WASHINGTON – Republicans' shocking midterm election losses have left the GOP scrambling, with prominent figures in the party casting the rout as an "Armageddon" and an "extinction-level event" after President Donald Trump’s coalition collapsed.
While polls indicated Trump was in for a thumping, the scale of MAGA's defeat left his party stunned.
"If we don’t change, we’ll take more beatings," retiring Rep. Don Bacon, R-Nebraska, said.
A day after the election, Republicans were still sorting out the results — and what they mean for the GOP in red states and battleground districts. Democrats won Senate races in deep-red Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa and South Carolina, and flipped at least 30 House seats on their way to full control of Congress.
“This
is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country,” Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a news conference after the election.
Marc Short, who was Trump’s liaison to Congress during his first term, wrote on social media: "Complete Armageddon for GOP."
The dismal performance prompted immediate handwringing about where the party goes next after more than a decade of domination by Trump, who said on Nov. 4 he had no regrets about the way he approached the campaign or his closing argument.
"If I was on the ballot, we would have won," Trump insisted. "We weren’t able to transfer the love to candidates."
'You can only step on the people so much, and they push back'
Trump pushed the GOP to hold its first-ever midterm convention and held 30 events in roughly as many days, thrusting himself into the center of the election and urging voters to "pretend" he was on the ballot in a bid to energize his MAGA base. He dangled $5,000 checks in front of Americans, promised military projects and even handed out presidential pardons.
It didn’t work.
Demographic groups that Trump made gains with in 2024 — notably Latinos and young people — defected from the Republican Party in droves. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said the American people signaled they wanted a course correction, referencing a fight he had with the president's team in 2024 over the official GOP agenda.
"It was a very ugly process," Perkins said.
The social conservative leader said he continued to work with the administration for the good of the country, even after it "steamrolled the platform committee."
"But I think you can only step on the people so much, and they push back. And I think the feeling that a lot of us had in that process, the resentment toward the heavy-handedness, I think the nation expressed a rejection of that last night," Perkins said.
Trump reshaped the Republican Party over the last decade, driving out dissenters and pulling together a coalition that rallied his populist message around immigration, foreign policy and the economy. It fell apart, though, amid concerns about high prices and a president who promised no new wars and subsequently attacked Iran, sending the cost of gasoline soaring.
Republican leaders have been loath to question the two-term president’s approach, even as his approval rating plummeted torecord lows and became a drag on GOP candidates during the midterm elections.
Trump’s sweeping tariffs, aggressive deportation push, eight-month war, and other policies have generated considerable backlash, and polls showed much of his agenda is unpopular; still, it met with little GOP resistance. The breadth and depth of the rebuke voters delivered Trump could change that, however.
"If it’s not an inflection point, then we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes," said GOP strategist Mike DuHaime, former political director for the Republican National Committee.
From Iowa to North Carolina
Hispanic voters swung toward Democrats by 22 points compared with 2024; voters younger than 30 swung by 36 points. Democrats made gains among voters with and without college degrees, as well as among Americans earning less than $50,000 and more than $100,000 a year.
Republicans lost at least seven Senate seats and possibly more. The Alaska Senate race has not been called, while the Mississippi Senate race, which had not been figured into even the most optimistic projections for Democrats, remains tied.
In Iowa and Texas, Republicans lost governors' mansions and House seats. Republican Julia Letlow won her Senate seat in safely red Louisiana by fewer than 2 percentage points.
Moderate Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, of Pennsylvania, and centrist Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, both of whom had survived multiple elections despite being high on Democrats' target lists, were finally defeated. In North Carolina, the losses ran so deep that even Rep. Richard Hudson, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, lost reelection to Congress.
"This is the kind of thing that says to aspiring presidential candidates and others down the line, that if we get thumped in 26’ that ought to tell us something about the direction we take in 28,'" John Bolton, who served as national security advisor during Trump's first term, said in anticipating likely GOP losses during an interview shortly before the election. "And I think the clear reading is that people have had enough of Trump."
The White House pushed back on the criticism in a defiant email.
"Every time the Radical Left, the Fake News, and the professional panic class have written President Trump’s obituary, they have been wrong. They will be wrong again," it said.
It also sought to shift the attention to Democrats.
"In the final two years of his presidency, Democrats will try — and fail — to reverse everything President Trump has done," the release said, listing more than a dozen bullet points that accuse Democrats of seeking to reopen the border, raise taxes and launch impeachment probes.
'It’s not going to be an easy pivot'
But Republican critics of the president worry he has done historic damage to his party that can’t be untangled over the next two years.
Former Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton, who voted to impeach Trump and endorsed his Democratic opponent in 2024, said it will take "many cycles to remedy" what happened on Nov. 3, comparing it to what Republicans faced after President Richard Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal.
"I think it fractures MAGA and there’ll be a lot of pieces, and we’ll see who tries to put Humpty Dumpty together again," Upton said of the 2026 election.
In 1974, Democrats picked up four seats in the Senate and 49 in the House. A net 34 seats have been won by Democrats in this year's midterms so far.
Moving away from Trump could be difficult, though. The president still has the bully pulpit and plenty of hardcore fans.
He was able to oust four-term Texas Sen. John Cornyn and two-term Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy in favor of his preferred candidates in this year's Republican primaries. While 38% of likely voters in battleground states strongly or somewhat approved of his job performance in a New York Times/Siena poll released two days before the midterms, that number was 82% among Republicans.
The immediate loser could be Vice President JD Vance, if he moves forward with an anticipated bid for president.
In a more than 600-word statement on the outcome of the election, Vance said he was told in the lead-up to the election that Trump-Vance 2024 supporters were angry and planning to vote for the other party.
"Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026," the vice president said.
Vance said there would be quite a bit of "infighting and arguing over what happened and why," including over their economic messaging. "But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone."
It was the war in Iran.
"Any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there," Vance said.
Former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Trump’s most ardent supporters in Congress before resigning from office and becoming one of his chief critics, responded to Vance’s commentson social media, saying Republicans lost because the administration didn’t deliver on its campaign promises.
"Blaming the Iran war won’t work, and it’s not going to be an easy pivot,” Greene said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Complete Armageddon': GOP seeks path forward after midterm drubbing
