This article was published in Average American News on November 5, 2026.
I already know that some of you aren’t going to like what I have to say about Tuesday night, and I know that some of you may even insist I don’t have the right to talk about what happened. But that instinct - to dismiss criticism, to treat honest examination as disloyalty - is exactly how we wound up in the position we are in today.
Although some races are still pending, the power shift is hard to ignore. In the Senate, Democrats will likely hold a six-seat majority. In the House, Democrats will take control, with some predicting as much as a 40-seat majority. Among those victories are at least six candidates who are either members of or were backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, such as Representative-Elects Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York.
So how did we get here?
The data is pretty damning. The coalition that helped deliver President Donald Trump and Republicans their 2024 mandate fell apart almost in real time. Hispanic voters, who gave Trump roughly 46 percent of their vote in 2024, backed Democrats in House races by as much as 62 percent. Black men, a group that had moved toward Republicans two years ago, returned to the low teens. Voters under 30 went for Democrats by a staggering 75 percent, a complete reversal from the near split we saw in 2024.
These aren’t small shifts that can just be ignored. They’re the kinds of numbers that determine who controls Congress, and they help explain how Republicans lost ground in states like Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and South Carolina. In several states, Republicans ran ads that portrayed young white men as lazy moochers gaming the system. That message may have been aimed at other voters, but it landed as a direct attack on a group that moved toward Republicans in 2024, because of rising costs and a weak job market under Joe Biden, and drove them away from the party this year.
And despite what some are claiming, turnout also appears to have been much higher than in the 2022 midterms. Early voting topped 60 million before Election Day, and the total ballots will likely exceed 120 million when all is said and done. Clearly, this wasn’t an election that nobody showed up for. The problem, actually, was that the voters who Republicans needed to turn out didn’t turn out in the places they needed them to. And that’s an important distinction.
So when Trump told voters to treat this election as though his name were on the ballot, the thinking made sense. His presence has generally been a major turnout driver for Republicans. But this time, it also turned the election into a referendum on him, his administration, and the decisions that they’ve made over the past two years. The results are proof of just how much that hurt.
Now, there will be voices who try to convince you otherwise, but we’re going to have to cut through the bullshit if we hope to learn from this. The biggest failure was clearly the economy, and, more specifically, how Republicans talked about it. There were real accomplishments to point to: no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, the enhanced child tax credit, Trump Accounts, and Trump Rx. Make no mistake, these policies are good for ordinary Americans. Yet, no matter how hard Trump and Republicans tried to sell those wins, the reality is that, to many Americans, none of it really mattered because they were still paying more at the gas pump and grocery store.
Higher prices, driven by a combination of tariffs and the Iran war, became the defining economic issue of the campaign. The Democrats didn’t need some elaborate economic plan to take advantage of it. They just had to point to what people were experiencing, connect it to the decision to go to war, and put the blame squarely on Trump and the Republicans. They did that over and over again, and Republicans never came up with an effective response.
As the saying goes: if you repeat something often enough, eventually people will believe it, even if the full story is more complicated. Republicans tried to take back the narrative with a historic midterm convention in Dallas 60 days before the election, but that effort only magnified the problem. When Trump was asked about the effect of rising prices on ordinary Americans, his response was combative and dismissive: “I don’t give a damn.”
That’s not just a messaging problem; it’s an empathy problem. It’s the same mistake Joe Biden made when his administration kept insisting that inflation was transitory while American families watched their grocery bills climb. Voters don’t necessarily expect their politicians to fix everything overnight, but they do expect them to understand what ordinary people are going through. You can defend a policy, explain a difficult position, or even disagree with voters, but what you cannot do is make people feel like their struggles don’t matter.
None of this is to diminish the fact that a perception of persistent corruption, the chaotic handling of deportations under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem - even though border security and deportations remain popular with the broader Republican base - and Trump’s fixation on vanity projects like the reflecting pool and White House ballroom all contributed to the sense that Republicans were too distracted to govern. Those are all real, but the data and exit polls distinctly point to affordability and the war as the major issues carrying a lion’s share of the responsibility for Tuesday night’s results.
It also needs to be said that none of this happened in a vacuum. The party in power has historically struggled in the midterms, and Republicans were never walking into this with great odds. The polling, which many of us on the right dismissed as a suppression tactic, reflected that. Losing seats was always a possibility, but losing this many, and watching so much of the 2024 coalition fall apart, was not inevitable.
The instinct now, as it always is, will be to point fingers. MAGA Republicans will blame the RINOs. Neoconservatives will blame Trump and the populist movement. Others will point their finger at influencers like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, arguing that they encouraged their followers to punish the Republican Party.
And while there are arguments to be made about all those things, those making them are missing the bigger picture. Candidate quality played a role in a handful of these races. In places like Texas and South Carolina, Republicans were saddled with weak candidates who carried real liabilities, making the difficult environment worse. That doesn’t explain the scale of the losses, but it is certainly part of the story in specific states.
Democrats won the messaging battle because they found the one issue that Republicans couldn’t agree on. There was no unified response on gas prices or the Iran war because Republicans were divided on the issue in the first place. Candidates were hesitant to defend it. Surrogates were contradicting one another. And the coalition that came together to elect Trump in 2024 simply wasn’t there in the same way this time around. Young voters, Hispanic voters, Black voters, and even Muslim voters who had moved toward Trump in 2024 either stayed home or went back to the Democrats.
The bottom line is that the war itself was unpopular from the start. A significant part of Trump’s 2024 mandate was built around the promise of avoiding new wars and keeping America out of another foreign conflict. To many voters, Trump broke that promise, and that frustration was made worse by the growing perception that the United States was fighting a war largely on behalf of Israel, an ally whose standing has fallen considerably among large segments of the American public.
For years, anyone questioning American spending or involvement in Israel was labeled an antisemite by some of the loudest voices in conservative politics. The same thing happened to critics of Ukraine funding, who were routinely accused of being Russian sympathizers. Figures like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, as well as politicians like Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz have had enormous influence over the Republican conversation, and that influence has helped shape the party’s approach to foreign policy. And while Trump and Republican leaders ignored many of the warning signs of those political consequences over the past eight months, the Democrats managed to successfully tie every increase at the gas pump to the war. Whatever the merits of that argument are, it resonated with voters, and the election results make that pretty obvious.
The good news is that at least some in the party are taking Tuesday night’s results seriously. In a post on X the following morning, Vice President JD Vance, the party’s frontrunner for the 2028 nomination, did something that I find to be rare in today’s politics: he offered a clear-eyed acknowledgement of why Republicans lost.
Vance was blunt and argued that the problem wasn’t turnout in the traditional sense, but that many of the voters who supported him and Trump in 2024 voted for Democrats in the midterms because they were angry about the war and the cost of living, had a desire to put America first, and wanted to change the relationship with Israel. Time will tell whether this translates into real change, but it is a sign that some Republican leaders are willing to do the hard work of identifying blind spots and recalibrating.
And despite what you hear from petulant attention seekers like Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, Republicans don’t need to find a villain or spend the next several months fighting among themselves. It simply means that we must acknowledge what happened. The Democrats found an issue that voters cared deeply about, made it the focus of their campaign, and took advantage of a Republican Party that couldn’t agree on how to respond. And when voters complained about the cost of living, the response from the top too often made them feel ignored rather than heard.
There will be plenty of finger-pointing in the weeks ahead. There always is. But if Republicans are serious about getting back on track, they need to do something that doesn’t always come naturally to this party: listen. Listen to the voters who walked away. Ask the uncomfortable questions. Admit where things went wrong, even when the answers aren’t convenient for those in power.
An election loss shouldn’t be treated as a loyalty test. It should be treated as a wake-up call. But it also doesn’t mean we go backwards. Because if Republicans spend the next two years explaining why the voters were wrong instead of figuring out why they left, there is a good chance we’ll be having this exact conversation again in 2028.