The Briefing, Vol. XIV, Issue 44
Nov. 9, 2026
Post-election edition
- Total election beatdown: Republicans hit a modern nadir
- Five mistakes by the Trump administration that helped lead to this
- Important perspective on Republicans’ defeat
Outlook
“An extinction-level event.” This was the phrase that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) memorably used to describe the 2026 midterm election. It was a beatdown that everyone saw coming, but whose magnitude almost no one expected. Certainly, it went far beyond our expectations.
Not all of the results are official just yet, but for the moment, the most important ones — the ones that will matter most in the day-to-day lives of most people — are arguably the ones that change power in the states, either dismantling Republican state control or establishing a governing trifecta that leaves the public at the mercy of Democratic policy priorities.
Arizona: Democrats will now have control of both Houses of the state legislature and the governorship for the first time since 1966. This hands the newly re-elected Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) a blank check to undo recent education reforms, raise taxes and enact any number of other policy initiatives.
North Carolina: Republicans lost at least five U.S. House seats and control of the state House. They are on track either for a narrow two-seat state Senate majority or a tie in the chamber, pending the outcome of one race. A tie means Democratic control, since Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt (D) would break ties, meaning a full Democratic trifecta. This was the biggest backfire from redistricting anywhere in the country.
Texas: The biggest disaster of all for Republicans has to be the loss not only of John Cornyn’s (R) Senate seat, but of the entire executive branch of the state government, up and down the ticket, plus the state House of Representatives.
Republicans retained control of the state Senate, so Democrats don’t have a blank check. But clearly Texas will no longer be a lab of conservative policy innovation for some time.
Perhaps this is just a one-off for a bad year, a lousy Senate candidate and a governor who overstayed his welcome. Perhaps Texas will revert to the mean. But this loss has potentially terrifying implications for the presidential map. If Democrats can win Texas in presidential races, there is no Republican path to victory in the Electoral College.
Wisconsin: Republicans lost every statewide race and two House seats, but the worst part for them is that they also unexpectedly lost control of the state legislature. For the first time, Democrats will be able to roll back many of the accomplishments of former Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) administration last decade (2011-2019).
Also, Democrats also established new state government trifectas by taking over legislative chambers and retaining governorships in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan.
‘Mistakes, we made a few’
The results were bad in most other states as well — we will not catalog all the results here, since they are widely available and not yet complete. But there were additional signs, even in Blue states, that voters are not hankering for a return to the Woke Era — something that also happened in 2020, which we will explore next week.
Moreover, things were not equally bad everywhere. Florida once again stood out as an example where a well-run Republican Party kept its head above water in a well-run Republican state. But note that Florida could have gone the same way as Texas if it had had the same level of Republican infighting, incompetence and poor candidate quality. Florida Republicans have serious rivalries, but they didn’t let these interfere with the task at hand.
But then why did Republicans lose so much worse than anyone expected, beyond the normal historical factors pointing to an opposition win in the midterm? What follow are five exacerbating factors that we believe were important — not necessarily a comprehensive list.
‘Liberation Day’: As we noted here in 2024, the public finally and irrevocably lost faith in President Joe Biden’s competence in late August 2021, when his team so memorably and totally botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. His approval ratings never recovered from there.
If you trace President Trump’s approval ratings back chronologically to the beginning of his second term, you will find a similar moment that decisively ended the honeymoon: “Liberation Day,” April 1, 2025, when his global tariffs took effect, confusing and terrifying the world’s investors and sending the stock market plunging.
Although the market has since recovered, voter confidence obviously did not, hence the election result.
Early on, a far more focused Trump 2.0 seemed to be running like a well-oiled machine. Liberation Day was the first moment when it seemed like maybe he didn’t really have a handle on things. And from that point forward, Trump’s approval ratings never recovered.
To be clear, no one actually votes based on the issue of tariffs per se. Commentators tend to overestimate the issue itself as an election negative — and risibly so for commentators who never previously opposed or expressed any concern about tarriffs. But as Milton Friedman or any conservative economist will tell you, tariffs do show up in your life in small ways that you don’t even recognize, potentially affecting your vote, even if you don’t recognize tariffs as the cause.
The stock market plunge of spring 2025 was a much more direct and visible effect than tariffs usually produce. It caused a lot of people to rethink the Trump presidency right then. But that’s only part of how Trump defeated himself on that issue.
Inflation: The real problem is that when you do a lot of little things that drive prices up here and there, you end up with a bigger inflation problem than you bargained for. Tariffs were just one piece of that puzzle; the Iran War (with its huge effect on diesel prices) was another. It also didn’t help that Trump over-promised about reversing Biden-era inflation, not just stopping it — such deflation of a fiat currency would be unprecedented and probably even harmful, as Chinese manufacturers are currently discovering. Or at best, they cancel out the good things you are doing to bring prices down in specific areas, such as the much-discussed price of eggs
In Trump’s case, this had knock-on effects that further exacerbated his problem: Continued inflation meant no cuts to interest rates, which in turn kept housing less affordable and contributed further to anger over the high cost of living.
To be clear, most of the inflation problem had nothing to do with Trump’s recent actions. Most of it is down to world events (the Ukraine War being one example) and some signficant portion was a byproduct of excessive COVID stimulus during Trump 1.0 and especially the Biden administration. People were happy to get all that money in their pockets in 2020 and 2021 — they were less happy about the resulting inflation, and they largely failed to connect the two related events.
For much of Trump’s second term, wages had been outpacing inflation. But in the months leading up to the election, inflation was starting to outpace wage growth. Voters start to get upset when they see themselves falling behind, their purchasing power diminished. When it comes to elections, they usually take it out on the ruling party.
Iran War: To put his argument in the most coherent terms possible, President Trump argued that he had to act on Iran, or else its Islamist regime would be threatening to nuke Los Angeles. Accepting this at face value for the sake of argument, Trump still became his own enemy in how he chose to prosecute the war.
Within days of its launch, Trump and the Israeli allies really seemed to have the Iranian regime on the ropes. Then he announced a cease-fire — and with the exception of occasional flare-ups in fighting, the U.S. has been locked in a zombie war ever since. Plans to provoke an internal uprising were apparently scrapped. Trump suddenly wanted to make a deal, when in fact a deal is the one thing you can never make with insane theocrats.
Even so, considering the low number of U.S. casualties, this might not have become the political football it is now, except that it induced the Iranians to use asymmetric warfare to squeeze oil exports from the Persian Gulf. In spite of various efforts to keep the spice flowing — pipeline construction, tanker escorts, strikes on Iranian radar installations and the sinking of Iran’s navy — this has resulted in higher gasoline prices and much, much higher diesel prices. The gas is highly visible to consumers, but the diesel is actually more important because it raises the cost of shipping everything behind the scenes — hence even more inflation.
Immigration enforcement: This was one of Trump’s strongest and best issues, and it remains so. But early on, his administration made a grave miscalculation that neutralized it and perhaps even turned it into a liability.
The public strongly supports the border crackdown and the deportation of all illegal alien criminals — including those only guilty of so-called “less serious” offenses like drunk driving and driving without a license. But when you send the Border Patrol out into hostile communities to track people down, resulting in protests, mass obstruction of ICE and shootings, it’s going to get ugly. It sours the public on immigration enforcement, rather than on the concerted leftist effort to obstruct law enforcement.
The thinking within the administration was that local polities would either cooperate and hold detainees and arrestees for deportation for the common good, or else just do it to get ICE off their communities’ streets. Instead, they dragged their feet and let the conflict play out. All it took was a couple of controversial shootings to turn immigration enforcement from one of Trump’s greatest strengths into one of his worst weaknesses.
The administration later recognized its mistake, removing Greg Bovino and sending James Homan into Minneapolis to make a truce with local authorities. Unfortunately, though, the whole controversy has helped mainstream the idea of abolishing ICE altogether, perhaps even going back to the Biden-era policy of encouraging illegal immigration and shutting down all immigration enforcement — hence the need for Congress to fund ICE through the end of the Trump administration using the clumsy tool of reconciliation.
Gerrymandering: In hindsight, the Republicans’ scheme to hold their U.S. House majority through mid-decade redistricting turned out to be a total self-own.
The results tell part of this story: In North Carolina, Republican legislators drew themselves a dummymander. They went from holding 10 of the state’s 14 House districts to holding perhaps four, or five at best if Rep. Virginia Foxx (R) somehow overcomes her deficit in the vote count and prevails. In Texas, Republicans went from 25 House seats to just 24. The lesson is one we kept reiterating during the election cycle: You can’t always determine outcomes so easily by just just manipulating the lines.
But here’s the rest of the story: Even if they had gained a few net seats through gerrymandering, it was probably not worth the huge (and foreseeable) political cost to the Republican brand. In fact, Republicans may benefit from the more favorable district lines in the next election, but they will still bear the political scars. Not only did the public react poorly to this conspicuous and crude form of election-rigging, but the gerrymandering also provided Democrats cover to retaliate without negative political consequences to themselves — which they of course did, and much more effectively, at least in California.
In fact, Trump should probably be thanking the state legislators in Indiana (whom he vilified at the time) and the Supreme Court justices in Missouri who blocked their respective states’ redistricting efforts. If Republicans in those states had stretched their House delegation majorities out much further into dummymanders, the way Republicans did in Texas and North Carolina, they probably would have lost even more House seats — not just those of Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) and Ann Wagner (R-Mo.).
Trivialities: At his best, President Trump speaks the language of the common man. He serves diners through McDonald’s drive-through, complains about the NFL kickoff rules, and keeps the heat on Democrats for permissive soft-on-crime policies.
But at his worst, Trump becomes completely one-track-minded about issues that do not matter to any voter at all. Even worse, he talks about them constantly on the campaign trail, wandering far and wide from whatever politically effective messaging he has available.
To name just a few examples, this includes his obsession with winning a Nobel Prize, his insistence on building a golden arch near Arlington Cemetary, his desire to name the Kennedy Center after himself, and his renaming of artificial intelligence, Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico.
Up to the final day of the campaign, Trump was still complaining about the Norwegians for awarding the Nobel Prize to someone else. This is not the sort of thing that a struggling family in Ohio can relate to.
What this meant was that Republicans suffered all the natural destruction of his low approval rating, and reaped few or none of the benefits of his bully pulpit.
Two more thoughts
One of our frequent adages at the Conservative Intelligence Briefing is that money does not buy elections. This was true when Trump won twice while being massively outspent, and this time it has proven true once again. Republicans poured nine-figure amounts into some states, only to see their lousy candidates get crushed, their good candidates get squeezed, and their safe candidates get uncomfortable. You can buy airtime to get your message out and to define your opponent, and that will help to some extent. But at some point, when the environment is bad enough, you run out of voters who are even willing to listen. This year featured one of those rough environments.
A second adage we like to use about politics is that things are never as bad as they seem, and they are also never as good as they seem.
In 2008, Democrats were on top of the world, thinking they had built a permanent majority. People were discussing the death of the Republican Party. Within four years, Republicans had gained a net 14 Senate seats and a majority, and a net 69 House seats and the majority. They went on to win the presidency two years later.
Republicans had a similar and equally false feeling of invincibility in 2024, when commentators were talking about the permanent death of the Democratic Party. Again, a reversal of fortunes was right around the corner.
Whether your party or your movement is doing well or badly at a given moment, fortunes change far more rapidly and more dramatically than you could ever expect. Take that as a small consolation in a difficult moment for the conservative movement generally.
Next time: Silver linings of 2026, implications for governing in 2027, election 2028 and beyond.
