US Republicans face reckoning after major midterm election defeat

He's more successful now than at any time in our history. Watch the beam go up. As President Trump focused on the renovation of the White House ballroom, the rest of his party was left scrambling to figure out just how it went so massively wrong for the Republicans on Tuesday night. In Texas, where Democrats James Tallarico and Gina Hinojosa turned the state blue in the Senate and Governor's races, The state's other sitting senator, Republican Ted Cruz, had this to say. 2026 was not simply a blue wave. It was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate level repudiation. Meanwhile, in Florida, the only bright spot for Republicans on Tuesday because of wins in the Senate, the governor's race and statewide offices, outgoing governor and potential 2028 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis compared the GOP's losses nationally to a meteor strike. This is close to an extinction level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last hundred years. For his part, Vice President J.D. Vance, another 2028 potential hopeful, admitted that many of the party's supporters had defected to the other side. In a long message on social media, Vance claimed that the reason the GOP lost so badly was because of the war in Iran. He also said he agreed with with a pollster's view that the party needed to change its relationship to Israel. With the midterms over and Trump now 80 and a lame duck president, the question is how the party will chart a way forward with jockeying in the 2028 presidential race already underway.