Earlier this year, as President Donald Trump and his top advisers stared down increasingly grim polling for Republicans, they devised a strategy for staving off losses in the midterm elections: Put Trump front and center.
The president appeared in taxpayer-funded campaign ads that showed him and U.S. forces in the Iran war, created a new midterm convention to star in, and crisscrossed 20 states to appear in 30 rallies in the campaign’s final weeks.
Democrats would make the elections about him anyway, his advisers reasoned, and at least this way the president could motivate his core supporters to get to the polls in a way no other Republican could.
“We turned the typical midterm scenario on its head,” said Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Trump’s 2024 campaign, in an interview shortly before Election Day. “Instead of running to the middle or running away, we decided to just run right into it.”
They ran into a wall of voters’ anger.
Trump — who entered his second term last year with some of his highest approval ratings on record and optimism from an expanded electorate that believed he could lower prices — led his party to generational losses, including a Senate seat in Kansas that hadn’t gone blue in nearly a century.
He underestimated how angry voters had grown at his handling of the economy, tariffs and the war he launched in Iran this year, alienating key segments of the coalition Trump built in his historic 2024 win, including young men, Black men and Hispanics. He leaves the future of the party reshaped by him unclear.
Republicans began the campaign with a favorable Senate map, aggressive plans to redraw House districts and access to enormous sums of money. They ended up losing at least seven Senate seats, most of them in states Trump carried by double-digit margins just two years ago, as well as control of both chambers of Congress.
On the eve of the election, standing in front of the newly renovated Reflecting Pool, Trump offered a historical explanation for his party’s predicament.
“For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms,” he said. “But we gave this a very strong shot.”
But Tuesday’s steep losses point to more than the usual political pendulum swings. The president drove down his own popularity, squandered his trust with voters on the economy and created an impossible environment for many incumbents. He started a war that spiked fuel prices, failed to focus on affordability while seeming preoccupied with White House renovations, and backed candidates whose liabilities required expensive interventions.
As the political environment deteriorated and the map expanded, weak incumbents who had rarely faced competitive races in their lifetimes faltered in deep-red states, compounding their troubles.
Democrats, despite their own fissures, took advantage of the mess: They recruited established candidates in some key races and attacked Republicans over the costs of Trump’s second term. Republicans significantly out-raised Democrats overall as Elon Musk and other big donors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs and other groups, but Democratic candidates nonetheless out-raised Republican candidates, helping make up the gap.
In the end, Republicans outspent Democrats in competitive midterm races $2.6 billion to $1.8 billion, a Washington Post analysis of AdImpact data found. It didn’t matter.
This account of how Republicans lost their majorities is based on interviews with dozens of people in both parties involved in the races, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.
The early bet
Republicans began the campaign season believing they had a plan to survive the usual backlash against a president’s party.
Their Senate majority stood at 53 seats, and all but one of the GOP-held seats up for election were in states Trump had won in 2024. The House, where the margin has hovered around five seats, was more vulnerable, but party leaders hoped a mid-decade redistricting effort would strengthen their position.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) scored early wins working with Trump to shape the field. In hours-long Oval Office meetings, Johnson secured endorsements for his preferred House candidates. Thune and Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, persuaded Trump to back Mike Rogers, a former congressman, in Michigan and Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa, avoiding potentially divisive primaries with two polished candidates who had extensive experience.
Democrats focused early on recruiting candidates who had won in red states before: former governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina, former congresswoman Mary Peltola in Alaska and former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Even so, few Democrats initially believed that they could retake the Senate this year. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, predicted shortly after Trump’s 2024 win that it would take “at least two cycles” to recapture the chamber.
“When I first talked about taking back the Senate in 2025, people rolled their eyes,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) told reporters just before midnight on Election Day.
But by late 2025, Trump’s approval rating had fallen to around 40 percent. His tariffs, announced earlier that year, had driven up the prices of some goods, and the president often defended them in ways that could sound insensitive.
“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said at an April Cabinet meeting.
Much of the year had also been consumed by the push to release files on disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which a House committee voted to subpoena from the federal government that July, over Trump’s prolonged objections.
Senior White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance and chief of staff Susie Wiles, arranged meetings with outside pollsters and analysts tracking Trump’s losses among newer members of his coalition, according to three people involved.
One pollster, Mark Mitchell, urged Trump over lunch in November to refocus on affordability. Mitchell, whom Vance had invited, said the president seemed more interested in discussing golf than how to regain support among working-class voters.
Trump’s advisers urged him to travel the country to demonstrate his attention to the cost of living. In December, they privately described plans for near-weekly rallies throughout 2026. That schedule failed to materialize until the campaign’s final weeks.
Several of the president’s political advisers also worried that top White House adviser Stephen Miller’s emboldened army of immigration agents and the mass-deportation agenda was hurting them, especially after agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in separate incidents in Minneapolis in January.
Republicans, knowing the challenge they faced selling themselves on the economy, instead settled on a contrast message that they believed would disqualify Democrats to voters.
“It’s a contrast between common sense and crazy,” Johnson said at a recent Iowa event, crediting former House speaker Newt Gingrich with coining the slogan.
They also planned to push the sweeping tax cut legislation the GOP passed in 2025, emphasizing provisions including no taxes on tips and investment accounts for children intended to appeal to middle- and lower-income voters.
But Trump’s attention was often on foreign affairs, as he authorized an unorthodox strike on Venezuela and bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities.
On Feb. 28, Trump launched coordinated strikes with Israel against Iran. Iran then closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving up fuel prices and adding a new burden on voters already frustrated by high prices.
The action violated Trump’s pledge not to start wars, and his top advisers were divided on its wisdom. But Republican lawmakers and strategists believed that the war would not necessarily doom them in November, provided gasoline prices fell by late July or August, before voters fully turned their attention to the campaign.
The administration’s mid-June memorandum of understanding with Iran offered hope that gas price relief was coming. But many Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), criticized the deal as soft on Iran.
“We think if we can get a 2 in as the first number in the price of gas nationally, that this whole thing blows wide open,” Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said in late June on the sidelines of his group’s annual convention. The average price of gas at the time was about $3.92 per gallon nationally, and by Election Day it had climbed to more than $4.
Democrats, still wary of the GOP’s financial edge, began to hope that their party would prevail as Republicans turned to attacking their candidates on transgender issues.
“Our bet was the economy is going to outweigh culture war fights,” said Mike Smith, the president of House Democrats’ super PAC, the House Majority PAC.
Still, Democrats faced their own challenges. Schumer’s top recruit in Maine’s Senate contest, Gov. Janet Mills (D), dropped out of the race in April, clearing the field for Graham Platner, a scandal-plagued political novice who had excited grassroots Democrats in the state in their bid to take out Republican Sen. Susan Collins. The primary in Michigan, where Schumer had been unable to recruit Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg into the race, became a messy three-way battle that often revolved around the issue of Israel, which divided Democrats.
The cost of Texas
Even before the war, Republican leaders had identified Texas as a potential problem they hoped Trump would help them avoid.
The morning after Sen. John Cornyn narrowly finished first in the state’s Republican primary, Trump told Thune something GOP leaders had been longing to hear: He was going to endorse the incumbent as he faced a runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton.
A Truth Social post in Trump’s voice was drafted, according to several people who saw it. Republican leaders believed that Cornyn could comfortably hold the seat. A runoff win by Paxton, however, could force them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars defending Texas — money they needed elsewhere.
But the endorsement never appeared.
For weeks, Republican leaders appealed to Trump with polling, warnings from donors and even the words of Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas), who said Cornyn would be impossible to beat. Thune and Scott urged Trump not to endorse Paxton; the president’s own top political advisers also favored backing Cornyn. Paxton’s allies countered by appealing to the president’s resentment of Senate Republicans and the preferences of his base. In May, Trump endorsed Paxton.
“I’m laughing at it in a kind of a sad way because it’s just an unforced error,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who retired rather than seek reelection in his purple state after clashing with Trump. “That’s just laying the ground for historic gains for the Democrats. And Democrats aren’t winning these elections; we’re losing them.”
Trump, furious over the Senate’s refusal to fund his ballroom project and to change its rules to pass a voter ID law, also did not believe Republicans’ central argument against Paxton: that he was so flawed he could lose, even in Texas.
Trump wrote of Talarico in late March: “Any human being running against him, sick, incompetent, close to death or, even a child, would win.”
The endorsement delay inflicted damage. Cornyn continued to pound Paxton with advertisements branding him “Crooked Ken,” mentioning his alleged affairs and questioning his growing wealth while in office. Later, Talarico would borrow many of the themes from Cornyn’s ads, describing Paxton as the most corrupt politician in Texas.
As Republicans fought each other for months after Paxton defeated Cornyn in the May runoff, Talarico spent more than $32 million introducing himself to general-election voters in ads between the primary and the end of August, according to AdImpact. Paxton’s campaign, by contrast, ran little advertising for months after his primary win. Top GOP officials acknowledged that Talarico was given too much time to introduce himself unchallenged.
“There were perhaps some sore feelings from the primary that caused people to be a little delayed in that,” one Republican official said.
By September, Texas threatened to consume money needed across an expanding Senate battlefield. During the national midterm convention in Dallas, Chris Young, a top operative in Elon Musk’s political operation, met with Alex Latcham, who leads the Senate Leadership Fund, to work out a rescue plan, according to two people briefed on the effort.
Musk ultimately donated $158 million to the group, freeing up money that SLF desperately needed to spend on other toss-up states.
Republican ads attacked Talarico as soft on crime and replayed his past comments that cast parents as abusive if they failed to recognize their trans children’s identities. Trump gleefully branded him “Talafreako,” leaning into the liberal arguments he made on transgender issues and veganism. The Democrat’s favorability ratings began to fall. But Paxton’s were even lower.
“It’s the worst general-election candidate polling on image I’ve seen in the state of Texas in my history,” a Republican strategist working on the race said of Paxton’s numbers.
Talarico connected Musk’s donation to his larger argument that Paxton was corrupt, telling voters in one of his own ads that Musk wanted to “buy” Paxton.
After the endorsement debacle, other tensions between Trump and congressional leaders emerged, with some believing that the president was uninterested in notching accomplishments on the economy for their incumbents to sell on the trail.
In June, Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for bipartisan housing legislation that was co-authored by Scott. Johnson, who is close with Trump, interceded for a week to try to prevent him from vetoing the legislation altogether. The president was still angry that the Senate had not changed its filibuster rules to pass a voter ID law, the Save America Act. In the end, Trump didn’t sign the housing bill, but he backed down from vetoing it, allowing it to become law.
The September reckoning
Texas was not the only Republican state looking worrisome.
Over the summer, officials noticed softening support for incumbents in Kansas and even Mississippi. Scott had established an incumbent protection program that tracked fundraising, time spent at home, local media appearances and other measures. He warned senators including Roger Marshall of Kansas, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi and James E. Risch of Idaho against complacency.
“People got tired of me saying the same thing over and over, so I started yelling,” Scott said.
At a summer confrontation at NRSC headquarters, Scott told Marshall that his fundraising and strategy were not cutting it, according to two people familiar with the encounter. Marshall pointed to high gas prices, something he could not control, to explain his poor poll numbers. Scott countered that he could control how often he showed up in his state. (Marshall was selling his Sarasota, Florida, home that had become a sore point in his campaign.)
In July, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) died. Trump endorsed his sister, Darline Graham, to fill his seat, and quickly backed the untested new candidate in the race to be her brother’s permanent replacement. That angered Rep. Ralph Norman, who argued that he had better experience for the role.
That same month, Democrats also caught a break in Maine, when Platner dropped out of the Senate race following a sexual assault allegation, which he denied. The party quickly coalesced around Troy Jackson, an unexciting but less-controversial nominee who previously led the state Senate.
As Republicans’ concerns about the Senate map grew, Trump prepared a different response to the party’s troubles: a two-day convention in Dallas designed to showcase his role as leader of the MAGA movement.
The Republican National Committee had changed its bylaws in January to accommodate the idea of a first-ever midterm convention. There would be no official business conducted — it would just be a party for die-hard supporters and donors, as a well as a chance for Republicans to raise more money.
But shortly after the convention, internal Republican polling showed support cratering, according to several party strategists. Voters had begun focusing on the election and remained angry about the high cost of living. Corruption climbed higher on the electorate’s list of concerns. Trump’s rapidly rising net worth while in office — plus bad headlines about his family, including a Russian oligarch bankrolling Trump’s son’s wedding party — collided with Americans’ dour feelings about their own economic situations.
An atmosphere of “doom and gloom” descended on the White House in September, according to a person involved in Trump’s midterm strategy.
As his popularity continued to sink, some candidates scrubbed Trump’s name from their websites and avoided mentioning him in advertisements or on the stump.
In September, sitting in his dining room off the Oval Office, Trump watched on a laptop as aides showed him an advertisement in which Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar (Florida) criticized his immigration policies. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” she said.
The president asked an adviser how to respond. The staffer advised him not to, according a person with knowledge of the conversation.
Trump complied for several days, but then shared multiple social media attacks on the Miami Republican, including one calling her “nothing but a back stabber.” (On Tuesday, Salazar appeared to be narrowly leading her opponent.) But her warning was prescient, as many Hispanic voters who had flocked to Trump in 2024 turned against him in Texas and other parts of Florida.
In Kansas, meanwhile, the party’s problems were becoming acute. Marshall’s internal polling showed him losing to Democrat Adam Hamilton outside the margin of error, even though the state had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Marshall’s campaign budget was so disorganized that it was unclear how much money was left for the final weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The NRSC, Trump’s team and Thune’s team pressed for Chris Grant, a more seasoned campaign operative, to take over the campaign, and Marshall’s chief of staff, Brent Robertson, eventually complied, texting Grant for help in October, just weeks before Election Day.
Grant’s team reworked the advertising and overhauled the budget. Marshall had attacked Hamilton, a popular preacher, as a “millionaire megachurch CEO with four homes.” Party officials wanted instead to portray Hamilton as a partisan Democrat beholden to Schumer, while running positive advertisements explaining why voters should reelect Marshall.
“He got caught asleep at the wheel. There’s no sugarcoating it,” one Republican said of Marshall.
The final sprint
On Oct. 1, Trump’s aides saw a change in the president’s mood, which had been glum for much of September, as he began to get out on the stump and interact with his fans at red-state rallies.
At one point, severe storms scuttled a planned helicopter trip from Denton, Texas, to a rally in Durant, Oklahoma. Trump took to the road instead, instructing the Secret Service to drive as fast as possible. His motorcade reached nearly 100 mph on closed highways.
An official traveling with him recalled thinking: “He’s actually serious that he’s going to go out and do this.”
The rally sprint gave advisers a measure of hope. They did not expect the events alone to transform the election, but they thought that Trump could give his supporters a reason to turn out in a campaign otherwise dominated by bad news.
In Ohio, his advisers believed his attention had helped Sen. Jon Husted, who was trying to hold off Brown. At rallies, Trump touted Husted as a former college football star and lavishly praised his backside.
“He, quite frankly, has put Jon Husted on the map more so than anyone ever thought that Jon Husted could be put on the map,” one adviser said.
In Michigan, Trump called Democrat Abdul El-Sayed a “jihadist” during an October rally full of dark themes about the Senate candidate. Republicans hoped lingering tensions between El-Sayed and his Democratic primary rival, Rep. Haley Stevens, would split the party enough to allow Rogers to slip through.
Trump had also opened the coffers of MAGA Inc., the super PAC backing him, announcing in late October that his political operation would spend $400 million in the midterms, all told. Earlier in the year, Republican strategists and donors worried that he had not approved a plan to deploy its enormous war chest.
The party was nevertheless running out of room. The Senate Leadership Fund cut spending in North Carolina and Georgia, effectively conceding those races as it tried to protect other seats.
In the end, Republicans lost Senate seats in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina. Mississippi, which has not elected a Democratic senator since 1982, remains too close to call, as does Alaska, another Republican stronghold. A Republican in Louisiana, where Trump endorsed against GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy in the primary, narrowly won the red state.
On Monday night, Trump asked voters to treat the election as if his own political future were at stake.
“I’m just asking everybody to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
Voters may have done exactly that, leaving Republicans to rake over the results.
“We’ve got to start thinking about running in a post-Trump world,” Tillis said. “If we’re at a low-water mark now, I see us having to look to new leadership moving into the next presidential cycle and moving on beyond Trump.”
Luke Connors contributed to this report.
The post The Republican missteps that laid the groundwork for a historic midterm rebuke appeared first on Washington Post.
