On May 3, 2016 — the night Donald Trump effectively clinched the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for the first time — then-Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
Graham was scarcely alone in voicing such sentiments. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Gov. Jeb Bush, and most political analysts said much the same thing. After all, how could nominating an unpopular, profane, and authoritarian reality star — with more expertise in stiffing contractors than formulating policies — lead a major political party to anything but ruin?
On Tuesday night, the reckoning that Graham had prophesied finally arrived, just a decade behind schedule.
As of this writing, the Democratic Party appears all but certain to win nine of the cycle’s top 10 Senate battleground states, including perennial bastions of Republicanism like Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina. And Democrats are favored to prevail in the 10th battleground (Alaska), while winning at least 255 House seats. Then there’s an 11th race almost no one saw coming (Mississippi) that is heading down to the wire. The party’s share of the national congressional vote isn’t entirely clear. But many analysts expect it to be the largest that either party has won since the 1970s.
Among the many Republicans felled by this “blue tsunami” was Graham’s own sister, Darline, whom Trump handpicked as the GOP’s nominee in South Carolina, after Lindsey died earlier this year.
From one angle, these results are astonishing. We have not seen a wave this large in half a century. And every previous post-2016 election cast doubt on whether such a Democratic rout was even possible. After all, Democrats won a national landslide in the 2018 midterms, but nevertheless failed to gain Senate control, as red-state electorates still proved largely unwilling to back Democratic candidates.
Conventional wisdom held that the nationalization of elections — and polarization of voters — had brought an end to the era when idiosyncratic Democratic candidates could compete in overwhelmingly Republican states.
No longer. Tuesday’s results look like precisely what many expected in early 2016, before Trump proved himself more politically formidable than most of his critics had imagined.
All of which raises the question: Why now? Why did Trump manage to provoke an epochal rebuke from American voters in 2026, but not in preceding elections?
It’s partly “the economy, stupid”
The most plausible answer is, to quote the legendary Democratic consultant James Carville, “the economy, stupid.”
As 2016 made clear, the American electorate didn’t consider Trump’s illiberalism or inexperience as disqualifying as mainstream elites did. And some believed that the business executive would be well-suited to manage the economy, or at least, bring about a measure of welcome economic change.
For much of his first term, Trump appeared to validate this impression, presiding over low inflation and full employment. In December 2019, a CNN poll found voters more satisfied with the US economy than they’d been in nearly two decades. (Of course, 2020 would bring economic upheaval, but many Americans didn’t consider Trump culpable for the pandemic.)
Trump’s apparent economic efficacy put a floor beneath his approval and the GOP’s electoral performances during term one. And it made him a somewhat more credible anti-inflation candidate in 2024.
Upon reelection, however, Trump showed less than zero interest in containing the cost of living. Rather, he actively pushed up prices by imposing large tariffs on most imported goods and triggering a global energy crisis with his war in Iran.
The latter proved particularly consequential. Between February (when the war began) and Election Day, Americans’ energy costs skyrocketed along with the Democrats’ polling advantage.
The whole “authoritarian nightmare” thing also mattered
Although the economic context is likely the biggest single driver of the GOP’s belated reckoning, it is not sufficient to explain it. The 2026 economy isn’t great. But it also isn’t a total disaster. America’s inflation rate is a bit under 4 percent; in November 2022, when Joe Biden suffered a much smaller midterm rebuke, it was over 7 percent. Our nation’s unemployment rate, meanwhile, sits at 4.2 percent; in November 2010, it was nearly 10 percent, yet the GOP won a smaller share of the national vote than Democrats apparently did Tuesday night.
To explain the scale of the GOP’s drubbing then, we can’t rely on material factors alone.
It is true that Trump has been an illiberal demagogue from the moment he launched his candidacy in 2015. And of course, he incited an insurrectionary riot on Capitol Hill in 2021 without squandering his political viability.
Nevertheless, the cruel and authoritarian character of Trump’s political project was more naked over the past two years than ever before. The first Trump administration did not tweet out white nationalist slogans from federal agency accounts on a regular basis. More critically, it did not ramp up interior immigration enforcement to the degree that the second Trump White House has.
The indiscriminate nature of ICE enforcement over the past two years alienated many Latino voters, who had warmed to Trump in 2024. A recent NBC News/Telemundo poll found that 65 percent of Latino voters disapproved of ICE, while nearly a quarter said they personally knew someone who was detained or deported over the past two years. On Tuesday night, Latino counties swung massively against Republicans.
Meanwhile, Trump’s willingness to condone ICE agents’ killing of two US citizens — combined with his broader assaults on civil liberties and government integrity — may have energized his opposition to an unprecedented extent.
The costs of Trumpism could linger
It is still unclear whether the GOP will pay a lasting price for its Faustian bargain with Trump. In early 2016 — before he himself became a Trump toady — Lindsey Graham predicted that a Trump nomination would not only cost the Republicans the 2016 election but “destroy the party for decades to come.”
There is little chance that the GOP will be politically irrelevant for a generation. But precisely how it will wriggle out of the corner that Trump has led it into remains to be seen. The party plainly needs to distinguish its brand from the president’s. Yet its remaining elected officials are overwhelmingly from deeply pro-Trump jurisdictions. And unlike George W. Bush after 2008, Trump is unlikely to quietly abide his party disowning him.
Whatever the future brings, Republicans will not soon forget a loss of this magnitude. Tuesday’s results are unlikely to cure the GOP of its taste for illiberal demagogy. But the next GOP leader may hesitate before launching new trade (or actual) wars, winking at neo-Nazis, or letting federal agents execute American citizens.
The political costs of Trumpism were, in fact, exceptionally high. It just took 10 years for the bill to come due.
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