After the Shellacking

On November 3, 2010, the morning after his party lost sixty-three House seats, Barack Obama stood at a White House podium and called it a shellacking. He didn’t recommend that future presidents take one, he said. Sixteen years later to the day, it’s the Republicans’ turn.

The count isn’t finished, but the shape of it is. As of Wednesday morning, Democrats held at least 54 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 44, with Alaska and Mississippi still uncalled. Before Tuesday, Republicans held 53. Democrats flipped seats in Texas, where James Talarico beat Ken Paxton; Kansas, where Adam Hamilton beat Sen. Roger Marshall; Ohio, where Sherrod Brown beat Sen. Jon Husted; Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, and South Carolina, where Annie Andrews beat Sen. Darline Graham, appointed in July after Lindsey Graham’s death. CBS News projects a Democratic House of between 251 and 268 seats. Democrats also took governorships in Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas. Speaker Mike Johnson has said he won’t seek another term as Republican leader, and Ron DeSantis, whose state elected Byron Donalds governor, called the night “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country.”

Two readings of the loss

The first reading is arithmetic. Since the Second World War the president’s party has lost House seats in every midterm but two, 1998 and 2002, and a president’s second midterm is often the worst, regularly enough that it has a name, the six-year itch. Eisenhower’s Republicans lost forty-eight House seats in 1958, George W. Bush’s lost thirty in 2006, and Obama’s Democrats lost nine Senate seats in 2014. Trump is barred by the Twenty-second Amendment from running again, so he’s a lame duck as well as a sitting president, and voters punishing the White House knew they weren’t choosing his successor. On this reading Tuesday was the cycle doing what it does, worse than usual because of a war and prices, and it turns when the president leaves.

The arithmetic doesn’t quite cover the size of it. CBS’s projection would mean a Democratic gain of somewhere between 37 and 54 House seats, beyond 2006, and the Senate swing already matches 2014’s nine with two races still out.

The second reading is structural. Here the question isn’t why a president’s party lost a midterm but how the party came to be led for a decade by a figure its own institutions neither chose nor could check. Since the reforms of the early 1970s, nominations have belonged to primary voters rather than to the party. Since 2010, money has reached candidates without passing through it. In 2016 a field of seventeen and winner-take-all primaries let a plurality candidate take the nomination before the party’s officeholders settled on anyone else. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld call what’s left the hollow parties, strong at raising money and enforcing loyalty and weak at deciding anything. A party that can’t choose its leader can’t remove one either. In August 2018 the Australian Liberal Party replaced a sitting prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, through two party-room votes in a single week. Nothing in the Republican Party can do that to a president, and on this reading Tuesday is what a party that couldn’t change course between elections looks like when the bill arrives.

The structure shows most plainly where a party has stopped competing. No Republican has won statewide office in California since 2006. In PPIC’s October survey even independent likely voters favored Democrats for the House 58 to 37, and the Proposition 50 map took away several of the districts Republicans still held, as Cross-Filing described last week. Californians who skip elections tell pollsters their vote doesn’t matter or that big money controls things, a quarter of them in one Berkeley IGS survey, Republicans more often than Democrats, and two-thirds of the state’s Republican voters told IGS they were not at all satisfied with its democracy. When the outcome is known in advance, a vote stops meaning much to the person casting it. A Republican Party that can have no serious presence in the largest state is structurally flawed, and so is a Democratic Party with none in Arkansas, which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008.

Democrats have begun to work this out. In Arkansas they filed 75 state and federal candidates this year, including candidates in 53 legislative districts, though they still left five statewide offices uncontested, and the Senate seats they flipped on Tuesday were in Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and South Carolina, states the party had long treated as lost. On the Republican side there’s no comparable effort to find in California. The party there is asleep at the switch, and a party that concedes the largest state before the vote has decided in advance not to hear from more than a tenth of the country.

The two readings aren’t exclusive, and each favors different options. If it’s the itch, vetoing and waiting and going to the states are enough, since the cycle turns by itself. If it’s the structure, most of the options leave in place the thing that failed, and the one that blames Trump’s absence from the ballot is the structure speaking.

A party in that position has a short list of things it can do. None of them excludes all the others, and the first two are already being argued in public.

1. Blame the war

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on Wednesday. “The president himself said so last night.” His invitation to the party was to say so plainly: “Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.” President Trump called Vance’s reading “largely true,” pointing to gas prices driven up by the Iran war, and added that he would “have to do it again.”

The exit polls give Vance something to stand on. In NBC’s, 63 percent of voters said the United States made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran, and 87 percent were concerned about the price of gas and diesel. This option puts the loss on one policy, made by one administration, which Vance can run against in 2028 without running against the voters who elected it. Its difficulty is that the president it would distance the party from says he’d do it again.

2. Blame the ballot

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. This option treats the midterm as a turnout problem, which the president’s own presence fixes, and leaves the program as it is. Its version of rebuilding means primarying the members who drifted.

The record for presidents who purge after a bad cycle is thin. In 1938 Franklin Roosevelt campaigned in Democratic primaries against conservative senators of his own party, Walter George of Georgia and Millard Tydings of Maryland among them. Nearly all of them won anyway, and in November the Democrats lost seventy-two House seats. A party whose voters gave the president 38 percent approval on Tuesday, on track to be the lowest midterm figure for any president and seven points below 2018’s, has less to purge with than Roosevelt did.

3. Use the lame duck

Republicans hold both chambers until January 3. Two months is enough to confirm judges and appointees, pass appropriations on their own terms, and write into law what a Democratic Congress would otherwise block.

It’s been done, though it hasn’t usually held. In February 1801, with Jefferson elected and the House lost, the outgoing Federalists passed a Judiciary Act creating sixteen new circuit judgeships, and John Adams filled them in his last weeks. The new Congress repealed the act in 1802. After losing nearly a hundred House seats in 1874, the Republicans used their last months to pass the Specie Payment Resumption Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The first shaped the currency for a generation. The Supreme Court struck down most of the second in 1883. A lame-duck program also hands the incoming majority its first campaign theme, which is undoing it.

4. Veto and wait

Trump said he would work with the Democrats and in the same breath signaled the veto. Senate Republicans “will not stand idly by,” said John Thune, who loses the majority leader’s office in January. Divided government with a veto is a defensive position that can be held for two years: let the new majority pass what it wants, kill it, and run in 2028 against a Congress that delivered nothing. Its weakness is that the exit polls already put the prices on the president. Sixty-two percent of voters blamed Trump for high prices, and 65 percent said his policies had made the economy worse.

5. Deal

The other half of Trump’s sentence was the one about working with Democrats. Cooperation is the option least discussed on Wednesday and the one with the most open ground. On AI the parties came out of the exit polls almost tied, and 76 percent of voters said they opposed building data centers in their communities, an issue that crosses the usual lines and belongs to nobody yet. Concern about the cost of living ran above 85 percent for food, fuel, utilities, and healthcare alike. A party that shares credit for anything on those can’t run against the Congress that gave it, which is why this option is usually the last one taken.

6. Rebuild the coalition

Republicans won 46 percent of Latino voters for Trump in 2024. On Tuesday they won 35 percent of Latinos in House races, and Democrats’ lead in Latino party identification grew from ten points to seventeen. Among young men, NBC found 32 percent voting Republican, against 49 percent for Trump two years ago. Fifty-seven percent of all voters said the administration’s immigration enforcement has gone too far, and only 22 percent said not far enough. Getting those voters back means changing something they reacted to, and it puts this option in direct conflict with the second.

7. Go to the states

DeSantis gave a timetable along with his warning: Republicans might not win back the Senate until 2032. If that’s the horizon, the national party matters less over the next six years than the governors and legislatures it still holds, Donalds’s Florida above all. A party out of power in Washington can make its argument in the states that still elect it, and build the bench the next national ticket comes from. It’s the slowest option on the list, and it depends on the national party staying out of the way.

The war decides the board

Every option on the list assumes something about the Iran war, and none of them puts the war in the party’s hands. The president decides it, and the night before the election the Wall Street Journal reported another of a series of limited American strikes, this one on Qeshm Island near Hormuz, kept quiet to avoid signaling a return to the full campaign. Brent crude had fallen more than 7 percent on Monday, to $104.77, after Trump said he wanted to give diplomacy more time, and rose back toward $107 on the news of the strike. Rubio says the United States could act after the election, and Iran’s Supreme Leader has promised a “geographically unrestricted response” if it does. Qatari mediators are carrying a letter from Vance, and Tehran’s price for reopening the strait is a return to June’s memorandum and the lifting of the blockade on its ports. Three courses are open from here.

Renewed campaign. Militarily, it starts from exposure already shown. Iranian fire has damaged or destroyed structures at 26 American sites, most of them in Kuwait. Mines and small boats have reached tankers off Musandam, and the Houthis, fighting their own war against Saudi Arabia, have already shut Riyadh’s airport. Economically, the cushion is thinner than in March. Brent peaked near $118 that month, diesel averaged $6.53 a gallon in September, up 77 percent in a year, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest since 1982. Prices at those levels would be the Republicans’ to answer for through the lame duck and into 2028.

Settlement. The record suggests prices can move fast. After the April ceasefire, Brent fell from its March peak to around $70 by July 1, and Monday’s drop on a hint of diplomacy came in a single session. The Houthi war with Saudi Arabia has its own causes, though, and wouldn’t necessarily end with an American settlement, and the analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya noted on Tuesday that the midterms “cannot, by themselves, reopen shipping routes.”

Grinding middle. Quiet strikes, a strait running about 70 percent below prewar traffic, Brent near $105, and gas prices that 62 percent of voters already put on the president. It’s the course that most resembles the present.

Option	Renewed campaign	Settlement	Grinding middle
1. Blame the war	Becomes a split with a president at war, with Vance against the man he serves	Loses its force, since a finished war is history and Trump claims the peace	Holds, and Vance keeps making it at a cost inside the party
2. Blame the ballot	Ties the party to the war through 2028	Strengthens it, since Trump can say the voters judged an unfinished job	Weakens it, since nothing changes that voters punished
3. Lame duck	War funding and any authorization become the main business, voted by Republicans alone before January	Frees the session for confirmations and appropriations	Turns into a fight over money for operations nobody announces
4. Veto and wait	A Democratic war-powers resolution forces a veto and puts every Republican on record again	Strongest here, since prices fall under divided government and the president takes the credit	Leaves the prices on the president, where 62 percent already put them
5. Deal	Nearly impossible, with Democrats running against the war	Opens up, on prices, data centers, and rebuilding fuel stocks	Possible on the economy, if the war is set aside
6. Rebuild the coalition	Harder, among the young men and Latino voters who left over prices and the war	Easier, once the war is gone and prices are down	Depends on immigration, the one lever the party controls
7. Go to the states	Governors face fuel prices with no federal relief coming	Governors take credit for a recovery they didn’t cause	The safest course, and the slowest

The table has a pattern. The options that help the party most under a settlement are the ones that let the president take the credit, and the options that help most under a renewed campaign are the ones that set the party against him. That’s the structural reading again, in another form: a party that can’t choose its leader can’t choose its war either.

Twin ideologies

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, in the old rhyme, agreed to have a battle, and the joke is that nobody can tell which is which. The usual account of the two parties sets them at opposite ends of one line, left and right, and asks each to move toward the middle. That account misses the line the voters seem to have been drawing on Tuesday. Each party has an authoritarian side and a libertarian side, a side that trusts power when its own people hold it and a side that distrusts power whoever holds it, and neither party has worked out which side it is.

On the Republican side the authoritarian twin has had the run of the house: a war fought without a vote of Congress, tariffs set by proclamation, immigration enforcement that 57 percent of voters say has gone too far, a fund of nearly $1.8 billion to compensate the president’s allies. The libertarian twin is smaller and has mostly lost its primaries. Thomas Massie put its creed in one sentence in May: “If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king.” Democrats have their twins too, a side comfortable governing by agency rule and executive order when its own president holds the pen, and a side, Ro Khanna’s when he co-sponsored Massie’s war powers resolution, that trusts neither. And both twins on the scale throw money. Massie voted against his own party’s signature tax and spending bill, and found almost no company.

In 1971 David Nolan published this as a two-axis chart, economic freedom across one way and personal freedom across the other, and more than half a century later the parties still campaign on a single line. Read on Nolan’s chart, most of what voters rejected on Tuesday wasn’t a position too far left or right. It was power used without consent: the war (63 percent called it the wrong decision), the enforcement, the corruption that 90 percent called a major factor. Moderation in that sense isn’t a matter of tone or of splitting the difference on a tax rate. It means giving powers back, war powers and tariffs to Congress, where Don Bacon has been trying to return the second, and changing the rules that reward the authoritarian twin in primaries. Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice general is part of why Lisa Murkowski is still in the Senate. Neither party has written a platform around that axis, and the one that does first will have found the voters this dispatch closes on.

The ones who stepped out

The Republicans who couldn’t be part of the loyalist bloc have mostly been removed from it by the party’s own voters. Massie lost his Kentucky primary on May 19 to Ed Gallrein, whom Trump endorsed, in what became the most expensive House primary on record. Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump in 2021 and this year voted with Democrats to rein in the Iran war, finished last in Louisiana’s primary. John Cornyn lost his runoff to Ken Paxton, who lost to Talarico on Tuesday, and Cornyn was among the first to congratulate the winner. Thom Tillis and Mitch McConnell are retiring, and Bacon is leaving the House. Susan Collins, who voted against several of Trump’s nominees, lost her seat on Tuesday.

“I got seven months left in Congress,” Massie said when he conceded. Those months end on January 3, and they run straight through the lame duck. In a Senate of 53 Republicans, Cassidy, Tillis, McConnell, Collins, and Murkowski are five votes with no primary ahead of them, enough to stop any party-line bill the lame-duck option depends on. In March the House defeated Massie and Khanna’s war powers resolution 212 to 219, with only one other Republican voting for it. A renewed campaign against Iran after the election would put the same question back on the floor with fewer members left to fear the next primary.

After January, they become the party’s exiles, and the party has had exiles before. In 1872 the Liberal Republicans broke with Grant over corruption and the use of federal troops in the South, nominated Horace Greeley, and were crushed. Most of them drifted back within a few years. Their cause, a civil service chosen by examination rather than loyalty, became law in the Pendleton Act of 1883, under a Republican president, after a disappointed office-seeker shot President Garfield. A cause can outlive the faction that lost with it, and the exiles of 2026 will be the people in the party who can say, with the record to show it, that they said so at the time.

The ballroom

On Wednesday afternoon, the day after the vote, the president called reporters together at short notice and spent nearly twenty minutes, by the AP’s count, on the ballroom rising where the East Wing stood, without mentioning the night before. He presided over the raising of the last steel beam and signed it, a beam adorned with two gold presidential seals. It would be “a special structure,” he said, “not only one of the biggest” ballrooms in the world, a thing “they’ve been trying to get” for 150 years, with “the most beautiful marble” and Corinthian columns. “It’s got to be pristine,” he said, “it’s got to be perfect.” Asked about the war afterward, he said he’d do it again.

The capital he was standing in was laid out as an argument against that kind of building. The Capitol sits on the hill at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue because Congress is the first branch, Article I before Article II, and the President’s House sits a mile off at the other end, smaller than Pierre L’Enfant first imagined it. In 1789 the Senate proposed to call Washington “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same,” and the House refused, and he became Mr. President. In 1801 Jefferson walked from his boardinghouse to the Capitol to be sworn in. Two years later he received the new British minister, Anthony Merry, who arrived in full court dress and wrote home in fury that the president had met him “in slippers down at the heels.” Paine had put the principle in Common Sense before any of it was built: “in America THE LAW IS KING.” The founding’s minimalism was never the whole story. Enslaved laborers helped build both the Capitol and the President’s House, and the plain republic had a great deal it didn’t let in the door. But plainness at the top was a deliberate statement that the person in the house was a tenant, not the owner.

If the President’s House needs a new room, we’d more readily support a gymnasium than a glittery European ballroom, and there’s a precedent for it. In 1933 readers of the New York Daily News, schoolchildren among them, sent in coins to build Franklin Roosevelt an indoor pool off the West Wing, for the swimming that eased his paralysis. Richard Nixon floored it over in 1970 to make the press briefing room, which still sits on top of it. A ballroom is a room for being seen. A gymnasium keeps a body fit for the work, and the Greek word named the place where young citizens were trained.

Why many of the president’s supporters don’t see that history in the building has more than one answer. The founding is mostly taught as a set of names and dates to be recited, a practice of repetition rather than of understanding, as The Practice of Practice described it, and a monument learned that way tells nobody what it was arguing against. Gold reads as success in a culture of display, and a ballroom paid for by donors looks like a gift rather than a claim. And for the authoritarian twin, the president is the nation, so a palace for the president is a palace for everyone. The libertarian twin sees it the other way, as a house growing to fit the office the house was built to keep small, and on Tuesday the voters weren’t thinking about either. They were thinking about the price of gas.

More than one reason

Vance’s sentence names “the reason,” and the exit polls don’t support any single one. The same voters who called the war a mistake also named the economy as their top issue at 39 percent, the state of democracy at 32, government corruption as a crucial or major factor at 90, and immigration enforcement as too harsh at 57. Several of the options above work only if one of those is the cause and the others are noise. A party that picks the war because it’s the one its likely nominee can run against has picked a story, not a reading of the vote.

The figure no option on the list is addressed to is the one in five voters who held no favorable opinion of either party, and the third who told NBC that neither party is better positioned to fight corruption.

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