Victorious Democrats spent Wednesday eagerly pointing to all their midterm lessons from the previous night. Highlight affordability. Call out President Trump’s less popular policies. Run on a bold, populist vision — or perhaps a more calibrated, moderate one.
But it might actually be Republicans who stand to learn the most from the results.
Around the country, races where the G.O.P. once seemed to stand a chance — the redistricting measure in California, or the governor’s race in New Jersey — turned into blowouts as the voters who helped power Trump’s smashing 2024 victory stayed home. The president’s longstanding edge on the economy, my colleague Shane Goldmacher pointed out, seemed to fade.
Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson have been quick to shrug off these results; Trump himself suggested that the problem was simply that he wasn’t on the ballot. Some in their party, though, say it’s time to acknowledge they have a problem.
“Republicans need to confront that we had a bad night. And that it didn’t have to be a bad night,” Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, told me this morning. Trump was right that his absence from the contest meant that voters stayed home, Gingrich said, but that’s a challenge his party has to confront, not ignore, particularly as Trump acknowledges that he can’t run for president again.
“You can’t just shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Gee, if only we could run Donald Trump every time,’ because you can’t do it,’” Gingrich said. “When you talk about ’26 and ’28, Republicans have to find a way to motivate the base Trump voter to come out and vote.”
Historical winds blowing
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