US midterms: what now for MAGA?

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1:08Registration as an investment advisor does not imply a certain level of skill or training, nor does it constitute an endorsement by any securities regulator. Please see nerdwalletwealthpartners.com for disclosures and important information. This was a referendum on the president and a rejection of the president and frankly, almost everything he's done.

1:31Hello and welcome to The State of It USA, the Times podcast making sense of Trump's America. I'm Katie Balls, Washington editor and columnist for The Times and Sunday Times. And I'm Gerry Baker, columnist for The Times and editor-at-large of The Wall Street Journal. This, of course, is the day after, the night before, and we were expecting, Katie, I think it's fair to say, in the midterm elections, I think people were in the end really expecting a blue wave. I think in the end what we got was a red wedding, if I may channel Game of Thrones, an absolute massacre of the Republican Party last night in the midterm elections.

2:07From coast to coast, from sea to shining sea, from the mountains to the prairies, the Republican Party got beaten everywhere in some of its strongest of strongholds and some of its deepest red parts of the country. We're going to spend the next half an hour or so trying to get to grips with the scale of this defeat for the Republican Party and victory for the Democrats, how it happened, why it happened, and then look at the implications for both the parties as we move forward, in particular as we look at the 2028 presidential election. But, Katie, again, let's just start with scale of that defeat.

2:41It looks like, as we record this, they're still counting votes in a few areas and will be for a while. But it looks like the Democrats have won at least seven Senate seats to take them from 47 to 54, with two votes still, two states still vote counting. That's Alaska and Mississippi. that was hardly on anybody's radar Mississippi looks like they're going to win Mississippi that will give them 55 seats in the Senate a majority beyond I think what anybody was really expecting 55 to 45 and the House again just sort of prolong the metaphor but just another absolute bloodbath for the Republicans it looks like their Democrats are probably on track for 257 maybe 258 seats in the House it's a gain of 43 That would be the largest majority the Democrats have had in the House at least since 2008, quite possibly back to the 1990s.

3:35Yeah, I think as those results have rolled in, you know, there were warnings of a blue tsunami. I think you can call it a blue tsunami. I think you can also call it a red wedding. But certainly it is on the very much the worst end of Republican fears and actually worse than many thought possible when you speak to them. And I was out in Washington, D.C. last night at a few watch parties hopping around town. And at one of my stops, I went to a Democrat event, but obviously everyone was very buoyant, cautiously optimistic, drinking cocktails called the Blue Wave. But then I was at a Republican event when some of the numbers really started to come in.

4:13And it was filled with kind of young Republican staffers in downtown D.C. At this event with lots of young staffers earlier in the evening, they this was around the time they called Florida for Byron Donald so in Florida the Republicans took the senate seat and they took the governorship which you know should be par for the course you would expect that in Florida but obviously it was still a win but it didn't create any joy in the room because they looked at the margins the margins on those victories for the Republicans were so tight that the smarter figures in the room started to look at one another and say we are in serious trouble.

4:49Some expletives were used. If that's what's happening in Florida, you know, God help us and what's going to be happening the rest of the night. And that is what happened. As, you know, as time went on, Texas, Maine, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, all flipped in the Democrats' favor for the Senate. But I think the defeat was so comprehensive. I know we'll get into this. It was hard to say it was down to any one specific error in campaigning. So for example, in Texas, you know James Tallarico won confidently and lots of people said oh it's because we had Ken Paxton who is a scandal you know prone candidate he is very you know a bad choice unpopular but they didn't the Democrats didn't just win the Senate they also won the governorship they also won seats in the Texas House so I think it was just such a comprehensive defeat for the Republicans that there is, you can't dismiss it down to one thing unless you say that is the bigger problem.

5:47And I suppose the final thought, Gerry, being, you know, Republicans were clinging onto the hope. And the first event I went to was a poly market, so one of those prediction market events. And, you know, that was 6 p.m., 7 p.m. And admin figures were still saying, we don't believe the polls. We're going to show everyone that the polls always underestimate the Trump vote. Actually, the polls seemed as though they were pretty accurate. Right. Actually, if anything, I think pretty well, most places, they underestimated the level of Democratic support in places like, again, as we've just said, I mean, states like South Carolina, which Lindsey Graham's sister famously appointed by Donald Trump, defeated by what, four points, I think, in the end.

6:29But I do think here we should say, you know, there is one overarching reason for this. This was a referendum on Donald Trump and the Republican Party of the last two years. And, you know, if you don't believe me, then, you know, believe the president. He went out there, as we talked about, Casey, over the last few weeks saying, pretend I'm on the ballot. Make this all about me. I want to be, you know, I want this to be a referendum so you can show me how much you love me. Well, you know, they showed him how much they loved him last night. And it was not the answer was not much. That to me is the big, obviously the big lesson here.

7:02You're right. And there are people arguing, was it the Iran war? Well, yes. Was it gas prices? Yes. Was it tariffs? Yes. Was it over aggressive immigration enforcement? Yes. Was it the whole sort of tone of his behavior towards his political enemies? Yes. Was it the way he treats allies around the world? I don't think that was a major factor. But yes, that all played a part too. What do all those things have in common? It was all him. And, you know, it was interesting because, again, the Republican Party, which has become, you know, essentially sort of amen corner for everything that Donald Trump says and does.

7:36There was no respite from any of this. And this is the point. There was no one who stood up to Donald Trump and successfully in the Republican primary process who could stand up last night and say, you know what, I won because I took a different track. Every single one of those Republicans fell in line with Donald Trump over every one of those issues that I talked about, which are extremely unpopular. Those who did stand up to him, Donald Trump got rid of. You know, we saw that in primaries in Texas and in Louisiana and in other places. And those candidates, you know, those people in the Republican Party who had the strength to say no to Donald Trump were dismissed.

8:14So this was a, you know, again, more than any midterm elections I've seen in my lifetime. This was a referendum on the president and a rejection of the president. And frankly, almost everything he's done for the last two years on this scale. Yeah. And I think to your point, Jerry, that's what I mean in the way that you couldn't say, oh, it's because of this campaigning error in this spot. It's something more fundamental. But even Susan Collins, if you look, I suppose, at the candidates who perhaps, you know, survived falling slightly foul of Trump. Yeah, not much, to be fair. Not by much. But for example, Susan Collins did not have Donald Trump visit her in Maine and do a rally.

8:54Still wasn't enough. Ultimately, this was about unhappiness with the Trump administration. But we can hear Trump's own gloss on what went wrong. Because obviously a Republican blame game and a post-mortem is going on after such bad results. And Donald Trump has ever tried to set the narrative himself. A part of it was Iran, but at the same time, people understood the importance of what I've done with Iran. I think historically it's going to be much more important than this evening. If I was on the ballot, we would have won. We would have won it all very easily. But you know, Mr. President, you told voters that you were on the ballot to go vote as though you were on the ballot.

9:31Yeah, I said, say you're on the ballot. Think about me being on the ballot. But they didn't agree and they didn't like the candidates in most cases. So, Jerry, that is Trump claiming he was not on the ballot, despite, of course, telling people repeatedly to imagine he was on the ballot, blaming the candidate, saying if he was there, it would have been a big win. He also did seem to acknowledge that Iran and the Iran war played a role in this, but stuck by his decision regardless. We were never really expecting Amir Kalpa from Donald Trump knowing his personality if things went badly in a moderate way.

10:05But given this result, how do you think those comments are going to chime of his party and voters? Obviously, this will be interpreted by any sane human being as a repudiation of Donald Trump and what he's done for the last two years. And there are still some sane human beings in the Republican Party. And they will say, you know, we need to change. The problem is that they can't. Donald Trump, you know, it is a paradox of a wipeout like this, that the Republican Party, the Republican voters in these states are reduced to a rump. And that rump is passionately pro-MAGA. And by the way, interestingly, I think the Republican members of the House who survived last night will again be sort of pretty hardcore MAGA voters.

10:49So it's going to be pretty hard for someone to come against it. But I want to want to again, let's we'll get more into the future of the Republican Party in a bit. One of the things that I just want to talk about was just how the Trump coalition fell apart last night. It's worth remembering that just two years ago, Donald Trump did win an historic victory for the Republican Party. He became the first Republican to win a plurality of the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004, only the second in the last 40 years. It was an extraordinary win two years ago. So he got the support. He increased support for Republicans in places and people among people they hadn't had before.

11:24Famously, of course, with the Hispanic voters who voted much more for Republicans for him in particular two years ago than they had done for any Republican in many years. He won the support of white working class voters, especially in places like the Midwest, which many of whom had traditionally voted Democrat. They voted for him. He won a lot of young voters. I mean, this is often quite, you know, this is this is one of the more striking things in the majority. But he really made advances among young voters where Republicans have trailed for years. Last night, Katie, every one of those demographics just deserted him.

11:56The Hispanic voters, surprise, surprise, after what they've seen with immigration enforcement over the last two years, his support among Hispanics collapsed. There are these key congressional districts which Republicans won along the Texas border, which are heavily dominated by predominantly Mexican immigrants. They turned massively against Trump. Young voters turned heavily against Trump all over the country in every pretty well every congressional district. And those white working class, non-college educated voters, especially in sort of those Midwestern states, but also in some of the farm states like like Kansas, where the Democrats won, Nebraska, where they fell just short.

12:36Those working class, rural voters without degrees, they've turned against Donald Trump, too. So this famous Trump coalition, which we were all kind of marvelling at two years and hailing as a real breakthrough for the Republican Party, has fallen apart in two years. And it's something that Trump also bet the house on because you saw, for example, in Texas, a redistricting based on your point about Latino, Hispanic voters, whether they thought, you know, this is our voter of the future. We're going to try and be clever by redistricting to we have our margins are so comfortable. We reduce them a bit because given we have this block of voters in southern Texas and beyond, we'll be able to do that and win more seats.

13:17instead has blown up in their face because that vote has collapsed and now they've lost those seats adding to their woes but one side of plenty to smile about and will perhaps do for the foreseeable with the democrats now we mentioned some of those victories and of course within them we're talking about some of those republican candidates ken paxton darlene graham um you look at the the candidate ramaswamy yeah exactly i mean your boys took a hell of a beating as somebody once said yeah clearly contributed to the Republicans' woes. And in contrast, I think there just has been a feeling that the Democrats have had fresher, in some cases, perhaps not Ramaswamy, but more generally younger candidates.

13:59Now we have perhaps a new generation, James Talarico, who we've mentioned, John Ossoff in Georgia, Abdulaziz Saeed in Michigan won his. And I think we can hear some of the high moments from last night. House Democrats have taken back control of the United States Congress. You will have a Congress that recognizes we don't work for the president. We don't work for the vice president. We don't work for the Supreme Court. We work for all of you, the American people. The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed lame duck president Donald J. Trump. We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.

14:51We just showed that a politics of division is no match for a politics of love. They might have been pointing to my name and my faith, but we all know that my name and my faith aren't the reason you can't afford your gas. Not the reason you can't afford your groceries. Not the reason you can't see a doctor. We also had Hakeem Jeffries there, who is expected to be the Speaker of the House now. Jerry, there's been polling in advance of this that, you know, the brand for the Democrats is still not in a good place. They're pretty unpopular. But it's fair to say this isn't entirely anti-Trump sentiment.

15:28Do you think that the Democrats and particularly some of the candidates we just heard, you know, they pulled off something pretty special? Yes, I do very much. I mean, I think that's right. And I think to illustrate that the one candidate who kind of who underperformed relative to the body, certainly didn't ride a blue wave, did win in the end, but but not by much was Abdul El Saeed in Michigan. He eeked out a victory when in some of those states that went for Trump by 15, 20, 22 points in the cases of places like Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, Mississippi, which the Democrats won on a swing. In other words, in American terms, they talk about it upwards of 15, 20 points.

16:09In Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed won, very narrow swing. Trump won that state very narrowly by about two or three points in 2024. And it looks like Al-Sayed won by two or three points perhaps last night. Now, that to me is quite telling because, you know, I don't think Sayed was a very attractive candidate. I think he is far left, you know, espouses far left policies, has said some frankly pretty disturbing things about. And it's got some pretty disturbing kind of friendships and alliances with people on the subject of Israel and particularly, more importantly, the Jews. And actually, you know, he was the one example, really the one example, I think, where where the Democrats did not storm to victory last night.

16:51Whereas, as you say, if you take, you know, kind of like I mean, you know, I think James Tallarico had his flaws and he did, you know, Republicans tried to sort of play up the, you know, the sort of slightly kind of in conservative terms, slightly eccentric views he has on issues like gender. He was a pretty solid candidate. He came across as a sort of a, you know, decent, fairly mainstream, not kind of extreme. The candidate – I forget whose name escapes me – Hamilton, the guy in Kansas who won, a very, very, very sort of mainstream, you know, don't scare the children kind of center-left candidate that would win in a place like Kansas.

17:28The guy who looks like he's won in Mississippi, African-American column who ran on a sort of an economic populist campaign. Annie Andrews who won in South Carolina. Yeah, these were, for the most part, kind of mainstream candidates. So I think, you know, full marks to the Democratic Party establishment in getting those candidates selected in places like that and avoiding this kind of disaster. So, yeah, I mean, if the Democrats take from this the lesson, hey, surprise, surprise, you know, select broadly center-left candidates that can command a majority among people who don't terrify people, don't look like communists or, you know, Islamists or whatever.

18:08then that's the path to victory. And that seems to be the kind of people for the most part. One other quick thing on that. The majority in the House is so large that Hakeem Jeffries will have that even though there are some of these far left Democratic Socialists of America candidates who did get elected last night, and that caucus within the Democratic Party may get up to a dozen seats or so, his majority is so enormous, he's going to have a majority of 70-odd seats potentially, that they will have really limited leverage over what the party does. And with that, we're going to take a break. And when we're back, we'll be talking about what this result means for Donald Trump personally, but also the future of the Republican Party.

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21:04And we're back. Now, Jerry, we know Donald Trump's life is about to become more uncomfortable with Democrats back both in the House and the Senate. I suppose one other pleasant surprise from the Democrat perspective is the fact that Donald Trump accepted the result. One of the things that was being talked about was this sense that they could contest the result, Republicans could cry foul, say there was voter fraud, just refuse. And lots of concern on the Democrat side of what that would look like. Instead, Trump quite quickly said he accepted it and he would try to work with the Democrats. I think the jury's out on the latter.

21:40Really, do you think it is that the result was so big and drastic, the level of victory, that it was hard for anyone to really say this was down to something else? Too big to rig. Yeah, too big to rig, exactly. And you know, is that in place of the MAGA hats, we now have the veto hats. I think if you've seen those, because it was Trump at the weekend was asked by my colleague Miranda Devine at the New York Post in an interview, you know, what he would be doing now if the Democrats did win Congress. And he said, oh, they're going to be calling me Mr. Veto because I'm going to have to veto everything.

22:10Of course, under the US Constitution, that's how it works. He can veto legislation that comes out of Congress. And so some people apparently last night replaced the red MAGA hats with red veto hats. So that, you know, we can take that as an encouraging sign that there was no allegations of dirty tricks. And actually, you know, I don't want to sound sort of too kind of sort of sentimental and misty eyed about this. But whatever you thought of the results, it was pretty encouraging that people everywhere just came out and said, we got hammered. We lost, you know, and we need to go back to the drawing board.

22:38And one of the reasons that result was so disastrous to Republicans last night is who are they going to blame? Republicans control Congress and they have a Republican president. Now things go wrong. He can blame Democrats for various things. He can, you know, the Democrats will and we'll talk in more in detail about the Democrats, but they're going to be faced with this quite tricky course here between passing legislation, which I believe they have already kind of planned to address some of the issues that really are on the minds of the American people, rising prices, the cost of housing, health care, things like that.

23:09They are going to come up with legislation. They're going to pass, no doubt, through the House and the Senate. Trump's going to have to decide whether to veto it. But they're also going to obviously have to do the really, you know, aggressive political stuff on the investigations. They are going to investigate Trump over, you know, a lot of what he's done, everything from immigration to law enforcement to lawfare to the Iran war. It's just going to be a wash in subpoenas and a wash in investigations. And, you know, again, while I think that's perfectly legitimate, they're going to have to be very careful there as to how, you know, they don't look like they're just being pursuing partisan warfare.

23:45They've been elected because people are really unhappy with the state of the country. They don't want to spend the next two years, you know, watching a political battle royal unfold in Washington. They want actually something to get done. So Trump's going to have some opportunities there. He's going to be able to portray them as obstructive. He's going to be able to portray them as, you know, political. And, you know, they will make mistakes. People always do. They will get things wrong. There will be some of their far left voices in Congress will stand up and say crazy things. And so he's going to, you know, if if he has a little bit of sort of strategic patience as well as which is, I know, improbable, but also can see opportunities where he can get things done himself without the need for any without any for Congress and perhaps surprise, surprise.

24:30And I wouldn't put this past him. Look for areas where he can agree with Congress. There might be legislation, you know, he may be joking about being Mr. Vito. You know what? He may he may decide. And, you know, let's never forget this about Trump. He's not an ideologue. Whatever else he is, he's not an ideologue for the last. One of the many criticisms that conservatives like me have about Trump for the last two years is he's done a lot of things that we expect to see done by Democratic presidents from intervening in industry, telling companies what they should be doing, imposing tariffs and things like that, things that I don't think are very helpful for the economy.

25:01He may find, strangely enough, that it's in his own advantage to explore some common ground with Democrats and actually to build some things in the next couple of years that might actually conceivably be constructive. Yeah. And we saw, for example, with Zora Mandani that Trump was, you know, giving signs that he would clash and actually has come to quite admire the New York mayor in some ways and found common ground. But we ultimately know the Democrats will be hostile to Trump. They will have their own debate about whether to try and impeach him. There are obviously lots of voices who don't think this is a good idea or a good use of their time.

25:35To your point, Jerry, perhaps with that majority in the Senate, they will just find it a bit tantalizing, even if it's still not the two thirds majority they'd get to. But what I think, you know, the jury is slightly more out on is how does the Republican Party respond to Donald Trump? How do you think this is going to shape, I suppose, Trump's final two years, but also what we're about to get into, which is the slow contest towards the 2028 nomination? So it's the critical question, I think, Katie, certainly for the next six months to a year as the presidential campaign gets underway. I think that, look, it's another example of what abnormal times we live in, right, and just how unusual and unique Donald Trump is in the history of American politics.

26:20In normal times, second term, midway through a second term, the president's a lame duck. The party's had a massive defeat at the polls. It's happened before, by the way. Again, as historic as this is, it's not unusual for a party to lose, the party that controls the White House to get heavily defeated in the midterms of the president's second term. normal normal normal service would say the party that's in power that's in the white house that's had this reverse says thank you very much mr president you've done a wonderful job for six years you'll you know you're enthroned in the pantheon of our party leadership and we love you and thank you but we got to move on uh and we got to probably move even in a subtly subtly different direction.

27:05With Donald Trump, it's incredibly hard to do that, you know, because of his grip, his extraordinary, I think, unprecedented grip on the Republican Party that anybody who comes out and says, you know, even in even in the most sort of servile way, you know, well, Mr. President, thank you, thank you. But sort of goodbye, Mr. Chips will get slapped down and told, you know, no, you can't do that. And they will be terrified. And they aren't frankly, they haven't exactly demonstrated themselves to be, you know, men and women of great courage in the last two years. And I can't really see them discovering a backbone now.

27:42So I think it will be what I think is going to be interesting. And you mentioned Ron DeSantis, Katie. I thought that was very interesting what he was tweeting overnight and saying he wants to run. I think I think it's going to be kind of like a canary in the coal mine phenomenon here. Someone like DeSantis, who I don't really think has much of a prayer of winning the nomination. someone like Nikki Haley, who I don't think is a prayer winning denomination. She was out there last night saying pretty harsh things about what's gone wrong in the last two years. They are going to be the kind of maybe this canary in the coal mine is maybe the wrong metaphor.

28:12Maybe it's a stalking horse, someone to put their head above the parabit and and get Trump to take shots at it. I think that we're going to see how that plays out. If, you know, if a DeSantis and Nikki Haley, I think a Ted Cruz is going to come out and say some things that are pretty critical of Trump, not in a, you know, he'll they'll all couch it in, you know, greatest president ever. But can we move on stuff? But it will be no mistake. There'll be no mistaking the message. If they can do that and gain a little bit of traction, you know, if the if the you know, if the stalking horse doesn't get shot right between the eyes and they have a little bit on the canary of the coal mine doesn't collapse, then that might open up a little bit of freedom in the Republican Party.

28:58And that will then be really interesting to see whether I think the more plausible candidates, J.D. Vance, perhaps Marco Rubio, perhaps some others who come out, whether they are able then to look a little bit more loyal to Trump while still being able to voice some criticisms. And Trump will sort of in a way have to kind of go with them because and allow them to do that because the alternative is, you know, has been pretty hostile. But it's a really it's a really difficult challenge. And as we said in the first half, you know, the Republican Party, you know, reduced to its rump is more MAGA than ever.

29:30It is, you know, unfortunately, one of the paradoxes of electoral politics that when you lose voters, you know, when you lose swing voters and voters who aren't absolutely hardcore, you're left, the party is left with the hardcore. And we really will be the hardcore that will determine how the primaries go starting in just over a year, Katie, remarkably. Yeah, no, it feels as though the Republicans are in a slightly worst of both worlds situation where, see, the administration is incredibly unpopular with the American people. But still, there is a base. We've seen that base turn up at 30 rallies in 32 days, queuing for hours to see the president.

30:05Even if occasionally there were empty chairs, it was a showing that, you know, there is still a cult around Trump. and these are the people who any candidate in 2028 is going to want to have on their side a bit at least to get to where they need to be jd vance has i think done enough uh disagreeing with the president in private and then that somehow making it into the papers frequently um that you know you can argue there is clearly water in some areas but he is still the vice president and it's going to be really hard for him to distance himself from some of the key decisions in the administration.

30:39And I guess finally, Jerry, just for Trump in those two years, I mean, he will be called a lame duck president now. He has said he is Mr. Vito. But is he the type of president who can be a lame duck in the sense that you mentioned Iran, there is a general sense he will focus more on foreign affairs, where there is less congressional oversight in terms of clipping his wings. He will want to continue building his legacy. He will insist that he is still popular. I mean, do you think we're entering a more volatile, cranky, perhaps more term one period of Trump? Or is it too early to tell right now?

31:18Look, if this result had not gone so badly for Republicans, I would have said Trump is absolutely not going away. You know, kind of what might have been interpreted as sort of a fairly normal midterm setback. Trump would be sort of liberated to spend the last two years doing even more of what he likes doing, which is executive orders and getting involved in controversial ways in foreign affairs, I think he will still be very minded to do that. I do think, interestingly, Casey, we heard in the first half him saying he had nothing to do with this defeat. And if he'd been on the ballot, the Republicans would have done much better.

31:51I think he probably genuinely believes that. What everyone else can say about Trump, the man's ego is such that I think he genuinely believes as if this had been a presidential election, he'd have won it. So I don't think he's going to go away. I think he will do all of those things we've talked about when we previewed these elections, Katie, that I think he will feel a sort of slightly freer hand to do some more aggressive stuff on the foreign policy front, particularly. I think he will pursue some executive orders. I think there will be a kind of heightened sense of alarm that people will have because, you know, he's running out of time and still wants to get a lot of stuff done.

32:25But I do think in the wake of last night, that is tempered a little bit. The scale of this is so big that it will open up at least the opportunity for some in the party. If he does start doing really crazy stuff, I mean, if he really doubles down on Iran, if he really doubles down, as I fear he might, on a kind of a warm new global order with the leaders of China and Russia, I think there will be people in the Republican Party after last night who say, no, you can't. You know, this is this is this is insane. You can't you know, you can't do this now. Now, they can't stop him. He will go ahead and do those things, but they can raise the political costs for him.

33:02So, yeah, I think, you know, I think it's still kind of sort of Trump unbound to some extent the next two years in ways that could be quite interesting, to put it mildly. Yeah, I think that Texas results speaking to Republicans is one that really freaks them out, because if you don't have Texas, what is the path to the White House when you look at the Electoral College for the Republicans? and if the Democrats have Texas now, that's an area where they're going to potentially keep pouring money in, whereas there's always been a debate before about how much Bob is spending in Texas, given it's so expensive to campaign there.

33:37I suppose one other loser of the night was Elon Musk, who spent nearly half a billion and has found the state he lives in has now gone completely blue and the money elsewhere also didn't tend to do much. But, Gerry, as we end, it seems as we are in Donald Trump's final season, but there is still more of the Trump show to come. So do join us again next week.

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35:51Thank you.

36:23Thank you.