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- The blue wave was more than a routine midterm swing. It was a repudiation of tariffs, the Iran war and, yes, Donald Trump.
If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to get taken behind a woodshed, behold the absolute butt-whooping Democrats put on Republicans Tuesday night.
We need not wait on the final results of Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race — one in which Democratic challenger Scott Colom may very well unseat incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith — to take stock of the carnage.
Prior to Tuesday, I predicted Republicans would lose both chambers of Congress. What I failed to anticipate was the intensity with which it would happen.
Democrats did not merely pick up seats in purple states. They shattered the South’s red wall and took the nation’s heartland for good measure.
Depending on the final tally in Mississippi, Democrats may well have won Senate races in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. They added Kansas and Iowa in one fell swoop. They picked up seats in Maine and Ohio, with Alaska still in play.
These are not exactly hotbeds of progressive politics.
For Republicans looking ahead to the next election, there’s another uncomfortable reality. The Senate map does not get appreciably better in 2028.
Pundits, including this one, will point to past midterm swings. It is undoubtedly true that the party holding the White House regularly loses seats in Congress in midterm elections. Americans have a healthy distrust of concentrated power.
In 2010, Republicans rode a wave of discontent with Barack Obama’s presidency to a 63-seat gain in the House and six additional Senate seats. Four years later, Republicans gained another nine Senate seats, taking control of that chamber.
In 2018, Democrats returned the favor, flipping 41 House seats during Trump’s first term.
Political pendulums swing. Sometimes violently.
But anyone arguing that losing states like South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Iowa and potentially Mississippi can be explained away as an ordinary midterm correction is not being honest with themselves.
There is more at play.
Long before the first ballot was counted Tuesday night, the warning signs were flashing red.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 37 percent, the lowest rate since Harry S. Truman’s 1946 midterm. Polls showed Republicans in trouble in states that should have been safely in their column.
The president, and by extension a Republican Party that has surrendered near-absolute control of its identity to him, faced mounting criticism over tariffs that raised consumer costs, a war in Iran that drove up gasoline and diesel prices, and the handling of the Epstein files.
The common thread was a growing perception that Washington was making ordinary Americans’ lives harder, not easier.
In traditionally red states, Democratic candidates largely avoided getting sucked into controversial social issues that plagued their party in recent election cycles. Instead, they focused relentlessly on kitchen-table concerns that clearly resonated with voters.
Republican candidates who fell back on familiar talking points about socialism or niche cultural controversies found increasingly unreceptive audiences.
That’s not to discount the threat of socialism in this country, or the lunacy of some elements of woke culture. Both deserve serious scrutiny.
It is to recognize that political buzzwords lose their potency with repetition, particularly when voters are more concerned about the cost of groceries than the latest outrage circulating on social media.
Before Tuesday, Republicans comforted themselves by pointing to polling irregularities in recent election cycles. For years, pollsters have struggled to account for Republican voters who deliberately avoid their surveys. Conventional wisdom developed that polls systematically underestimated Republican strength.
If anything, this cycle produced the opposite result. The polls failed to fully capture the intensity of the blue wave.
Moments like this in politics almost always demand introspection.
Unfortunately, they almost always produce wild deflection, contortionist justifications and rabid finger-pointing instead.
Honest reflection might begin with the recognition that Americans still care more about their pocketbooks than blind allegiance to a political party or personality.
The maddening part for Republicans is they actually had a case to make.
Even with the economic headwinds created by tariffs and the Iranian war, inflation rates are roughly one-third of the 9.1 percent peak reached under Joe Biden. Unemployment is nearly 50 percent below the Biden peak. Real wages have risen in many parts of the country, including Mississippi. And the One Big Beautiful Bill preserved lower tax rates for working families. Without it, workers would have seen massive tax hikes.
Republicans could have made a compelling argument that the underlying fundamentals of the American economy remained strong and that their policies offered the best path to greater prosperity.
They didn’t. Or couldn’t.
Historically, Republicans have offered a competing vision for the role and function of government, how wealth and prosperity are created, and how human beings thrive when personal freedom is maximized.
They could have explained why free enterprise produces opportunity, why limited government protects individual liberty, why work and innovation should be rewarded, and why economic growth is a better answer to poverty than permanent dependence on government.
They didn’t. Or couldn’t.
Instead, too many Republican campaigns became little more than loyalty tests, with candidates competing to demonstrate their devotion to a single man rather than their understanding of the people they hoped to represent.
If the experience in Mississippi teaches Republicans anything, it should be that the days of winning elections simply by reminding voters there’s an R beside your name may be coming to an end.
Democrats have demonstrated that they can compete in the South when they recruit credible candidates, run disciplined campaigns and adequately finance their efforts.
When the dust settles, the numbers are likely to show that Colom and the political action committees supporting him outspent Hyde-Smith by more than three to one.
Money alone doesn’t win elections. But strong candidates with serious financial backing can make voters reconsider political assumptions that have hardened over decades.
Republicans who have taken their brand for granted received a rude awakening.
They are going to have to recruit better candidates.
Ken Paxton’s considerable political baggage arguably helped bring down the Republican ticket in Texas. In South Carolina, the decision to elevate Lindsey Graham’s sister as his successor was a spectacular act of electoral malpractice.
These were avoidable mistakes, born at least in part of the arrogance that comes from believing certain states belong to a political party by near divine right.
But this is about more than picking the right horse.
Candidates are going to have to meet voters where they are. They are going to have to articulate a positive vision, defend their records and explain how their policies improve people’s lives.
Renaming bodies of water and performative patriotism can only carry you so far when people feel like feeding their families is getting harder.
And Republicans are going to have to find an identity bigger than one man.
Donald Trump is not conservatism. He is not the Republican Party. And neither the party nor the principles it once championed should rise or fall on the political fortunes of a single personality.
That doesn’t require abandoning everything Trump has accomplished or pretending Democrats have suddenly discovered all the answers.
It requires recognizing that a political movement organized primarily around loyalty to an individual eventually loses the ability to explain what it actually believes.
The Republican Party needs to rediscover the principles that once defined it and find the courage to defend them again.
This country is great. Its people are capable. Its opportunities remain abundant.
The defining fight of our time is still whether Americans will increasingly see themselves as victims and wards of the state, dependent on government to dictate their outcomes, or whether we will re-embrace the extraordinary proposition on which this country was founded: that a free people, exercising personal responsibility and pursuing opportunity, can chart their own remarkable destiny.
That is a fight worth having.
But Republicans cannot win it merely by telling voters how terrible Democrats are, or demanding fealty to Donald Trump.
They have to give Americans something worth voting for.
Tuesday night was a brutal reminder of what happens when they don’t.
