When this column two weeks ago described these midterms as a unicorn election, unlike any of the 11 midterm elections and 11 presidential elections I had covered, it turned out to be even more true even than I imagined.
Up until mid-summer, this looked to be about as normal a midterm as there could be in the Donald Trump era. There were guardrails in place that seemed to limit just how bad the election could get for Republicans. Then, in August and September, the election took a decided turn for the worse for the GOP. The House was a goner, and the Senate began to look seriously competitive. Now, with most of the votes counted, it’s clear this was a massive and meaningful repudiation of President Trump and his party.
A former Republican House member and veteran of several decades in Congress told me that he saw the election as “Watergate déjà vu.” My response was, “Yes, but without the resignation.” After President Nixon’s resignation, when President Ford addressed the country for the first time, he declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Unfortunately for Republicans today, this nightmare still has two more years to go. There is no reason to believe that the president’s policies, words, and deeds, the ones that triggered this disaster for his party, will get more palatable to voters over the next 26 months.
It will be at least another week or so—perhaps even longer in Alaska and/or Mississippi—before the ballots have all been tabulated and the seat counts firmed. Currently, it appears Senate Democrats will gain at least seven seats on net, potentially eight or nine, depending on the outcomes in Alaska and Mississippi. At this writing, Democrats seem to have an edge in each. A seven-seat gain creates a Senate split of 54 Democrats to 46 Republicans; the two states above would get them up to 56.
In the House, Democrats have already won 254 seats to 163 for Republicans. If Democrats take six of the 18 uncalled races, that will land them on 260 seats, a 45-seat gain.
Interpreting election results has a certain Rorschach-like quality, with many different conclusions possible. On the one hand, gaining 40-plus seats is a fantastic outcome for a minority party, but it’s not a 64-seat gain like Republicans won in 2010, or the 54 seats they won in 1994.
Then again, with 30 years of gerrymandering cutting the number of organically competitive districts to far less than half what there used to be, a 54- or 64-seat net change in the House is very nearly impossible. This election tested the outer limits of what’s politically feasible.
Because Republicans had such a tiny majority going into the election, their losses will leave them somewhere around 175 seats next year, the smallest number of Republican seats in decades. More than a few House Republicans won’t relish the idea of serving in the minority for an unknown period of time and may opt to retire early, meaning the GOP would have to defend seats in special elections next year and in early 2028, not to mention the additional challenge of recruiting candidates to run for a party in the minority.
A substantial share of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents had become so disappointed in Trump and some of his policies that they simply “voted with their seats,” registering their protest by refusing to vote at all. Meanwhile, Democrats who had grown to despise Trump voted in extraordinary numbers against every Republican. Independents largely went along with them. Republican incumbents who had been unopposed in 2024, or who won by landslide margins, were defeated, often with little or no warning at all.
The consortium exit-poll results paint a damning picture of how voters saw this second Trump term. In many ways, the negative judgments against Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, and Barack Obama in 2010 and 2014 look tame in comparison.
Democrats have also now emerged from the hole they dug on the state legislative level during the Obama years. It may be a while before Republicans get out of this one.
Democrats should beware of hubris, however. As Mitch Bainwol, who directed the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2002 cycle, recently put it, over the last quarter century “voters aren’t hiring; they’re firing.” While Democrats had some stand-out candidates in more than a few states and districts, they were more beneficiaries than victors.
The voter poll taken for the news consortium of the Associated Press, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MS Now, and NBC showed that 52 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, to just 47 percent favorable. That is hardly a rousing affirmation, but it was certainly better than the 59 percent unfavorable rating for Republicans, to just 40 percent favorable.
Even in states where Democrats enjoyed their greatest successes, voters’ judgment was less than a full-throated endorsement. In Georgia, 50 percent viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably (49 percent favorable). In Iowa, 53 percent saw the Democratic Party unfavorably (45 percent favorable).
Certainly, some of the Democratic gains in the reddest of areas will end up being short-term rentals, likely to bounce back to the GOP in 2028 or 2030. That will fill in some of the hole that the GOP is in, but not all of it, particularly since there is not a Democrat in the White House right now to play off of.
This was an election unlike any that any living person has ever witnessed, and probably unlike any that we will ever see again. The laws of gravity and politics have not been repealed, but an extraordinary set of circumstances suspended them for an election. Plenty of partisans and analysts looked at the changes in voting patterns from 2020 to 2024 and predicted a realignment based only on those two data points. Anyone making such sweeping declarations from last week’s results is guilty of the same mistake.