Even before millions of Americans cast their ballots on Tuesday, President Donald Trump knew what was coming.
The inevitability of an electoral drubbing that would strip his Republican Party of their majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate was looming even on Monday afternoon when he made a final campaign appearance in front of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool.
“For some reason, the sitting President doesn’t win the midterms, but we gave this a very strong shot”, he told reporters. It sounded like a dress rehearsal for his eventual concession, rooted in the possibility that the Democrats’ victory would be so sizeable that it would be impossible even for an election-denying president to accuse his opponents of rigging the vote.
By the end of the night, he was admitting on Fox News that the Iran war had hurt Republicans during the midterms, saying people “didn’t like it” when they had to pay more for fuel. He hinted that further strikes could be on the horizon, saying, “We have to do something large”, and that it could involve a “heavy hit”.
As the results flooded in on Tuesday night, the Republican Party’s worst fears were confirmed. Hoping for nothing more than a blue trickle of votes in the Democrats’ favour, scores of Republican lawmakers found themselves washed away by their opponents in something close to a political tidal wave.
After Trump spent weeks telling voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot”, they did precisely that, offering the official condemnation of his first two years back in power that was presaged for months by his plunging approval ratings.
Exit polls showed that millions of people were putting their wallets top-of-mind as they voted, citing the soaring cost of living as the central issue driving them to the polls. Sixty-five per cent of voters told pollsters they held Trump personally responsible for the country’s worsening economic conditions.
His insistence that the nation’s “affordability” crisis is a Democratic-inspired political concoction found no purchase with voters who – on Tuesday itself – started paying the highest prices ever recorded in the United States for petrol and diesel.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed claimed victory in Michigan’s close-fought Senate race (Photo: AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)Up against those numbers, Trump and his fellow Republicans stood no chance. As the evening unfolded, the scale of the disaster became quickly apparent, with North Carolina the first Senate seat to flip into the Democrats’ hands. Former governor Roy Cooper scored a whopping win over Michael Whatley, a victory made even more sweet for Democrats given Whatley’s position as a former head of the Republican National Committee.
In Texas, James Talarico pulled off the kind of result that Democrats have coveted for decades, pummelling his scandal-soaked Republican rival, the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton. Talarico became the first Democrat elected to the Senate since 1988, and his fellow party member Gina Hinojosa scored a stunning win, defeating pro-Trump Governor Greg Abbott, who was denied a fourth term in power.
South Carolina was the next domino to fall, where Senator Darline Graham was defeated by Dr. Annie Andrews, a Democratic Party candidate slandered by Trump with the moniker “Trannie Annie”. Graham, sister of the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who died unexpectedly in July, was roundly rejected by the electorate, losing a seat Republicans have held for nearly 3 decades.
Kansas then handed the Democrats control of the Senate, with Adam Hamilton’s victory over Senator Roger Marshall. In a fresh indication of the scale of the wave washing over the country, Hamilton in January will become the first Democrat from Kansas to take a Senate seat since 1932.
As the evening unfolded, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, insisted he had spoken to Trump, and that the President had told him he was “feeling great”. But by 10:37pm Washington time, just 15 minutes before the Democrats secured control of the Senate, the President appeared to be struggling to accept reality. In a posting on Truth Social, he insisted: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Republican strategists, meanwhile, understood the scale of their party’s collapse, with Trump’s own former communications director Bryan Lanza calling the election’s outcome “devastating”.
“The voters are tired of this war and they’re tired of inflation,” Lanza told LBC, accusing Trump of having been “off message” on the campaign trail. “It’s definitely worse than I imagined … I never thought we would lose South Carolina.”
With both the House of Representatives and the Senate moving into Democratic Party hands, the Democrats will soon have big choices to make: do they try to impeach Trump yet again? Probably not, given the absence of a two-thirds Senate majority to convict him at trial.
Do they accept Trump’s overture, in an interview with The New York Times, for talks to try and find common ground? Again, probably not.
Do they instead launch sweeping investigations of some of his top aides, including “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth and former Attorney General Pam Bondi? Almost certainly.
But Democrats will also have to contend with divisions within their own party, as left-wing supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America jockey for position with the centrists and elites who have dominated the party and its platform for generations.
For Trump, events will also move quickly now. Even before the final votes were tallied, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida – who will be leaving office in January – sounded the klaxon intimating his own plans to seek the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2028.
“Some of these Republicans are saying, ‘well, the gas, it’s no big deal’. Like, or they’re trying to blame Biden for it. No, listen, we just gotta be honest. Gas is higher.
“It hurts people,” he told Sirius XM radio, in a veiled jab at Trump’s efforts to shirk responsibility for a worsening economy. “If you can’t admit that to voters, you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.”
On Fox News, as reality dawned, pro-Trump host Jesse Watters leveled with his audience. “It’s not a red wave,” he glumly told viewers as the results streamed in.
Then, referring to the cash payments Trump had promised every adult if Republicans retained control of the House and the Senate, he added: “I don’t think we’re going to get our $5,000 checks.”
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