After taking a coast-to-coast pulping like the Republican Party took last night, any team led by a competent coaching staff would take stock. Losing is a learning opportunity. Getting publicly and completely rebuked by the American people in hundreds of small elections is the Harvard Ph.D. of losing.
The GOP should get a mirror, hold it up and say: “Look at you now. You got whipped. And by a bunch of nerds.” That is unlikely to happen, which is a testament to how deformed the institution has become under the totalizing leadership of President Trump—although “leadership” surely isn’t the right word for what he’s done.
Leadership implies thoughtfulness, strategic vision, stewardship and paternal care. Mr. Trump possesses none of those qualities in any measure. He has never demonstrated any interest in advancing or preserving the Republican Party’s traditional commitments to free markets, free trade, individual responsibility, fiscal thrift or the sanctity of life. He is sometimes OK on national security. Give him that.
Across his decade as the nominal leader of the GOP, Mr. Trump has often been as hostile to its members and representatives as he has been to the members and representatives of the other party. Now, at long last, the reckoning. Live by the ego maniac, die by the ego maniac.
With no real leader, no real change is possible. When the GOP looks in the mirror it should see a starving, malnourished loser with two black eyes and a bandage around its head. If it does a slow turn it should see a sign that says, “Kick me.” Looking lower it should see another sign that says, “Go ahead and kick me again. Nobody’s going to stop you, because nobody cares. I deserve this.”
The only course of treatment is the application of time, in the fullness of which the American people will grow tired of the arrogance and incompetence of the Democratic Party. It, too, will get a pulping one day, and the Republicans will get another turn behind the wheel. We can only hope it has learned a thing or two by then.
Also insightfully reflecting on the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections is Yuval Levin. A slice:
But these have been overwhelmed by the broader tenor of this administration, which has utterly lacked any public-spirited vision or direction and has allowed itself to be defined by Trump’s own vapid impulsivity and thuggish narcissism, and to descend into shameless personal corruption. The president’s uses of power have tended to involve starting risky and complicated ventures that he has had neither the patience nor the strategy to finish and then moving on from them, as if it hardly matters how they might end up, and any bad news that results can just be overwhelmed by the next big thing. This has often been his path through life, of course, but the stakes of failure are awfully high when what’s at issue is a war or trade policy rather than an ill-conceived casino project. And at this point, the president just seems to have grown tired of his job, seeking escape from its burdens in ridiculous vanity projects while real problems (often of his own creation) fester.
In fact, sheer exhaustion now defines the public’s responses to Trump, too. Many Americans who had a lot of tolerance for him and once found his antics entertaining are tired of it all. His silly nicknames and his petty whining haven’t gotten any dumber — they were always this dumb. But many people who thought they were funny have grown sick of them, and Trump’s sheer unseriousness now strikes some of his former supporters as inadequate to the office and the moment.
How much did the masked marauders of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contribute to making one of Trump’s two most salient issues in 2024, immigration, into a negative for him? How much did his tariffs nullify another winning issue of 2024, inflation?
The importance of money in politics is more asserted and deplored than measured. In Texas, Elon Musk, the most overrated dabbler in U.S. politics, perhaps did something useful with his estimated $224 million money geyser for Republicans. He unintentionally demonstrated that there is a point at which the utility of political dollars not only declines steeply, but actually becomes negative. Senator-elect James Talarico prospered politically while saying, “Texas is not for sale.”
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Our parties are primordial. So, the Republicans’ recovery is as predictable as what will cause it — excesses by Democrats. They will misread the largely negative nature of the voters’ mandate to them, which is: Stop the national embarrassments, the rampant egotism, corruption, recklessness and incompetence.
Congressional Democrats will rightly try to investigate, publicize and discourage all of this. Trump might inadvertently give Congress a spine transplant by spurning its subpoenas. By a political version of Newton’s third law of motion (for every force or action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction), his obduracy might prompt, on Capitol Hill and in the public, an overdue reaction against presidentialism — the overbearing primacy of the chief executive — that has poisoned politics for decades.
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Euphoria about the smashing to smithereens of his degraded party — a necessary act of civic hygiene — should be tempered by some facts: The president has learned how much latitude a president has if he acts fast and breaks things because he has no constitutional conscience — no allegiance to the spirit of the document. He has learned this from executive branch enablers masquerading as conservatives.
And the most important fact we have learned this autumn is never mind his ballroom and his gigantic arch-cum-sniper’s-nest. The president’s rhetorical streams of semiconsciousness have made something patent: He is not well. There might be dark, dangerous days ahead.
“The real reason we lost is obvious,” Mr. Vance wrote. “The reason we lost is the war.” Corruption? He didn’t mention it, though 90% in the national exit poll rated it of crucial or major importance to their vote.
He also had nothing to say about tariffs, even as cost of living placed second at 89%. On immigration, which scored even with the Iran war (73% vs. 74%), and which the Trump team managed to turn into a political weakness with its harsh enforcement, Mr. Vance set up a straw man by warning against “establishment” calls for “amnesty” that no Republican is calling for.
The selective blame is no accident. While the Vice President has become a true believer on tariffs and hard-line immigration restriction, unidentified leakers to the press throughout the Iran war have suggested he opposed it. When Mr. Vance now writes, “To the people who are pissed off and want to say, ‘I told you so’: you’re right, you did tell us so,” he’s thinking of himself.
Citing unlisted data from an unnamed friend, Mr. Vance wrote that the Republican voters who strayed claim they could be won back if the GOP would “1) End the war.” He also praised the “political advice” that counseled a “diplomatic resolution to the conflict”—his own position, which dragged out the war after its initial six weeks with a worthless April cease-fire and June deal that Iran immediately violated.
It could be honorable to speak up internally about the need to end a war. But to post it on social media is to tell the Iranians they now have the upper hand in nuclear and Strait of Hormuz negotiations.
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The war is unpopular: 63% in the exit poll say attacking was the wrong decision and 37% the right decision. But that’s better than tariffs, which 66% say hurt the economy and only 21% say helped. Fifty-eight percent also say Trump immigration enforcement went too far.
Nothing on Mr. Vance’s list of ways to win back Trump 2024 voters gives evidence of any self-reflection, least of all “4) Change our relationship to Israel.” That’s the message of the Jews-on-the-mind podcast ecosystem promoted by Mr. Vance and led by his friend and ally Tucker Carlson. The exit poll shows only 4% of voters rank foreign-policy issues first.
The Iran war certainly contributed to Republicans’ defeat. The conflict has driven up energy prices, and more than one-third of voters in the Post-sponsored NORC survey listed the war as one of the country’s three biggest issues. More than 6 in 10 of them voted Democratic.
But the economy ranked as a substantially larger worry. According to a separate Fox News Voter Poll, which had a sample of about 80,000 people, 66 percent of midterm voters said Trump’s tariffs have hurt the national economy and 64 percent said tariffs have hurt the economy in their area. Eighty-nine percent said the cost of living was a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote, and 63 percent blamed unusually high prices more on Trump’s policies than on factors outside his control.
Republican candidates saw the danger coming. Five battleground Senate nominees avoided mentioning tariffs at the party’s September convention in Dallas. So did Vance. Trump, on the other hand, boasted that tariffs were “making us much richer than we ever thought.”
As Election Day approached, the administration’s own actions suggested otherwise. Trump suspended tariffs on certain ground beef imports to lower grocery prices. After Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) appealed to administration officials, the White House exempted nine categories of Canadian products important to agriculture in her state. Collins lost anyway.
As red states in the Midwest such as Kansas and Iowa turned into competitive battlegrounds, farmers received some protection from protectionism. Tariffs raised equipment costs while trade wars reduced foreign markets for American crops. Instead of removing those costly distortions, the administration compensated farmers. A promised $8 billion bailout shortly before the election brought projected direct federal payments to farmers this fiscal year to about $55 billion.
GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller ponders, with public-choice analysis, the midterm results.
Kevin Madden tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
“This election was a lesson in political gravity. When voters’ top concerns are inflation and affordability, and you answer those concerns with tariffs, a trade war, and a war with Iran that exacerbates those worries, you lose elections.”
[Frank] Meyer’s position was not, of course, that individuals do not need help pursuing moral excellence. But he was convinced that attempts to use state force to make people virtuous were likely, in reality, to achieve the opposite, all while inviting tyranny by concentrating too much power in a single institution.
When [gasoline] prices spike sharply upward, economic illiterates everywhere are quick to see evidence of collusion or monopoly power among oil companies. In fact, big price spikes are evidence of exactly the opposite. Colluders and monopolists don’t have to wait for changes in supply and demand to hike their prices; they squeeze us to the limit all year round. Sure, changes in demand and supply give them a little more leeway, so prices still fluctuate – but only a relatively small amount.
As such, commercial society demands much of us: to decline to enslave ourselves to immediate desires, short-term considerations, and the lies of relativism; to embrace the virtues of prudence, magnanimity, and benevolence, especially when it seems expedient to set such habits aside; and to be wise and virtuous people, however exalted or humble our place in society might be.
There has never been a shortage of people eager to draw up blueprints for running other people’s lives.
