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For once, Democrats and Republicans seem to be in agreement: Tuesday’s election results were very, very bad for the GOP. The question now is whether the White House and twin Republican majorities in Congress will change course or double down on an agenda of mass deportations, on-again-off-again tariff ploys and “owning the libs” at every opportunity. As Donald Trump headed to a meeting with Republicans on Wednesday, a federal government shutdown was in its 36th day. A record for the longest defunding of federal agencies has now been shattered, with Washington still paralyzed and the president seemingly only marginally interested (before now) in the result. But the president himself gave away the ballgame as he spoke to reporters: “I don’t think it [the results] was good for Republicans...the shutdown was a big factor, negative for Republicans.” That’s that. Any debate over which party was taking more blame for the state of things is now over, with Trump having conceded that his own party is taking the majority of it due to its control of the House, Senate and White House. With Democratic sweeps across the country, including a victory by a controversial AG candidate in Virginia, Democrats in D.C. charged back onto the Hill on Wednesday confident in the knowledge that they have the momentum as negotiations continue. But shutdown negotiations are just one arena, and both Democrats and Republicans now have their eyes fixed on next year’s midterm elections where the real prize is up for grabs — control of Congress. Republicans who watched Tuesday night’s election results were near unanimous in their diagnoses. Others, like Trump, blamed the government shutdown and persistent cost-of-living issues stemming from inflation for delivering Republicans defeats across the board. “There is no sugarcoating these results. They’re really bad for the party,” Michael DuHaime, a former Republican National Committee official, told The Wall Street Journal. He added: “Republicans would be smart to heed the warning signs of this election...[T]hese races are an early warning system.” Another GOP strategist outside the Trump orbit was matter-of-fact on CBS News in an interview this week: the election results were a referendum of his second term. “These off-year races ... they aren’t just local, essentially headaches, over taxes or traffic. They are a real pulse check over Trump’s second act.” Pointing to the shutdown continuing to drag on and the firings of many federal workers who live in Virginia and elsewhere around the capital region, Shah said that voters were not seeing the president and his team deal with economic issues, instead favoring to wage battles against Democrats. “Voters are signalling louder than ever: ‘Is this America First, or a reboot that is not delivering, and is just chaos?’” Shah, who describes herself as a #NeverTrump Republican, explained on CBS. While GOP critics of the president find no purchase in the loyalty-obsessed second Trump administration, Vice President JD Vance seemed to agree with her. “We need to focus on the home front. The president has done a lot that has already paid off in lower interest rates and lower inflation, but we inherited a disaster from Joe Biden and Rome wasn't built in a day. We're going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that's the metric by which we'll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond,” Vance wrote on Wednesday, while dismissing Virginia as a “blue state” and therefore unimportant to Republicans. Vance also shouted out Scott Pressler, a GOP activist, and Turning Point USA for their voter registration efforts throughout the year. But Pressler, on his own page, simply retweeted his own video from August warning that Republicans would lose “everything”, including the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, if a course correction wasn’t made. He gave no reasons in the video beyond a fear that Republicans weren’t adequately embracing mail-in votes and early voting, but on Wednesday he thanked Vance for the praise. Other Republicans in MAGAworld were willing to attribute the losses to real political reasons, rather than the typical farsical complaints about voter fraud. “We got our asses handed to us,” declared Vivek Ramaswamy, the MAGA-aligned candidate for governor in Ohio. “Our side needs to focus on affordability.” Ramaswamy, who has faced racist abuse from others even inside the MAGA tent, also implored his party to drop “identity politics” in the same video. An unnamed ally of the White House was also quoted by Politico on Wednesday morning: ““People aren’t feeling the promises kept. You won on lowering costs, putting more money back into people’s pockets. And people don’t feel that right now.” With victories in the midterm elections next year, Democrats could be in a real position to take back the House of Representatives and, should a real landslide play out, possibly the Senate as well. Doing so would have a twofold effect on the Trump administration — it would halt any ability by the White House to get legislation passed, and it would trigger a wave of Democratic-led investigations of Trump and his Cabinet, among others. Those investigations would carry the power of congressional subpoenas. And as progressive and moderate Democrats alike train laser-like focuses on affordability and health care costs, Republicans could very well find that their newfound realizations about the urgency of addressing rising prices may have put their opponents a full lap ahead of them in the sprint to next November.
