Republicans annihilated in midterms: Anti-war MAGA was right

Well, the results are in, and the Republican Party got absolutely annihilated in the midterm elections. They massively lost the House, as expected, and they also lost the Senate, as I predicted. But Democrats won way, way, way more seats than even the most partisan leftists dreamed they would get.

Democrats won Texas by huge margins: James Talarico beat Ken Paxton. They won in South Carolina, where Lindsey Graham’s sister went down to defeat. They won in quintessential red states like Kansas and Ohio and Iowa. It’s so bad the anticipated Fetterman flip won’t save the GOP. Nothing will. It’s so bad that Donald Trump had little choice but to accept how bad it was, pledging to accept the results, work with Democrats wherever possible, and veto bad legislation they might propose. As he should.

But policy comes later. Right now we need to understand what went wrong.

Two years ago, Trump won a massive victory over the Democratic coalition, bringing in new voters, minority voters, men, young people. He exposed the hollowness of the Kamala Harris campaign and achieved a mandate to cut government — which became the DOGE initiative — and to avoid foreign entanglements. No new wars! That was Trump’s promise.

And let me be clear: more than anything else, that broken promise, the Iran War, is clearly why Trump’s voters did not show up for him last night. It has been obvious for weeks, to anyone who was paying attention, that Americans are furious about high energy prices that are downstream of this reckless attack on Iran, that was never justified to the American people and never voted on by Congress, and that went entirely contrary to Trump’s campaign promise.

When you break a promise, your voters punish you. George H.W. Bush learned that with “read my lips, no new taxes.” Now Trump is learning it.

And the price is high. A moderate comeuppance for the GOP might have been well deserved to get them back on track, but this is perhaps the most staggering rebuke of the incumbent party in American politics in my lifetime. Only Barack Obama’s trifecta + 60 in the Senate in 2008 comes close. Thankfully, Democrats will not be in a position to pass legislation — Trump can veto it. But they will be in a position to launch investigations of the Trump family, the administration and Trump supporters, from the lowliest to the highest, including Elon Musk.

That will be the Democratic agenda. I would not rule out the possibility that they try to impeach Trump again, and make no mistake, they are very, very close to having the votes to pull that off.

That is the cost of this reckless war: The end of the Trump agenda, forever. Trump will never again have the kind of political power he had to enact the America First agenda.

Certainly the president himself deserves blame for this, and deep down he knows it. But we must also blame the neoconservative advisers who urged him to do something his voters did not want: initiate a costly conflict with a distant foreign nation that is largely irrelevant to our own security. They have desired this war forever, and Trump gave it to them. And it has destroyed his party.

Every hawkish GOP hack who said the war would be over quickly, or it wouldn’t matter for midterms, or the concerns were overblown, is a fool or a liar. On the other hand, every America First populist or libertarian who said, “hey wait a minute, why are we doing this,” was absolutely correct to sound the alarm. It was foolishness — no, it was madness. And now the chickens have come home to roost.

The Democrats didn’t just beat Republicans, they destroyed them. Their victories were so absolute that candidate quality didn’t matter. With the exception of Florida, the sole bright spot for the GOP, basically the story is that every single Republican who could lose did lose. All of them. Every single one. They lost in the Senate races, they lost in the House races, they lost in the state legislatures and governors’ races.

You can’t sugarcoat this: It’s a blowout that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. Oh, by the way, a few months ago, the Iran War was in its infancy, and had not yet damaged the economy. Once voters understood Trump wasn’t ending it, they decided to punish him. And so they have.

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.