The election cycle had just started when Tim Scott, the newly elected chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, announced what his top priority was for the next two years.
It wasn’t defending the GOP’s Senate majority.
In one early 2025 meeting, Scott told Republicans that the most important thing to him is his relationship with President Donald Trump, three sources with knowledge of the comments told The Washington Sun. He added that he wouldn’t do anything as NRSC chair to jeopardize it, two of the sources said. It was an unusual statement from the Republican in charge of winning Senate races, who is normally expected to relentlessly advocate on behalf of his candidates.
Scott’s priority was shared across the Republican Party this year. It has now led Republicans to a historic electoral disaster.
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Republicans suffered a cataclysmic wipeout Tuesday, a blowout many in Washington considered unthinkable in an era of hardened voter partisanship. The staggering volume of losses — at least 25 seats in the House and 7 in the Senate — matched the shock of how deeply Democrats reached into Trump territory, flipping MAGA-heavy districts where neither party committee spent a dime. Democrats swept to victory in Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, snapping decades-old dry spells and elevating history-making candidates in places like Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan.
And at the heart of it all was Trump and a party congenitally unable to show independence from him. As the president’s approval sank to record lows — particularly for his handling of the economy, voters’ number one issue — party members stubbornly refused to put any distance between themselves and their leader, even when their own evidence suggested they should try. Reanimating the Trump 2024 coalition — held together by a populist streak that wrangled Latino, working-class and young voters — failed miserably.
The writing had been on the wall for months. When Republicans decamped Washington this past winter for a private retreat in Florida, they got a five-alarm warning from Chris Winkelman, who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the flagship House GOP super PAC. He told lawmakers in a briefing at the March meeting that the midterms, then eight months away, were a growing problem.
“It is entirely possible that we’re going to lose 10 incumbents,” he told the members, according to two people who were in the room.
By Tuesday night, it was clear that Winkelman’s warning was not nearly dire enough.
GOP pollster Robert Blizzard said “the Trump coalition came apart at the seams.” Mike DuHaime, the former political director of the Republican National Committee, called it “a Watergate-level loss.” Longtime North Carolina GOP strategist Paul Shumaker said that Trump voters “feel betrayed.”
One Republican operative called it a “total ass-kicking from coast to coast” that laid at the feet of the president and his political team. A second called it an “absolute embarrassment” for party leaders like Rep. Richard Hudson, the chair of the National Republican Campaign Committee, who saw all of their strategies “blow up in their faces.”
Interviews with more than 50 lawmakers, candidates, senior strategists and consultants from both parties, some of whom were granted anonymity to share internal party deliberations, reveal how Republicans blundered their way into a cataclysmic loss that leaves the future viability of MAGA in doubt and resuscitates a Democratic Party that looked nearly dead two years ago.
And they showed the startling miscalculation of a party that devised a strategy almost singularly focused on embracing Trump, even as evidence mounted that the public backlash against him was the most severe a president had faced in decades.
A spokesperson for the NRSC called the account of Scott’s remarks “categorically false and a 1000% lie.”
Republicans’ Big Redistricting Flop
Republicans started the cycle in 2025 with a risky gambit to keep the map in their favor: mid-decade redistricting. Led by White House political adviser James Blair, Republicans leaned on red-state governors and legislators to redraw their congressional maps to pad the party’s margins ahead of what has historically been a tough midterm political environment.
The line-moving — which started in Texas in July 2025 — put 22 Democratic incumbents into districts Trump won in 2024, up from 13 at the beginning of the cycle. But by Tuesday night, of the seven red states that redrew their districts, aiming to pick up up to 15 seats, Republicans did not appear to be on track to win any of them. In Texas, Democrats smothered GOP candidates in the Rio Grande Valley, a redistricting hot spot.
“The undertow of the national wave will reach deeper in Texas than anywhere else, and D.C. operatives never accounted for that in their math,” said a Texas GOP consultant. “The genius idea a few D.C. operatives had to redraw the congressional map [is now] laughable.”
But last year, when redistricting still looked like a daring move, Democrats were caught flat-footed. They “didn’t have a game plan,” said Will Van Nuys, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s deputy executive director. That didn’t last.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly floated the idea of redrawing his own state, after his team figured out if it was “legally feasible, politically feasible” to pass a ballot initiative to overturn the state’s independent, commission-drawn lines, said a person familiar with Newsom’s thinking. They added: “This all started with Gavin.”
By August 2025, Democratic leadership gathered over Zoom on the sidelines of a major donor retreat at the Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego to discuss whether they would counter Texas with a California redraw. Representatives for Newsom, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the DCCC and the House Majority PAC decided to give it the green light, according to two people involved in the discussions.
“Gavin’s going to have to put his neck on the line and potentially ruin his presidential chances if we lost,” said Mike Smith, president of House Majority PAC. “And I think it was all making a blood pact that we’re not letting this down.”
California’s vote count is still trickling in, but Democrats could pick up up to five additional seats in the state. The move will buoy Newsom as he eyes a 2028 presidential run.
Democrats thought they’d hit another wall when the party’s efforts to redraw the lines in Virginia were thrown out by the state’s Supreme Court. A senior NRCC official was in a meeting with congressional chiefs of staff when his phone wouldn’t stop buzzing on the wooden conference-room table. When he announced to the room that the court had blocked the Democratic-drawn seats, the room broke out into cheers.
The brief victory, though, just clouded deeper problems in the Republican ranks.
The Struggle to Recruit Candidates
When Scott met with Gov. Brian Kemp in Atlanta in April 2025, it was ostensibly to recruit the popular governor into challenging Sen. Jon Ossoff. The race, one of the GOP’s few clear offensive opportunities this cycle, was expected to be the most expensive and competitive race in the country. Recruiting Kemp would be a coup for Republicans.
But Scott did not effectively sell Kemp on the Senate, according to two people briefed on the interaction, even though he promised Kemp enormous financial backing. Instead, Scott told the governor that he wasn’t long for the Senate himself, one of those people said.
“If you had said to him, ‘We’ll get you on Foreign Relations and Armed Services, you can talk to generals, travel around the world’ — he’s a Bush foreign policy guy; he’s got a lot of interest in foreign policy, and he would’ve been really intrigued,” said the second person with direct knowledge of the interaction. “Kemp was open, but it was a lackluster, unimpressive effort. As soon as they failed to get Kemp, that race was over.”
Republicans, in private, didn’t limit the blame to Scott. Trump’s meddling in Senate primaries triggered enormous frustration in some corners of the party, especially his endorsements of the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sister. Both lost Tuesday night.
He also backed former RNC Chair Michael Whatley in North Carolina and Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia, who proved disappointing. GOP super PACs ultimately cut off spending in both states this fall — states that operatives in both parties expected a year ago to be at the center of the political universe.
“He’s an incredible salesman to his own people, but his deficit is the bully pulpit and being able to explain to the middle of the electorate what he’s done,” a senior GOP operative said of Trump.
But, this operative added, “the Republican Party has gotten lazy. They get a Trump endorsement and that’s all they run on.”
Dialing into Fox News early Wednesday morning, Trump was defiant. When asked about “candidate quality” and if he had regrets, he said, “I had no choice.”
Democrats had their own tumultuous primaries, but they were able to limit the ultimate damage. In Maine, Graham Platner easily defeated Chuck Schumer’s handpicked candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, before he was forced to abandon the race after he was accused of sexually assaulting a woman.
The accusation’s appearance in the media wasn’t a coincidence: Democratic operatives in Washington, convinced that rumors of Platner’s sexual misconduct would eventually emerge and sink his campaign against Collins, worked behind the scenes to make sure any such story was published before the July 15 ballot deadline, according to two people with knowledge of the effort. “If that story had come out even eight days later, we would have been stuck with him,” one of the sources said.
Democrats ultimately held a summer convention and picked Troy Jackson to replace Platner on the ballot, likely saving the seat for the party. Jackson defeated Collins on Tuesday.
How Democrats Pushed Back Against Republicans’ Cash Advantage
The nagging fear for many Democrats working congressional races was their bank accounts.
Quarter after quarter, the Republican ecosystem grew its pool of cash, while Democrats struggled mightily to keep up, particularly with donors who cut big checks. The problem for Democrats multiplied this summer with a Supreme Court case that opened up coordination between the committees and campaigns. The RNC, MAGA Inc. and other GOP-backed super PACs flooded the landscape with cash, which would eventually crack ad-spending records for a midterm cycle.
In mid-July, one day after the Supreme Court lifted those coordination limits, GOP members in the NRCC’s Patriot Program met with the NRCC chair and executive director. One Republican member pressed for more financial help from the committee. A person inside the room remembered afterward: “And I was like, ‘Wow, oh, that’s legal now.’”
By late summer, Democrats started to raise private, and increasingly public, alarms over the disparity and whether it’d hamper the party’s efforts to expand deeper into GOP territory. Days after House Speaker Mike Johnson met with GOP megadonor Elon Musk in late August about his own midterm spending, Van Nuys knew the DCCC had to get creative.
Following a Saturday Zoom meeting before Labor Day, when Van Nuys realized the DCCC was defending more seats than it was pushing into, he decided to pitch an unprecedented way to save the committee some much-needed cash. He proposed putting 13 Democratic members, who represented the second tier of front-line districts, into a weekly polling program to track their races. Then, move all the cash earmarked for those incumbents into offensive House races deeper into the GOP battlefield. The DCCC’s executive director, Julie Merz, pitched it directly to members days later.
That move, internally called the “Polling Protection Program,” freed up nearly $10 million, Van Nuys said, for races like those in Iowa’s 2nd District and Texas’ 35th. By early Wednesday morning, Democrats had flipped both.
The high-dollar checks did come — they just came at the end, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg pumped $84 million, as did Future Forward, the flagship super PAC behind Kamala Harris’ 2024 election, with $77 million.
For some Democrats, the tide was so high that the cash was unnecessary. In North Carolina, riding on Democrat Roy Cooper’s coattails, Cyril Jefferson didn’t spend any cash on ads, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, but he beat Republican Rep. Addison McDowell, who spent about $230,000.
“The money has failed. Redistricting has failed. Them hitting us on trans or defund the police or tying us to communism, all of that has failed,” Van Nuys said in an interview with The Sun in October. “No matter what they throw at us in the next few weeks, I feel very confident in where we stand right now.”
Republicans Stuck Close to Trump
By the end of spring, Democrats started to see signs that they were on track for a big year.
One senior House Democratic operative recounted seeing a poll in mid-June of Arizona’s battleground 6th Congressional District, where political newcomer JoAnna Mendoza was taking on Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani. Mendoza’s name ID was barely above 30%, but she still led Ciscomani by 2 percentage points on an early ballot test.
It would be the start of a flurry of internal Democratic polling that showed numbers so positive that many operatives struggled to believe them.
“We had just never seen polling this good,” the senior Democratic strategist said. “It’s hard to be excited when you see one good poll. But when you never see any negative polls, it’s a ‘holy shit, something is happening here’ moment.”
There was little doubt why Democrats were starting to see especially favorable data at the start of summer: The Iran war and its effect on gas prices was torpedoing Republicans. Trump starting a new war, despite promising to end them, and heating up inflation, after promising to tame it, left the Republican base deflated. While Republicans hoped the Iran operation would be a short-lived intervention akin to the targeted operation in Venezuela earlier that year, the United States has spent nearly all of 2026 engaged in occasional skirmishes. The Trump administration conducted defensive strikes on Iran the day before the election. Nationally, gas prices average $4.15 a gallon, compared to $2.98 before the war.
It was the “reverse Dobbs effect,” a senior GOP national strategist said in describing the Iran war’s impact on the GOP base. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which injected energy into a depressed Democratic base and led to the party faring better than expected.
Even if Trump’s popularity was starting to dip, most Republican candidates still showed little interest in distancing themselves from their party or its leader. Republican political operatives have long resisted breaking with Trump, convinced that doing so would do more to depress turnout in the MAGA base than win over swing voters. They explicitly decided to double down on the strategy this election cycle, confident they could persuade many of the Trump supporters who usually skip midterm elections to turn out this year.
But by the start of 2026, Trump had already become more unpopular than he had at almost any previous point in his tenure. It wouldn’t get any better from there.
By the time this summer arrived, Trump’s popularity had already taken a significant hit in public polling because of the Iran war, according to polls. Some GOP strategists concluded that putting a little distance between their candidates and the president was becoming a political necessity.
“It’s just truthful that he is the most unpopular president we’ve had in a long time,” said one senior GOP strategist. “More unpopular than Biden was.”
Republicans had both big and small opportunities to distance themselves from Trump, GOP officials said, whether over Iran or when the president attempted to rename one of the Great Lakes. But almost until the end, any such effort never materialized.
“We failed to do it,” retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said. “We became a department of the executive branch, and it didn’t work. It never does. Didn’t work for Obama. Didn’t work for Trump, politically.”
Tillis underscored a war powers resolution over the summer as proof of the pressure Republicans felt to toe the administration’s line on Iran, saying that the White House was whipping the position even though the resolution was effectively meaningless.
“I mean, that was the level of control that they’ve exerted over the conference to our own disadvantage,” the North Carolina Republican said. “There’s no separation. There’s only barely. People are saying, ‘Well, we’re not, I’m not happy with what’s going on with the war.’”
Some Senate Republican strategists were especially distressed by Scott’s stance. They believed Scott, in his formal role, should be responsible for convincing Trump that the party’s candidates need to show some measure of dissent on issues like tariffs and the war. They quickly came to believe he was unwilling to do that. That left them fearful that if they spoke out, they could expect an attack from Trump and little to no backup from the NRSC.
“They thought of it as their job to represent the White House’s view to the Senate candidates, not the other way around,” said the senior GOP strategist, who suggested that a candidate like Ashley Hinson should have been given the green light over the summer to start forcefully opposing the tariffs because of the particularly harmful effect they’ve had on farmers.
“We don’t fucking do persausion anymore,” the strategist continued. “We’re just going to say the base-motivating thing over and over again. And that’s a big problem. There was no effort to help campaigns with what those persuasive swing-voter messages were.”
Scott defenders dispute that the senator didn’t stand up for Republican candidates to Trump, pointing out that he backed Cornyn over Paxton and helped engineer a temporary tariff freeze. He also publicly criticized a Truth Social post of Trump’s from last year
“Chairman Scott took the job as NRSC Chair knowing that it would lead to conflicts with the White House, including tireless defense of incumbents like John Cornyn,” an NRSC spokesperson said.
By the time summer ended, Republicans felt relatively confident about the state of the midterm map. The environment was rough, but many of their candidates in key House and Senate races were still competitive.
Republicans’ Fall Panic
Republicans had just wrapped their midterm convention in Dallas where Trump begged Republicans to pretend he was on the ballot. The economy and the Iran war, the 100-pound weights around the party’s necks, were ignored. After a tough August, when their candidates languished in the low 40s in internal polling, Republican strategists and operatives expected their voters would return to their partisan corners, as they traditionally have in recent cycles.
By mid-September, they started to realize it wasn’t going to work out that way.
A flurry of Republican polls one week after the convention showed a precipitous drop across the board for the party. Trump’s image dropped, candidates once sporting a significant lead fell back into statistical dead-heats and a map that looked competitive when the month began was suddenly tilting quickly to the left.
“That was the point at which, OK, we’ve got to hunker down and now go all in and make sure that we maintain the Senate,” said Alex Latcham, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, the flagship Senate GOP super PAC. “This is no longer about picking up seats.”
Despite a barrage of negative ads against Democrats, “no matter what you did, voters were just not fucking listening,” another Republican strategist said. “And you can’t break through. And it just got tougher and tougher.”
Republicans’ nerves mirrored Democrats’ disbelief.
Democrats’ biggest problem, in fact, might have been managing the sheer number of good polls Democratic operatives were seeing internally: One official with the House Majority PAC said campaigns were constantly clamoring for the super PAC to release data about their race, faster than the group was actually able to release them.
Leading Democratic strategists said the game plan this year was simple: focus on economic issues, push as deeply as they could into red territory and hope that Republicans keep focusing on the culture-war issues that dominated most of their advertising, like the party’s relentless focus on transgender issues.
Their only confusion was why Republicans remained so confident about the state of the map late in election season.
“I always assume the other side knows what they are doing. But over the last 18 months, it became increasingly obvious they didn’t,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic strategist. “From ‘Liberation Day’ to the ‘big, beautiful bill’ to attacking Iran — just one unforced error after another.”
Some Republicans agreed.
“Even though they voted for Trump in 2024, he’s doing everything but what he said he’s going to do,” said Shumaker, the North Carolina-based GOP consultant. “That coalition he had was created, in large part, by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ failure on the economy. Why should anybody think they will maintain that coalition without focusing on the economy?”
How Far the Map Went
When state Rep. Lindsay James, a chaplain, launched her congressional run in Iowa, few Democrats thought she had a chance.
“There was a lot of dismissing this race in particular,” James said in late October, during a break from greeting Grinnell College students during early voting. She said she’d heard from Democratic donors, consultants and activists: “It’s too hard, it’s too red, it’s too far gone.” And she worried “Democrats have left the Midwest behind.”
She noticed a shift on the ground this summer, as she held a 22-county town-hall tour, when not just Democratic activists but also Republicans and independents started showing up. When Van Nuys, the DCCC deputy executive director, cooked up the plan to free up cash in early September, one of the top districts the committee wanted to jump into was James’ — a district Trump won by 10 points.
By late October, after significant spending on both sides, James led GOP state Rep. Joe Mitchell by an 8-point margin, according to the DCCC’s internal tracking numbers. As James hugged Grinnell students who told her they’d voted for her, she surveyed them on what snacks her congressional office should stock when she was elected.
James ultimately beat Mitchell on Tuesday night. She’s clear-eyed about what Democrats must do to hold onto these voters, who are primarily angry about Trump but haven’t bought into the Democratic Party, either.
“Any kind of political theater, I’m not interested in that,” James said. She warned of potential distractions, like another Trump impeachment. “We need to deliver, and we need to deliver quickly.”
In the final days of the campaign, James traded messages on a particularly active Signal thread, composed of 14 of the DCCC’s Red to Blue women candidates. It was a place to lean on each other for advice because “there’s challenges for women candidates that are unique,” she said.
Denise Powell, who flipped an Omaha-based district Tuesday night, has taken to sending each of her fellow candidates in the Signal chat friendship bracelets, à la Taylor Swift, in the lead up to Election Day. James’ bracelet has messages like “Vote for Lindsay” and “Fiery Redhead.”
Good luck charms, James said. It’s luck those Democratic candidates didn’t end up needing.
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