An epic defeat turns the president into a lame duck—and hopefully marks the beginning of the end of the MAGA era.
Donald Trump wants to make one thing perfectly clear: The epic defeat suffered by the GOP in Tuesday’s midterms wasn’t his fault.
As it became clear that the GOP was not only losing both houses of Congress, as well as countless local races, but doing so at levels not seen in generations, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Trump spent much of the evening that way—searching for anything that could explain the humiliation he was suffering. He blamed Fox News for having too many Democrats on. He blamed far-right Republican politicians like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, resoundingly defeated in his bid for a fourth term, for supposedly straying from the righteous path of Trumpism. He proclaimed to Fox News that the results weren’t actually about him. “I don’t view it as a hit on me,” he said, adding, “It was a point in time. I shouldn’t feel guilty.”
Almost nobody believed the man who has now morphed from a onetime political colossus to a widely loathed lame duck. (As if to underscore his newfound irrelevance, the White House posted a picture of Trump on Wednesday morning with the desperate-sounding caption, “PSA: TRUMP IS STILL YOUR PRESIDENT.”) That’s because the verdict of the American people was as unmistakable as it was accurate. Across the country, voters said the same thing: Trump’s entire second term has been a catastrophe, and he deserves to be punished, along with the party that has aided and abetted him for the last 10 years.
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It is not hard to understand how we got here. Trump won in 2024 only because he faced a fatally weak opposition. The Democrats nominated Joe Biden, who was visibly in cognitive decline, committed to supporting a genocide in Gaza that revolted many Democratic voters, and maddeningly indifferent to the affordability crisis caused by Covid and the Ukraine War. By the time Biden finally ended his campaign, the damage had already been done (particularly since the new Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, was unwilling to distance herself from Biden). Trump told voters he would focus on lowering the cost of living and keep the United States out of new wars overseas. That was enough to get him a second stint in the Oval Office. But instead of sticking to the promises he’d made, Trump misinterpreted the election as a mandate for a hard-right, untrammeled MAGA presidency, with himself as an imperial, untouchable king. He unleashed ICE to deploy gestapo tactics on American streets, enriched himself and his friends with corruption that dwarfed the graft of the Gilded Age, and launched a ruinous tariff war. Then, to top it all off, he launched an illegal war of choice in Iran that destabilized the global economy and sent the price of just about everything soaring.
Voters were rightly fed up. Given a chance to express themselves in the midterms, they handed the GOP a defeat that is truly historic. Metaphors of a blue wave or blue tsunami hardly do the midterms justice. The scale of the Democratic Party’s victory was far larger than other modern midterm defeats, even the “thumping” suffered by George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama (a “shellacking”) in 2010, or Donald Trump in 2018.
Instead, the 2026 midterms were the type of wipeout that a party suffers once in a generation. In terms of scale, it is comparable to the 1974 midterms, where the GOP was devastated by the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon.
Sean Trende, one of the smartest Republican political strategists, noted, “If you are watching this and just have a passing familiarity with elections, just understand you’re seeing something special, a 100-year flood. Easily the worst election for a party since 1974.”
The Democrats are on track to win the popular vote in House races by 13 percentage points. As New York Times columnist David Wallace Wells notes, “The 2010 margin was 6.8 points, an election remembered as a generational wipeout. Tonight is expected to almost double that. 2008 was 10.5 and 2006 was 8.0. A thirteen point win would be the biggest congressional margin in fifty years.”
Even more impressive than the size of the victory was where the Democrats won. They didn’t just sweep the swing states but also made unprecedented incursions into red states—or what should now be seen as formerly red states. The Solid South is no longer solidly Republican. Texas now has a Democratic senator and governor. Georgia has two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor. South Carolina has a Democratic senator. Mississippi is too close to call but could have a Democratic senator. Angie Nixon, who wasn’t supported by the national Democratic Party, came agonizingly close to flipping Florida.
The victories in the South inaugurate a new era of politics: If Texas is a purple state, then Democrats have many more paths to forging a national victory in presidential elections.
It’ll take a few more weeks to have a full vote count, but Democrats are looking at roughly 255 seats in the House and 54 or 55 Senate seats.
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The Democratic victory is all the sweeter because Republicans ran a disgracefully bigoted campaign, playing to racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and homophobia. Despite this, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who won in Georgia, will become the first Black woman governor in American history. Abdul El-Sayed, who won handily in Michigan, will be the first Muslim senator in American history. Chris Pappas, who won in New Hampshire, will be the first openly gay male senator in American history.
These victories also bode well for the future: The Democrats, if they can address the economic problems that have fueled voter rage, have a chance to govern as a multiracial, multicultural, and socially liberal majority party.
One of the bizarre features of the election was how focused Donald Trump was on the human posterior. He repeatedly praised the “ass” of Ohio Senate candidate Jon Husted (who lost his race) and singer Nicki Minaj. Republican operative Todd Gillman told Politico: “Honestly, we need to move as far away from Trump as we can. I think Republicans might be screwed all the way until ’30. Talking about Nicki Minaj’s fat ass. All that stuff is just wearing people out.”
Trump’s crude way with words perhaps gives us the best metaphor for the midterms. Trump and the GOP have received a once-in-a-lifetime ass-kicking.
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