OPINION:
Throughout the 2026 midterm campaign, President Trump told Americans to pretend that he was on the ballot. On Tuesday, they did just that.
By the time the smoke cleared, Democrats had flipped seven Senate seats, including three in states long held by Republicans, to take over the chamber. They also overcame a Republican redistricting effort to capture the House, flipping 32 seats to win a hefty majority.
That is not a wave so much as a tidal shift — the kind of result that rewrites assumptions about which states are still “safe.”
People were interested in these podcasts
And yet, hours after the results rolled in, Mr. Trump tried to have it both ways. “I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted on Truth Social.
It is a remarkable pivot from a man who spent months insisting the opposite: that this election was, in fact, all about him.
Voters apparently agreed with his original framing, just not his conclusion. According to an NBC News national exit poll, 43% of voters said that opposing Mr. Trump was a key reason for their vote. That is a larger share than during his first-term midterms in 2018.
Only 38% approved of Mr. Trump’s job performance, and in Senate battlegrounds such as Georgia, Ohio, Michigan and Texas, majorities gave him a thumbs-down.
The economy, more than anything else, fueled the backlash. Three-quarters of voters said conditions are poor and 65% said that Mr. Trump’s policies made things worse. Sixty-two percent blamed him directly for high prices.
The AP VoteCast found similar sentiment, with roughly three-quarters of voters describing themselves as “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the country’s direction.
Mr. Trump, naturally, saw it differently. “I wasn’t on the ticket, and because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote,” he told The New York Times — a tidy bit of logic that somehow transforms a repudiation into an attendance problem.
Republican strategists were not buying it. “Midterm elections are about anger management and failed expectations. They drive the math of turnout,” said Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, where Democrats flipped a Senate seat held by retiring Sen. Thom Tillis. “Clearly, Trump failed to meet the economic expectations and also fueled the anger in doing so.”
Consultant Mike Murphy was blunter still. “The message is very clear and very simple here. It was a complete repudiation of the party as defined by Donald Trump,” he said, adding that Mr. Trump had “brought a Chernobyl-level disaster to the Republican Party — the worst beating the party has taken since ’74, after Watergate.”
So what did this election actually teach us?
Lesson one: Red states are not bulletproof. Texas elected a Democratic senator and governor for the first time this century. Kansas sent a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in nearly a century. South Carolina — barely considered a battleground before Tuesday — flipped too. When a state like Texas stops being predictable, every map gets redrawn.
Lesson two: Endorsements are not armor. Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates lost in Texas, South Carolina and North Carolina. Historically, a Trump endorsement has been a golden ticket in Republican primaries and general elections alike. This cycle, it looked more like a liability.
Lesson three: Deflection has limits. Unlike President Clinton in 1994 or President George W. Bush in 2006 — both of whom publicly owned their midterm defeats and promised to recalibrate — Mr. Trump has refused to accept any responsibility. “I don’t like to consider it a defeat for me. I wasn’t on the ballot,” he told Fox News. That kind of denial might play well with the base, but it does nothing to address the voter anger that produced Tuesday’s results in the first place.
Lesson four: The economy is still the story. Inflation, affordability and the cost of living — these were not side issues. They were the main event. Voters were not swayed by dozens of Trump rallies or a reported “Trumpapalooza” midterm convention. They were swayed by their grocery bills.
True, President Trump was not on the ballot. But his presidency was unmistakably on trial — and the verdict, delivered from Kansas to Texas to South Carolina, was not in his favor. Whether he learns anything from it remains the only real suspense left in this story.
• Joseph Curl has covered five American presidents over nearly four decades at The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.