Rarely in American politics has a president traded away so much political support so quickly.
But Tuesday’s election results showed that even many Republicans opposed his policies. In Senate races in Ohio, Texas, Kansas and other battleground states, GOP candidates struggled to consolidate Republican voters while Democratic candidates drew close to universal support within their party. More than one-quarter of voters who backed a GOP House candidate said Trump’s tariffs had damaged the economy, and about one-quarter said his overall policies had made the economy worse, according to a large poll of 75,000 midterm voters, called The Voter Poll by SSRS.
“This is what happens when you govern by impulse,” said Steve Israel, a former Democratic congressman from New York, who led the party’s House re-election campaign for four years . “This is what happens when you’re not stepping back and analyzing what you need to do, but just throwing your elbows out and plunging forward.”
Seismic is not big enough to describe what has occurred,” said Jason Villalba, a former Republican House member in Texas, where Democrats won races for the Senate and governor. “It’s an abject repudiation of MAGA, of Trump and of Trumpism across the board. A president accustomed to creating his own political weather system, blowing through the traditional guardrails on executive powers, will now face a Democratic-led House and Senate that promise to try to reverse much of his agenda. Democrats will be under pressure to respond to their own angry and restive voters by investigating Trump’s financial gains in office, restoring the GOP’s cuts to health insurance programs and reining in deportations. One of Trump’s greatest assets—a MAGA movement that supported him with a rare intensity—is now damaged, if not fractured. Trump’s loyal political base allowed him to control the Republican-led Congress as he claimed unusual authority to slash federal agencies and take other actions without the approval of lawmakers.
President Trump had re-entered the White House with advantages he lacked in his first term: A victory in the popular vote, a cadre of aides eager to expand his authority and cultural currency that had NFL players doing the “Trump dance” in the end zone. “It’s total carnage,” said Tom Rath, a former Republican National Committee member in New Hampshire and veteran of multiple presidential campaigns. The losses that Republicans suffered on Tuesday marked one of the most decisive repudiations of a president in modern history. “What occurred today was a tectonic shift in American politics.
