Republicans are finally paying the price that party leaders predicted when they first nominated Donald Trump, and there’s no clear path out of the hole he’s dug for them, according to a new analysis.
On the night Trump clinched the GOP nomination in May 2016, then-Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it,” and Vox’s Eric Levitz observed that finally proved true.
“On Tuesday night, the reckoning that Graham had prophesied finally arrived, just a decade behind schedule,” Levitz wrote.
Democrats appear set to win nine of the cycle’s top 10 Senate battlegrounds, including longtime GOP strongholds Kansas, Texas and South Carolina, and are favored in Alaska. They are on track for at least 255 House seats, and analysts expect their share of the national congressional vote to be the largest for either party since the 1970s.
Among the casualties was Graham’s own sister, Darline, whom Trump hand-picked to run for the late senator’s seat in South Carolina.
Levitz credits part of the rout to economic pain, noting Trump “showed less than zero interest” in the cost of living, driving up prices with tariffs and a war in Iran that sparked a global energy crisis.
But the economy alone can’t explain a wave this large, he argued. Inflation was over 7 percent when Joe Biden suffered a much smaller midterm rebuke in 2022.
Instead, Levitz wrote, “the cruel and authoritarian character of Trump’s political project was more naked over the past two years than ever before,” including white nationalist slogans posted from federal agency accounts and indiscriminate ICE raids. Latino counties swung massively against Republicans, and Trump’s willingness to condone ICE agents’ killing of two U.S. citizens may have energized his opposition “to an unprecedented extent.”
Now Republicans must figure out how to escape, according to the analysis.
“The party plainly needs to distinguish its brand from the president’s,” Levitz wrote. “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.”
The defeat may at least make future GOP leaders think twice, Levitz argued. The next one “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,” he concluded. “It just took 10 years for the bill to come due.”
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