defeat had nothing to do with him, even though he spent the fall telling anyone who would listen to vote as if he was on the ballot: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” He contended that Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott “become a RINO in the last six months” and at 11:52 p.m. was furious that Fox News Channel had former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on as a guest and contended, “Fox News bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”
He is delusional, and that’s a really bad condition for the president of the United States to be in. This isn’t just another NBC reality show he’s hosting. He’s got real duties and real decisions to make for the next two years.
For Republicans, last night was worse than the 2006 midterms. In 2006, the GOP base “came home” and lost “only” 31 seats in the House. You look at the Senate seats that flipped that year — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Missouri, Montana — most of them were purple or swing-y, at least for that period.
Last night Republicans lost Senate races in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Texas, and we’re still waiting for a call on Mississippi and Alaska. That’s a long list of some of the most traditionally GOP-leaning states in the country. Forget Michigan or Maine.
And it wasn’t just a bad crop of Senate candidates. The GOP lost governor’s races in Georgia, Texas, Iowa, and possibly Alaska. In South Carolina, Alan Wilson won by about four percentage points. The Republican brand is seriously damaged in just about every corner of the country.
You might be asking, “Jim, when does the cheerful part start?”
As Dr. Phil likes to say, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’re getting.
As I know from watching many decades of excruciatingly frustrating professional football: When you’re headed in the wrong direction, you do not improve things by heading in the wrong direction faster, or with more intensity or determination. The only way to build a lasting improvement is to change direction. Sometimes, one of the worst things that can happen is a lucky win that convinces you that your wrong approach is actually working. That delays your reckoning with what isn’t working and making the necessary changes.
Before Tuesday, Republicans could walk around in a bubble of self-delusion, telling themselves that the polls were wrong, that Donald Trump was a popular president, that Americans were happy with the state of the economy, and that they could rely on mid-decade redistricting, Elon Musk’s fortune, and attack ads about trans teenagers to keep themselves in office. More than a few MAGA folks seemed to genuinely believe that the 2024 presidential election was a turning point in American history, and Trump had altered the dynamics of American politics on a scale of FDR or Reagan.
Nope.
This morning, Republicans can’t walk around with those delusions. In two years, Republicans have gone from popular enough, compared to the alternative, to phenomenally unpopular.
Four years ago, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine won reelection, 62.4 percent to 37.3 percent. Enter Vivek Ramaswamy, and as I mentioned last week, Trump endorsed Ramaswamy the day he announced. Ramaswamy made his infamous ad featuring Amy Acton’s mother, and Vice President JD Vance argued that Republicans shouldn’t object to the commercial.
“My message to my fellow elected Republicans is, if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.”
Well, with 99 percent of Ohio precincts reporting, Acton beat Ramaswamy, 52 percent to 44 percent. The governor’s race wasn’t even that close. Democrats won the secretary of state race, and as of this writing, lead the state attorney general’s race, the state treasurer’s race, and lead both state supreme court races. Democrats also flipped two U.S. House seats and look set to make gains in the state legislature.
The American electorate may have once had a tolerance for Trump-style, in-your-face, below the belt nasty politics such as featuring your opponent’s estranged mother contending she is lying about being sexually abused as a child. But that tolerance has long since evaporated.
The good news is, Republicans know that they have to change, and they have to change dramatically between now and Election Day 2028. As painful as this morning is for the party, they would have been worse off with modest losses that let them believe they could continue on the same path.
ADDENDUM: When I unveiled my predictions Monday, some readers contended they were too pessimistic about the GOP’s chances, and others wondered why I would be so grim about the midterms. It turns out I was far too optimistic.
Sure, I picked the correct winner in the Senate races in New Hampshire, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nebraska.
But I picked embattled Republicans to hang on in South Carolina, Maine, and Kansas. (In South Carolina, Annie Andrews won by five percentage points! It wasn’t that close!) I guess we’ll see how Alaska plays out.
In the governor’s races, I picked the correct winner in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Arizona, the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and California. But it was a brutal night for Republican governors, and I counted on a traditional Republican advantage that went extinct in places like Georgia, Texas, and Nevada. In Kansas, the race isn’t called yet, but it’s looking bad for Republican Ty Masterson.
I predicted the Democrats would have a small majority of 227; at this hour, the Democrats have won 228 seats, with 68 races still to be called. The Democrats are going to have a gargantuan House majority; mid-decade redistricting proved a catastrophic failure, and all of the talk that gerrymandering had ended the era of big sweeping waves in House elections proved to be faulty.