There is one number that stands out above all others as I think through the meaning of the midterms: 13.
As I type this, Democrats are on track to achieve a 13-point margin in the total popular vote for the House of Representatives. If you put that in presidential terms, our nation hasn’t seen a margin like that since 1984, when Ronald Reagan swept the popular vote and won 49 states.
If you compare that margin to previous midterms, the American people haven’t spoken that clearly since 1974, the first midterm after Watergate.
That’s not the only important number, of course. There’s 81, the projected Democratic margin in the House. There’s 56, the possible number of Democratic senators (if Mississippi and Alaska go blue). And there’s 26, the potential percentage of the statewide swing (from Trump plus-14 in 2024 to Talarico plus-12 in 2026) that turned Texas blue.
I’m going to say that again — that turned Texas blue.
The Democrats hadn’t won a statewide race there since 1994, and then James Talarico led an epic rout. Republicans lost every single significant statewide race. Even the Republican State Supreme Court justices lost their races.
Over the last quarter-century of tight races and extreme partisan polarization, we’ve grown used to election analysis that requires poring over exit polls, agonizing over messaging mistakes, and parsing the impact of different issues and scandals.
Perhaps the paradigmatic example is the 2016 presidential election.
Did Donald Trump win because Antonin Scalia died and Republicans held their nose and voted for him to save Scalia’s seat? Maybe. Did Trump also win because the James Comey letter reopening the Hillary Clinton email investigation chased the “Access Hollywood” tape out of the headlines? Possibly.
Or did Hillary Clinton lose because she didn’t spend enough time in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania? Perhaps. Or did she lose simply because 2016 was a change election, and she represented the establishment? That could be, too.
But that kind of analysis is completely inappropriate in an election this decisive. In the aftermath of a wipeout of biblical proportions, it’s better to begin our analysis with one of my favorite biblical passages: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Or, put another way, it’s as if we pulled away the algae from Trump’s filthy Reflecting Pool, and found an inscription that read, “My name is Trump, king of kings: Look on my renovations, ye Mighty, and despair!”
That’s right: It’s the Ozymandias election.
It is difficult to overstate the sheer arrogance of Trump and his remaining MAGA base. They treated the rest of the people of this country as if they were of no consequence.
Actually, it’s worse than that. They treated the rest of the country as if they were enemies.
To the voters who longed for peace, he gave them a unilateral, undeclared war.
To the families seeking relief from high prices, he gave tariffs.
To the voters alarmed about corruption in Washington, he made the swamp so corrupt that barons of the Gilded Age are regretting that they were born in the wrong era.
To the new Hispanic Republican voters who helped Trump win and transformed the Republican coalition, he gave brutal racial profiling and pogroms in the streets of Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and other cities.
To voters who were weary of intolerance and cancel culture, he delivered a wave of censorship unseen since Woodrow Wilson imprisoned his political opponents by the hundreds.
To voters who wanted stability in the world, he gave fractured alliances and embraced Vladimir Putin, the world’s deadliest and most dangerous dictator.
And then, when dissenting Americans — including dissenting conservatives — condemned these outrages and cried out for relief, they were treated with contempt and rage.
The cancel culture of the MAGA right inflicted immense cruelty on its enemies, and MAGA relished their pain.
It would be a grave mistake to lay the blame for all this pride and arrogance on Trump alone. Last month I wrote that every institution eventually takes on the character of its leader, and so it is with Trump’s Republican Party.
The cult of Trump was so comprehensive, so all-consuming, that it became virtually impossible to succeed anywhere, at any level of Republican politics, without explicitly swearing fealty to Trump — and not just once but again and again, whenever you were asked to do so.
There was no better way to pledge loyalty to Trump than by acting like Trump.
That’s why a loathsome politician like Vivek Ramaswamy runs an ad exploiting the rape of a child. That’s why an equally loathsome politician like JD Vance spreads gross lies about immigrants far and wide even as innocent people suffer from the pain and shame that he caused.
That’s why grotesque racists like Bo French felt that they had a home in the Republican Party. After all, if the president can condemn entire groups of immigrants based on their countries of origin, then why can’t every other Republican who wants to broadcast his own bigotry do so? That’s why hundreds of thousands of Texas primary voters could look at Ken Paxton — and all of his adultery and corruption — and say, “Yep. That’s exactly the man we need in the Senate.”
If a MAGA voter is bewildered today, perhaps he should stop making a meme calling his opponents “fake and gay,” delete the post declaring that Indian Americans worship demons, turn off the podcast that’s shrieking at him that every person who votes Democratic is a heretic, and take a very long and thoughtful look in the mirror.
A guy can dream.
Donald Trump is to blame, but no one — absolutely no one — made you imitate him.
One thing that struck me when I traveled down to Texas to report on the Talarico-Paxton race was the combination of anger and fear emanating from Paxton’s Republican opponents.
They weren’t just angry at Paxton for challenging and beating the longtime incumbent, John Cornyn. They were furious at Paxton’s supporters, the people who’d insulted them, mocked them and hounded them out of Republican politics. They wouldn’t go on the record with their support for Talarico, but it was easy to see where they stood.
Midterm wipeouts don’t have to be fatal to parties (though they can signal a party’s demise). The Republicans almost held the White House in 1976, just two years after the 1974 election I mentioned earlier nearly wiped out the Nixon-era G.O.P. Bill Clinton was re-elected two years after the Republican revolution of 1994, and Barack Obama won after the Tea Party movement erupted in 2010.
But in those previous elections, the parties that experienced serious losses in the midterms were ultimately led by responsible adults who could react and respond to voters’ concerns, adjust policies and tactics, and revitalize their parties’ fortunes.
But Donald Trump is not Bill Clinton. He’s not Barack Obama. He’s not even Gerald Ford, who had the dignity and integrity to salvage the Republican brand after Watergate.
At least when Ford was trying to rebuild the Republican Party, the “crook” wasn’t still in the White House. In 2027, the Republicans will be trying to pick up the pieces with a crook in control of the Oval Office and his own cult of personality.
Trump is an erratic, egomaniac tinpot tyrant in decline who will blame everyone but himself for the loss. In fact, that’s already started. In a Truth Social post Tuesday night, he said that Fox News “bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”
There you have it. The problem with the 2026 midterms was that Fox News wasn’t sycophantic enough.
And there’s another thing — as a practical matter, every faction of the Republican Party has a reason to blame a different faction for its defeat. The circular firing squad has started, and every part of it has plenty of ammunition.
Free-trade Republicans are blaming the tariffs. America first Republicans are blaming the Iran war. (In an X post on Wednesday morning, Vance wrote, “The reason we lost is the war.”) Hispanic Republicans can blame ICE. South Asian Republicans can blame Bo French. Anti-woke Republicans can blame Trump’s crackdown on free speech.
They would all be correct, at least to some degree. They made the conscious decision to follow, defend and pledge allegiance to an unstable, hateful man, and now — at long last — they’re experiencing the inevitable consequences of their inexcusable moral compromises.
The next few days and weeks will be filled with conversation and debate over what the Democrats should do next. The easiest possible advice is to focus like a laser on the voters’ overwhelming concerns — corruption and the cost of living — but it’s now quite possible that our nation could be looking at a generational realignment.
That’s a conversation for another day. For now, we can sum up everything that happened in the midterms in three words, words that the MAGA movement has scorned for 10 years: Character is destiny.
Some other things I did
Speaking of character, my Sunday column was about Todd Blanche, Trump’s attorney general, and the damage he’s doing to the Department of Justice:
In case after case after case, the Department of Justice is targeting Trump opponents, making frivolous arguments and engaging in vindictive, meritless prosecutions.
I blame Trump, but I also blame Blanche. He doesn’t understand his own job.
We all know that Trump has an extreme view of executive power that renders him a virtual elected monarch. His administration’s actions extend well beyond conventional unitary executive theory, which puts a premium on presidential control over the executive branch. He treats the law as his plaything, deciding on his own whim which laws will be enforced and which ones will not.
It is true that the president is the boss of every cabinet official. He can fire them at will. But it is also true that the attorney general is different from every other member of the cabinet.
Unlike, say, Pete Hegseth, Blanche has three masters, not one. The attorney general and all the lawyers working for him also answer to the judiciary, which not only decides the cases he brings; it also governs the conduct of D.O.J. officials in court. And he also answers to the bar — rules of ethics are binding on every attorney, including government attorneys.
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