The Best And Worst Explanations For Republicans’ Midterm Losses

As was mostly expected, the Republican Party had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad night on Tuesday. Democrats took control of the U.S. House and Senate, winning seats in the latter from states like Iowa, South Carolina, and Kansas that President Donald Trump won by double digits two years prior.

Predicting a bad night for the GOP — even if not quite that bad of a night — narrative-setters were already rushing to assign blame for the results before Election Day votes were cast. On and after Tuesday night, the blame game continued. Republicans in Congress and campaign consultants are eager to deflect blame from themselves for their personal losses, for obvious reasons. Trump haters in the media and in both major political parties are equally eager to use Tuesday night’s results to attack their enemy in chief.

The big result to watch for now is what lesson Trump and the Republican Party will take from Tuesday night’s trouncing. Plenty of people are urging them to take exactly the wrong lessons — and resulting course corrections — from their midterm setback. Whether they can recover depends on them taking the right ones to heart instead.

Good Explanation: Historical Trends

Historical trends alone aren’t enough to explain the wipeout that extended to states like Texas, Iowa, Kansas, and perhaps even Mississippi. But they do provide helpful context and a baseline from which to evaluate Tuesday’s results.

It’s conventional wisdom that the president’s party loses seats in a midterm election. In every midterm election since 1938 except two, the president’s party has lost seats in the U.S. House (the two exceptions are the 1998 and 2002 midterms, under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush). Not always, but more often than not, the ruling party also loses seats in the Senate.

The pattern applies further when one party enters the midterms with a trifecta — control of the White House as well as both houses of Congress — as Republicans had entering Tuesday’s elections. When Republicans had a trifecta in 2018 under Trump, they lost the House. When they had a trifecta in 2006 under Bush, they lost House and Senate. Democrats entered the 2022 midterms with a trifecta under Joe Biden and lost the House, as they did in 2010 under Barack Obama.

Bad Explanation: Deportations

The media and other Democrats want very badly to convince the White House that delivering on Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to enforce immigration laws is now costing his party.

“Backlash to Immigration Crackdown Creates a Challenge for Republicans,” The New York Times decreed on Monday, setting up the narrative before the polls even opened on Election Day. By deporting aliens who are illegally present in the United States, many of whom have committed violent crimes, Trump is turning voters away, the argument goes. (To testify that “Republicans are really out of step” on immigration, the Times turned to a Democrat member of the Senate.)

But that narrative is hard to square with the fact that voters gave Trump a clear mandate in 2024 in favor of deportations. The Biden border crisis, by which Democrats welcomed millions of illegal aliens to break immigration laws and flood into American cities, was consistently ranked one of voters’ top concerns in polls leading up to Trump’s victory. In June 2024, a CBS poll found more than 6 in 10 registered voters supported the idea of deporting all aliens “living in the U.S. illegally.”

In polling just days before Tuesday, NBC News found voters favored Republicans on the issue of immigration by double digits. In exit polling, the outlet found that voters still leaned toward Republicans over Democrats on the question of which party was “better able to handle immigration,” although the number was closer (44 percent to 41 percent). Among voters who said immigration enforcement policies were a “crucial or major” factor in their vote, the majority went Republican.

For every swing voter the corporate press can dig up who claims to be turned off by Trump’s deportations, there is almost certainly a young Republican voter who is demoralized that deportations aren’t happening faster. To back down on fulfilling the deportation mandate voters gave Trump in 2024 would be exactly the wrong lesson to take from the midterms, especially because so many of Americans’ affordability concerns are negatively affected by mass immigration — and because every illegal alien Trump doesn’t deport is a future Democrat voter waiting to be granted amnesty. If you want to know how immigration policy does shape elections, look at the demographic changes in Texas in recent years before its blue flip on Tuesday.

Better Explanation: Senate GOP Leadership Failures

Republicans who ran the party before Trump became its leader have long been eager for an opportunity to wrest back control. They ran to Politico in the days leading up to Tuesday to proactively — and anonymously — attack Trump for their own losses.

Unfortunately for the GOP, fighting Trump is about all that Senate leadership has done over the past two years. It’s no surprise voters punished them Tuesday for doing more to undermine their own party than they did to govern with their two-year trifecta.

The GOP held majorities in both the House and Senate for the first two years of this Trump term, but accomplished little. Trump and other election integrity advocates urged Senate leadership to pass the popular SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, and explained how it could even be passed by the slim GOP majority without ditching the filibuster. So opposed were longstanding Republicans senators to the SAVE Act that when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton offered to drop his challenge to Sen. John Cornyn in exchange for its passage, he was met with a shrug.

Senate Republicans made confirmation of Trump’s cabinet appointees difficult, from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to Attorney General Todd Blanche. They failed to codify many of the victories the Trump administration achieved through executive power, including his popular actions to secure the border. And despite the fact that everyone knew in January 2025 that the GOP would likely only have two years of a trifecta in which to pass its agenda, the Senate spent fewer hours in session in 2026 than in any other midterm year since 1990.

Worst Explanation: ‘MAGA Impulses’

On Monday, Henry Olsen predicted in The Washington Post that Republicans would lose across the board, something he thought should prompt the party to reconsider its “MAGA impulses” in light of “broader public sentiment.” The folks at Freedom Conservatism had already decided who to blame before Election Day began, declaring on Monday that “we don’t need to wait for the election returns to form a conclusion on the efforts of nationalists, postliberals, and reactionaries to take over America’s conservative movement.”

Republicans lost, the Freedom Conservatives said, because of their “populist ideas” and the “bigots, cranks, and conspiracy theorists” which the “Dissident Right” had embraced. To course correct, they prescribed a return to the principles of “free trade.” David French, who is paid by The New York Times to criticize conservatives while pretending to be one, blamed “MAGA’s cruelty and arrogance.” Mark Levin blamed the midterm losses on “isolationists” who, he said, were insufficiently enthusiastic about starting a war of choice in Iran.

As convenient as this narrative is for those who have wished to retake control of the party since Trump won the nomination in 2016, it discounts a decade of reality. “MAGA impulses” transformed the GOP from the party of big business, globalist trade, and foreign wars to a coalition built on prioritizing the needs of Americans, from the economy to foreign policy to immigration.

There is one prominent area in which the old-guard neocon coalition has succeeded in regaining power from the wing of the party they call “nationalists” and “postliberals,” and that was its successful campaign to drag Trump into a new war in the Middle East. If you think voters want more of that, keep reading…

Best Explanation: Iran War and Resulting Gas Prices

According to NBC exit polling, roughly 3 in 4 voters said the Iran war was a “crucial or major” factor in their vote. Of those voters, nearly two-thirds voted Democrat on Tuesday. Among voters aged 18-29, 71 percent considered the war a “crucial or major” factor in their vote, and more than 80 percent of those young voters went blue.

The decision to enter another Middle Eastern war was felt as a betrayal by many Americans who were drawn to Trump’s 2024 coalition on the promise of “no new wars,” but the most obvious effect of the war on voter enthusiasm appears to be its role in increasing energy prices. This graph is worth 1,000 words:

The average consumer price index in U.S. cities rose 3.7 percent in the 12-month period ending in September 2026, largely driven by a more than 20 percent increase in the “energy” index and a more than 74 percent increase in the “fuel oil” category. The spike in gas prices, as documented in this chart from GasBuddy, aligned exactly with the launch of the Iran war at the end of February:

It turns out, contrary to former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen’s prediction in The Washington Post in January, there was in fact a potential “downside to striking the Iranian regime.”

Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.