Republicans were left reeling on Wednesday after voters swung decisively against them, setting off fears that President Trump and his low approval ratings would again drag down the party’s midterm candidates.
As the scale of their electoral defeats set in, Republicans sought to find culprits, blaming their candidates, the government shutdown, a misguided focus on demonizing transgender issues, and a weak economic message.
Speaker Mike Johnson used a news conference to cast Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City and a proud democratic socialist, as the new leader of the Democratic Party. In emails and group chats, Republican officials slammed their nominee for governor in Virginia as a fatally flawed candidate and chided their donors for not opening their wallets wide enough. And on Fox News, other Republicans argued that Democrats had prolonged the government shutdown for their own advantage.
The one person no Republican dared to blame: Mr. Trump.
Democrats benefited from the president’s role in the elections. He loomed over them but did not do much to actually help Republicans, hosting no fund-raisers or in-person rallies, merely phoning into campaign calls intended to turn out supporters in New Jersey and Virginia. He did not even say the name of Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears of Virginia when he endorsed her for governor in a conversation with reporters aboard Air Force One.
Democratic voters, as they have done in nearly every election since Mr. Trump first took office, surged to the polls to express their discontent with his handling of the presidency. And Republicans again struggled to turn out their MAGA base without the president’s name on the ballot.
In his own understated way, Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge the problems with Republican turnout.
“They say that I wasn’t on the ballot and was the biggest factor,” he told reporters at a Wednesday breakfast with Republican leaders. “I don’t know about that. But I was honored that they said that.”
In Virginia, not only did Abigail Spanberger win the governor’s race by a margin not seen for a Democrat since the segregationist Albertis Harrison was on the ballot in 1961, but Democrats also flipped at least 13 seats in the state House of Delegates, wiping out a generation of suburban Republicans.
In New Jersey, Democratic turnout surged as Representative Mikie Sherrill, the party’s nominee for governor, received 26 percent more votes than Democrats won in 2021. Republican turnout increased only modestly.
And early county-level results suggested that Republicans did not hold the gains that Mr. Trump made in 2024 with young men and Latino and Black voters. Places like Perth Amboy, N.J., a heavily Hispanic city Mr. Trump lost by just nine percentage points last year, delivered a 50-point margin for Ms. Sherrill.
The governor’s races in liberal-leaning New Jersey and Virginia were always long shots for Republicans with Mr. Trump in the White House, but the party’s defeats still underscored its central political conundrum ahead of the midterm elections.
If Republicans break with Mr. Trump, they risk a public flogging that could depress turnout with the party’s base or cost them in future primary races. But if they defend him, they energize Democrats and independents who are furious with his handling of the federal government and increasingly disenchanted with his stewardship of the economy.
Structurally, the midterm map still favors Republicans. A chain of redistricting efforts across the country is likely to give Republicans an advantage in the contests that will determine whether they maintain control of the House. On the Senate side, all but two of the 22 Republican seats up for election are in states that Mr. Trump carried by at least 10 percentage points in 2024.
Republican strategists say they see a path to keeping control of Congress, albeit a difficult one.
“It centers around three things,” said Corry Bliss, who led the party’s House super PAC for the 2018 election. “The economy being good, the president being motivated and engaged, and the Democrats continuing to be crazy.”
Still, there was clear evidence on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s actions were acutely damaging to Republican candidates. His approval rating hit a second-term low of 37 percent in a recent CNN poll, and more than six in 10 voters disapproved of how he was handling the shutdown.
In New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican nominee for governor, struggled to separate himself from an administration that canceled federal funding for a major rail tunnel that would benefit the state’s many commuters. The problems were even more stark in Virginia, where Ms. Earle-Sears would have faced Republican blowback if she had criticized Mr. Trump’s firing of thousands of federal employees.
“Independent Virginia voters were decisively against Trump for a variety of reasons,” said former Senator George Allen of Virginia, who also served as governor of the state. “Then the top of the Republican ticket ran a historically awful campaign that created very adverse political gravity.”
The situation is a striking reversal from President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time in office, when Democrats found that their Senate and House candidates often overperformed the president’s low numbers.
Republicans cannot win midterm races unless they figure out how to drive more MAGA conservatives to the polls, said Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of Republican National Committee, who is now leading a new conservative group that is trying to make Michigan more red.
“You cannot win without some portion of them,” she said. “You’re never going to get all of them, but you can’t have a huge portion of them sitting out and win.”
Republicans don’t yet have a clear solution to that problem.
Speaking on Wednesday from the steps of the Capitol, Mr. Johnson tried to remind Republicans that the future of the Trump agenda could very well rest on whether the party can maintain control of Congress next year. A Democratic congressional majority, he said, would again try to impeach Mr. Trump.
“He won’t have four years, he’ll have only two,” he said. “He is in a very real sense on the ballot.”
Mr. Johnson recounted that Mr. Trump had promised in a private conversation on Wednesday morning that he would take a more involved role in the midterms, holding rallies and fund-raisers and doing “all the things” to support Republican candidates.
“He is very much engaged, very dialed in, and he understands the stakes,” Mr. Johnson said.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and other Republicans — including Mr. Trump himself — pointed the finger at the government shutdown. Mr. Youngkin, speaking to reporters on Wednesday morning in Richmond, said Democratic senators should end the shutdown that had just handed their party significant political victories.
“The government shutdown is a big challenge,” he said. “I think it caused quite a turnout yesterday.”
Chris LaCivita, who helped manage Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign, blamed Ms. Earle-Sears, saying on social media that “a bad candidate and bad campaign have consequences.”
Others on the right suggested that Republicans should adopt some of the issues that Democrats have focused on relentlessly this year.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as a culture warrior in the mold of Mr. Trump and is now seeking to become governor of Ohio, posted a “no sugar coating” video on social media in which he said Republicans needed to focus on costs and ditch “identity politics.”
“Our side needs to focus on affordability,” he said. “Make the American dream affordable. Bring down costs.”
But Erick Erickson, the conservative talk radio host, said that it was Mr. Trump and Republican policies that were driving the price increases Democrats have railed against this year.
“Unfortunately for the GOP,” he wrote on X, “the president, his base, and the institutional voices elevated by MAGA have embraced the very policies driving up costs and cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it.”
Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
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