Since this past Tuesday, there has been a plethora of mad expostulation disgorged from pundits and the commissariat on the manifest state of the electoral aftermath. Before diving right into your humble authors hits n’ misses and overhedging, let us take a gander at what brought us all to the postmortem below.
There is no greater contrast, and explanation, than a contrast between two ads, one for Ohio Governor and the other for Mississippi Senator. First up, the infamous Vivek Ramaswamy “pedo-mom” ad, so-called not for the ad itself, but for the self own it generated which Vivek and Vice-President Vance tripled down:
It turned out that Acton’s mother lost custody of Action because she stood by her husband, and Action’s step-father, who she joined on the lamb when he was charged with molesting Action. When this came out, Vivek and Vance declared that the ad was still accurate due to the accusations made… which wasn’t so accurate after all. This was a clear case of following the style of Trump with never apologizing and political confederates standing by their allies right or wrong. This doubling and even tripling down created a variant of the Streisand Effect where they wanted more attention brought to the situation because they felt people would reward them for being “fighters” who never apologized in contrast with the “establishment” “surrender caucus”.
Sufficient to say, the ad backfired spectacularly with Vivek going down in electoral flames.
In contrast was an ad by the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Mississippi, which while mocking the Republican incumbent was never vicious but rather playful in its mockery.
Easily one of the best political ads this decade, it hit hard where it needed to while keeping Scott Colom out of the muck n’ mire. It also specifically hit hard on one of the top three issues for voters: The economy.
And now, the top of the myriad reasons that the Republicans suffered on of their biggest single-election loses since Watergate, if not the sea-change that was Ike’s 2nd Midterm.
The Economy
The economy was an obvious top concern. Trump came in and kicked off almost arbitrary and capricious Unconstitutional tariffs and promised a manufacturing renaissance. He even declared a “Golden Age”. After his tariffs by executive fiat kicked off, he owned the economy in the eyes of the voters. The reality was something different, particularly amongst the working class. There was no manufacturing renaissance. Inflation outpaced wage gains. But above all else, it was Trump’s insistence otherwise and the flailing attempts by Republicans up and down the ticket to defend Trump and the economy under him. People felt lied to in much the same way they felt the Biden Administration lied to them about the economy. No more clear example of this could be found than the Kansas State Fair debate for U.S. Senate where the incumbent Republican was openly booed and mocked at times in contrast to the Democrat. The full debate is can be found here.
But what really burned people was being told that their economic plight wasn’t real but a hoax or “fake news”. They felt lied to and abandoned once their usefulness as voters for Trump were at an end.
Foreign Policy Mismanagement
And that economic conundrum connects with the mishandling of the waging of the Iran War, if you can even all it “waging”. The repeated promises that it would be short and the repeated declarations of victory were clearly hollow to the voters who saw continued attacks on the Strait of Hormuz and, more explicitly, in the price of gas and diesel. That just exacerbated the feeling that Trump failed on the economy and that he both didn’t care and that his Administration was incompetent.
Trump openly praised tyrants like Communist China’s Xi, North Korea’s Kim, and Russia’s Putin; this contrasted with vitriol and even saber-rattling against our allies, from Canada to Denmark (via Greenland). This but served to underscore the incompetence when it came to foreign affairs that drew a stark contrast of his mostly successful 1st term Administration with the current 2nd term Administration so far.
Racialism
That alone would have lead to a good night for the Democrats, but it was the entire package of Trump’s 2nd term so far that made things even worse for the Republicans, and unlike the economy, were unequivocally the fault of the GOP’s own making. The nuking of the nascent multi-racial working class coalition that the ‘24 election seemed to have forged was more than just undone by repeated “own goals” of Republicans.
The most egregious example of the Republicans nuking themselves with racial politics was the infamous tweet of GOP Texas Railroad Commissioner Bo French where he expressed disgust at swarthy “foreigner” students, specifically South Asians daring to cheer on the University of Texas Longhorns at a football game, who displaced “Americans” from the University. This quickly blew up in French’s face when it was pointed out that those students included American citizens and Texas residents. But rather than just shut up, he openly defended his tweet and the alleged replacement by “foreigners” based solely on their ethnic ancestry. While a small minority on the Right, French echoed the “Heritage American” crowd who seek a White ethno-nationalism. He was joined in by many people defending him, which again echoed that warped variant of the Streisand effect to draw more attention to French on the false belief that most of Texas agreed with him. South Asians were moving towards the GOP when it came to voting, or at least were until now. The irony is that the picture showed the students fully assimilated into American, and Texan, culture.
One of the biggest self-owns racially, though, was the seeming cruelty of immigration enforcement. ICE engaged in performative enforcement by hastily hired agents with little to no training, which sometimes resulted in people getting killed. They went after legal immigrants, deprioritized violent criminals by going after spouses of Americans as well as kids, and even detaining (sometimes repeatedly) American citizens!
One of the racial aspects was at least defensible on principle, hypothetically. The Voting Rights Act was effectively nuked, which alone could be defended on legal and Constitutional ground, but when combined with the blatant partisan, and racial, tinge of the mid-decade redistricting (discussed below), it energized the Southern Black population to come out and vote at Presidential election year levels.
“Dummymanders”
And thus, we come to the “dummymanders”. Trump spent a huge chunk of his political capital pushing Republican states to redistrict aggressively to the point of trying to permanently wipe out the Democrats on the Federal level. The elimination of the VRA and the minority-majority districts resulted in a blatantly partisan move to eliminate Democratic seats—seats that were overwhelmingly Black in population and representation. The backlash was so great that, depending on how you define the Deep South, the Democrats won more votes than the Republicans by some counts!
North Carolina was a prime example of the “dummymanders” backfiring. Democrats actually picked up more seats this past election than they would have gained if the districts were untouched. This wasn’t only a Republican failing, though, with California’s redistricting, as approved via the ballot box, probably saving multiple Republican members of Congress.
It would have been worse for the Republicans if they had gotten their way with redistricting Utah, Indiana, Georgia, and South Carolina. In Utah, the court-mandated Democrat-leaning district save the GOP there from losing two seats. In South Carolina, it may have saved three or more seats from flipping to rhe Democrats. In Georgia, the old line kept the Democrats from picking up any seat.
But the most notable example was in Indiana. If Trump had his way with new districts, the Democrats would have won all but one if not all of the Congressional seats. But those seats were saved by Republican state Senators who refused to redistrict. Those state Senators were rewarded earlier this year for the prescient move by being primaried and tossed out for daring to oppose Trump.
Stolen Election Schtick
This “all or nothing” attitude was also seen with all the political sturm und drang over the SAVE America Act. There were plenty of provisions that the Republicans could have passed, but despite substantive reasons many Republican Senators had to oppose a handful of provisions in the full bill, Trump insisted on “all or nothing”. When you insist on “all or nothing”, you shouldn’t throw a temper tantrum when you get the proffered choice of “nothing”. And all that because Trump is incapable of admitting that he lost the 2020 election.
Becoming the Swamp
And then was the reason exit polls indicated as the biggest motivating factor for voters: Corruption. Within the Trump Administration and political pests locked in orbit around it, corruption was manifest and open. Billions of dollars were likely made in a swampy fashion, both within the Trump family and those adjacent to them. Officials openly took advantage for fun and profit, especially when it came to stoking their egos. Between the hawking of merchandize, the crypto-coins, and the Flamingo Revolution, people stopped seeing Trump and those around them as pro-worker populists but rather out of touch swampy elitists.
Compounding that was the arrogance and inflated egos that rubbed salt into the above wounds as well as the sheer incompetence people felt coming from the Administration, as well as it’s unrestrained use of the law as a political weapon. The constant and blatantly open lawfare served only to alienate voters who believed that Trump cared more about personal vengeance than he did about them.
It was All the Things!
Each of the above problems alone would have resulted in a good, but not great, election for the Democrats. Combined, though, it became an orgy of defeat for the Republicans. But the real motivation against the Republicans in the voting booth was the sheer arrogance and self-centered ego-stoking of Trump himself. The triumphal arch, the White House ballroom larger and taller than the core White House itself, the gilding of statues, the proposed D.C. golf course, and especially putting his face on American coinage as a sitting President were all contributing factors that made people believe that he cared less about the people than he did about himself.
His final campaign bit on the Monday before the election at the Reflecting Pool, though, was the perfect encapsulation of this. The Reflecting Pool was refurbished with a new bottom coating in a swampy manner that literally turned it into a swamp, and rather than accept this mistake, Trump’s Administration tried to prosecute innocent people in order to find a scapegoat that would allow Trump to convince himself and others that he was infallible. That Reflecting Pool is a spot-on metaphor for the Trump Administration. At the campaign event, Trump even talked about renaming it (and he does have a love of renaming things to burnish his legacy) after himself—a perfect metaphor for Trump himself.
In 2024, Trump’s most devastating line against Harris was “she’s for they/them; Trump’s for you”. This election, people came to the conclusion that Trump wasn’t actually for them after all, and they felt betrayed.
The Mandarins of the GOP as the Lesser of Two Evils
A singular person in the Presidency, even then, might not have resulted in the tsunami that Election Day resulted in. The problem with the modern-day Republican Party is that Trump is the Republican Party, and the Republican Establishment. People inside the party are either enthusiastically subservient to Trump or in fear of being unpersoned for daring to oppose him. This purging of the GOP from dissenters has been manifest and overt. Politicans being primaried our of office, as with Sen. Cornyn in Texas or the state Senators in Indiana, or hounded out of the “cool kids club” of central committees and both partisan and non-partisan organizations as with what happened with former Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske who refused to go along with the “stolen election” fantasies, are all examples of this.
Palace politics became more important than electoral politics. And whenever this hurt the Republicans electorally, Republican insiders all circled around to protect Trump and blame failure on even supporters whose usefulness to Trump were outweighed by the need for a scapegoat. It is the quinticensial example of “good tsar, bad boyars”. It didn’t matter how much elected Republicans lost or political machinations became self owns, for far too many felt that even if the Republicans were defeated and the GOP put out of power, they’d still have standing within the GOP and all the grift and ego-boosting that came with it—in other words, ‘twas “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
This is not to say that there aren’t still plenty of principled Republican politicians and party activists, or that they even compose less than a majority of politically active Republicans, only that Republican leadership is dominated by these sycophantic mandarins or at least cowered into silence lest they unperson themselves with voiced dissent.
One of the oft repeated exhortation to voters was that as bad as they thought the Republicans were, the Democrats were worse. That dog don’t hunt, likely because Kristi Noem shot it. There message, thus, was basically Hobson’s Choice. The problem with this is that sooner or later people will go and emphatically tell Hobson what anatomically (and immoral) thing he can do with his horse before leaving… and this election was just that.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Your humble author underestimated the sheer magnitude of the electoral shift. In fact, your humble author originally was going to predict that the Texas Senate seat would flip, but decided at the last moment before posting the election predictions due to skepticism that Texas would flip as it had failed to do for decades of predictions that it would. Your humble author was hesitant buck the wisdom that those predictions wouldn’t pan out; my deepest apologies for not sticking with my gut instinct.
Nationally, it was worse for the GOP than was predicted, either by your humble author or practically anyone else. Democrats, as predicted, did flip the House of Representatives with over 230 seats, but they have exceeded that and, as of writing, stand at over 250 races called for them, and potentially up to 260 once all the races are called. This would be the Democrats’ biggest House majority since before the Republican Revolution of 1994!
In the Senate, it was far worse. As of writing, Democrats have gained seven seats that have been called, and are leading (and likely to win) two others, for a net gain of likely eight or nine seats, giving them 54—56 seats. In addition to picking up North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, and Texas, Democrats have picked up South Carolina and Maine. In addition to Alaska as one of the predicted Democratic pick-ups, the Democrats are likely, as of writing, to pick up the Mississippi seat.
In the governorships, the Democrats, as predicted, picked up Ohio, Iowa, and Nevada. They are also ahead in the Alaska governor’s race with over 49% of the vote with the Republican stuck below 30% in the first round before instant run-off votes are calculated. Democrats also managed to keep the Kansas governorship as well as picking up the governorships of Georgia and Texas! That’s a half dozen seats
The Democrats, as predicted, also picked up a dozen legislative houses. This gave Democrats clear trifecta control in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. Democrats, even when they didn’t flip chambers, made gains almost everywhere, with trifectas broken for Republicans in states like Texas and Georgia.
The South was the biggest over-performance by the Democrats. Democrats picked up the lower houses in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. The only reason they didn’t pick-up the upper houses in Texas is because not all of the seats were up this year. The Democrats surprise pick-up and South Carolina and likely pick-up of Mississippi in the U.S. Senate just underscores this. Even when the Republicans won, their winning margins were often very narrow. Republicans retained the Senate seats in, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, abet narrowly, with their victory margins being <4%, <3%, <2%, respectively. In Florida, that narrow win was against a very Left-wing socialist. Governor’s races in Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida were also narrow, with margins of <4%, <3%, and <2%, respectively. Of note, in Tennessee, Blackburn won less than 46% of the total vote!
In Nevada, as predicted, the Republicans lost every statewide race. While cold comfort, the Republicans did as well as most of the statewide candidates in Texas and Georgia, so the Republicans in Nevada can honestly say their state is as red as those two! Gov. Lombardo, at least, kept his loss to single digits. Also as predicted, Republicans kept steady in the state Senate due to seats they would have lost not being up until 2028. The Assembly did indeed result in a supermajority for the Democrats picking up four seats and leading by less than a hundred votes as of writing in a fifth.
Unsurprisingly, the Democrats won the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Congressional districts. Democrats won those seats by over 20 points, even in the 3rd Congressional district which Republicans narrowly lost in the 2024 House race and which Trump actually won.
The biggest surprise was that David Flippo lost the 2nd Congressional district, with the Democrat, Teresa Benitez-Thompson getting over 50% of the vote as of writing, meaning the Independent American Party candidate Lynn Chapman did not play potential spoiler. This is a massive rebuke to Donald Trump whose endorsement handed the Republican nomination to Flippo. Flippo’s campaign slogan for his races in Southern Nevada’s Congressional seats has been “Flip it with Flippo”. Well, he finally did flip a Congressional seat, ironically enough.
The only silver lining for Republicans in Nevada, aside from winning most of the non-partisan Board of Regents elections on the ballot, was that Question 7, added a state Constitutional mandate to require voter ID in order to vote, passed with over 62% of the vote. Question 6, which they opposed and which added a rather expansive enshrinement of abortion into the state Constitution also passed.
In fact, some of the only real wins for the Republicans were the ballot measures to require voter ID, ban racial discrimination, and protect women’s/girls’ sports. The problem for the GOP, then, isn’t with voters becoming overwhelmingly Left-wing, but with the voters turning on an out-of-touch Republican Party.
tl;dr
This is one of the worst elections for the Republican Party since the defenestration of 1958. The Democrats have a good shot at getting a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in 2028, and Trump doubling down in the last two years of his 2nd term means that, barring “events, my dear boy, events” as Harold Macmillan put it, puts the Democrats well poised to not only keep Congress, but pick up the Presidency and additional governorships and sate legislative houses in two years.
This has not ended well; it likely won’t end well either.
