As results came in Tuesday night showing that Republicans were taking sweeping losses in the midterm elections, President Donald Trump quickly sought to deflect blame, declaring that the drubbing happened because he was not on the ballot.
“I wasn’t on the ticket,” Trump said in an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday night before polls had closed in parts of the country. “And because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote.”
Almost as quickly, Republicans began to point their fingers back at the president.
They said their party’s loss of control of both the House and Senate, its worst midterm showing in decades, was the direct result of a series of choices the President had made in the year leading up to the election.
They cited Trump’s tariff policies. They pointed to his decision to take the country to an unpopular war in Iran that drove up prices. And they questioned his political instincts, arguing that he had imperilled his party’s chances by supporting weak candidates and going on an unconvincing tour in the final weeks of the campaign.
“Trump has almost dared Americans to vote against him,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in Michigan, adding that the President had closed the midterm campaign on a “greatest hits tour on every annoying thing that could be done to aggravate the American people.”
Roe said Trump’s analysis of the results was “ridiculous,” adding a profanity, and said the President was “the engineer of the Republican collapse.”
The recriminations opened a new and difficult chapter for Republicans, who faced defeat in states where they had decades-long winning streaks. Some Republicans defended Trump, while others urged the party to move on from him, raising questions about how much influence the President will have in his party during his final two years in office.
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who is from a battleground district and did not run for reelection, dismissed Trump’s analysis of his party’s defeats as “nonsense.”
“This is all about him,” Bacon said.
The “No. 1 reason” for Republicans’ showing was the President’s unpopularity, Bacon argued, followed by the President’s decision to back what he said were feeble candidates in key Senate races: Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued GOP nominee in Texas, and Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina, a political novice who has filled the seat of her brother, the late Senator Lindsey Graham, and then ran for a full term to replace him.
“We lost the Senate race in South Carolina for Pete’s sake,” Bacon said. “He pushed bad people forward.”
Brinker Harding, the Republican who was thumped in the Nebraska district that Bacon has represented for the last decade, said he would not comment on Trump’s assertion that Republicans lost because he wasn’t on ballot. But he offered his own list of reasons.
“Gas prices are high,” Harding said. “The tariffs have been an issue.”
Republican leaders had a muted reaction to their party’s grim night.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, issued a 177-word statement that celebrated what he said were Republicans’ successes during the first two years of Trump’s second term.
“Thankfully, we still have President Trump in the White House, and we’ll work with him to stop the worst impulses of Democrat extremism,” he said. He did not cite any causes for his party’s dismal showing.
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who saw his party swept out of House control and will lose his gavel by next year, was more forceful in his defence of the President, saying that Democrats “truly do have Trump derangement syndrome.”
But election results across the country showed that Democrats had drawn voters to their side, even in reliably Republican states such as Kansas, Iowa and Texas.
On Fox News, Trump said some voters simply “didn’t like the candidates.”
“Some of the candidates that I endorsed fought me,” Trump said, adding that his base voters “didn’t like that they fought me.”
In Iowa, the Trump-endorsed Senate nominee, Rep. Ashley Hinson, sought to overcome the political headwinds posed by the economy by calling for an end to the Iran war and criticizing the president’s tariff policies. The Trump-endorsed Senate nominee in Michigan, former Rep. Mike Rogers, took a similar approach.
Both Republicans fell. But Paxton, Trump’s choice in Texas, appeared to lose by an even wider margin after seeking little space from the president.
Dick Wadhams, a Republican consultant in Colorado, said Trump’s comments were “ironic.” Most of the candidates who lost key Senate races in conservative states, Wadhams said, were recruited by or endorsed by the President.
Voters in those states, Wadhams said, were making a statement against Trump.
“This was not a pro-Democratic vote,” Wadhams said. “This was an anti-Trump vote.”
In Ohio, supporters of Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican who fell to Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown, traced the party’s losses to the President.
“We pushed the envelope too far,” Luis Gio, 59, a court translator, said at the Husted watch party, pointing disapprovingly to the President’s construction projects in Washington. “The White House ballroom. I mean, why push things like that when the country needs more important things?”
And in Oklahoma City, Mayor David Holt, a Republican, wrote on social media that his party was “morally and intellectually bankrupt,” adding, “It is now time to make America good again,” a twist on Trump’s signature slogan.
He said his party’s performance was a singular failing of the President.
“I can’t think of a midterm that is more directly tied to a single person and their utter failure,” Holt, who worked in the George W. Bush administration, said in an interview. “It feels like an entire country coming together and saying: Enough.”
Craig Shirley, who was a White House aide under Ronald Reagan and has written books about him and Trump, called the midterms a “black eye for the Republican Party.”
He said he believed Republicans would continue to rally around Trump and his policies on border security and taxes. But he said the war in Iran had clearly taken a toll on Republican candidates.
“Absent the war, the results would have been a lot different,” he said. “A lot of people like Trump, but they don’t like this damn war and what it’s done to inflation and gasoline prices and diesel prices.”
Jon Fleischman, the former executive director of California Republican Party, said that in the end the President was on the ballot, in a sense. Voters were angry about the economy under Trump and fed up with the war in Iran, Fleischman said.
“They can’t show their frustration directly to the president,” he said, “so they shared their frustration with the president’s party.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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