The 2026 midterms were not just an earthquake. They were a continent-wide rupture of the Earth’s crust, allowing molten lava to spill out across the nation and burn Republican bastions to the ground.
A year ago, most observers would have said Democratic control of the Senate was a pipe dream. After Tuesday, Democrats could finish with as many as 56 seats, many of them in states President Donald Trump won by double digits just two years ago.
In the House, Republican gerrymandering was supposed to insulate the party from defeats like this. Instead, every GOP gerrymander failed. Florida Republicans’ effort to gain four seats could end with Democrats holding all of those districts. Texas Republicans’ grab for five seats could result in Democrats gaining one.
And then there are the other Southern dummymanders. Tennessee Republicans thought it would be clever to go for a 9-0 GOP map by tying Democratic cities to rural Republican areas. They may succeed, but Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais was behind Wednesday in a district that Trump won by more than 20 points in 2024. Alabama’s GOP drew a district to unseat Rep. Shomari Figures that Trump would have carried by 14 points; Figures won by eight. North Carolina Republicans thought they had created an 11-3 map in their favor; Democrats appear to be on track to gain at least five seats, and several Republicans survived by razor-thin margins.
I could go on like this ad nauseam — there’s GOP carnage around every corner — but it’s more important to identify the cause, which is simple: Independents combined with a significant number of non-MAGA Republicans to reject the Trump GOP.
CNN’s exit poll makes that crystal clear. Democrats won the third of voters who say they are independents by 17 points. That alone accounts for about half of the 10-to-11-point margin by which the Democrats will probably win the national House vote. Democrats also won about 15 percent of non-MAGA Republicans, who made up 13 percent of the overall electorate. This accounts for another 20 percent of the overall margin. Chalk the remainder up to their own impressive mobilization — Democrats outnumbered Republicans slightly in the electorate — combined with sky-high levels of party loyalty. Some 98 percent of Democrats voted for Democrats, an almost unheard-of share.
It also appears that the impact of the Iran war on U.S. agriculture was a big factor in the GOP rout. Virtually every place with any significant farm sector swung massively against Republicans. The rural South, supposedly the GOP’s heartland, was Exhibit A.
It’s easy to see why this devastation occurred. Trump launched a war against Iran that created large increases in energy prices, and he now seems to have no way out beyond essentially conceding failure. Unwilling to use ground troops or to bomb Iran’s economic infrastructure, he has settled on a modern version of siege warfare. That can still work — the Iranian economy is running on fumes — but it’s taking time that the Republican Party didn’t have.
The consequences of Trump’s decision to ignore public opinion throughout his second term have now been laid bare, but there are more to come. The stunned survivors of this political disaster are not going to want to repeat the exercise. Much of the Trump GOP has come crashing down, and it’s a safe bet that any Republican with an eye on the future will be looking for a new set of plans for the rebuilding.
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