Can Republicans learn from this defeat? Not likely

• By David M. Drucker / Bloomberg Opinion

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A healthy Republican Party would respond to this historic midterm-election repudiation of US President Donald Trump with contrition and honest introspection. Its leaders would plot a fresh path forward and shed the elements of a White House agenda that drove US voters to hand control of the House of Representatives and Senate to a Democratic Party they do not even approve of all that much.

Reduced to a rump in Congress and its governing coalition gutted to the bone — just in time for 2028 — that Republican Party would assemble a more durable confederation of voters that does not rise and fall on the whims of a narcissistic albeit once-in-a-generation political talent.

However, Republicans and their exalted leader are not the picture of political health.

Those within the party most likely to confront reality and take on the difficult work of rebuilding the party were cut down in ruby-red House districts, Senate seats and governors’ mansions that have simply not elected Democrats. The only Republicans left standing were insulated — by gerrymandered districts, their constituents’ stubborn support for Trump or a combination of the two. The party’s short-sighted motivation would be to follow the president’s defiant lead and resist the new Democratic majorities’ attempts to neuter the commander-in-chief.

And so the party’s future, immediate and otherwise, is in Trump’s hands, and most elected officials would still take their cues from the White House.

As the shocking returns flowed in showing defeats in Senate contests in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas (Texas!), some veteran party insiders I spoke with disagreed with my assessment and said that battered congressional Republicans would be chastened, distance themselves from Trump and finally end blind support for his agenda on Capitol Hill.

Some Republican operatives even speculated that Vice President JD Vance would be forced to abandon any plans he might have to seek the White House, to say nothing of aspiring Cabinet members.

I am not a gambler, but if I were, I would not risk a nickel on that bet. The siren song of the president’s loyal, MAGA populist base would be hard for the party’s 2028 contenders to resist — and that is if a major effort materializes to wean the party off of Trump.

This is not the first time the president has led his party into a ditch, only to recover like Lazarus because he refused to concede failure. That kind of obstinance inspires grassroots conservatives who see a fighter rather than a shirker.

“I wasn’t on the ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump said in a Truth Social post on election night.

Meanwhile, Republican strategists told me with a high degree of confidence that Democrats would overplay their hand — just like Republicans did — causing voters to turn back to Trump and the Republican Party just in time for a presidential campaign, now unexpectedly ripe with opportunity.

The claim that Democrats would overreach and offer Republicans a chance to revive their political standing is not unreasonable; the US has seen both political parties misinterpret an election backlash. The Democrats did so following back-to-back blue waves in 2006 and 2008. Two years later in 2010, a red wave gained the Republicans 63 House districts and seven Senate seats during former US president Barack Obama’s first midterm election. The Republicans committed the same faux pas during Trump’s first presidency, which fueled a blue wave-flip of 41 House districts in the 2018 midterm election.

If Democrats dive head first into impeaching Trump and legislate on culture-war issues after the new Congress is seated in January, voters would sour on them quickly. However, I wonder if Republicans have digested the breadth of the destruction the 45th and 47th president left in his wake this week — an apocalyptic political disaster that, as polling analyst Sean Trende said, has not been seen since 1974, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that left the Republicans on life support.

Republicans did not just lose a Senate seat in Kansas for the first time in nearly a century. The Democrats were possibly poised to win a Senate seat in Mississippi for the first time since 1982. The Republican lost states, districts and other offices that Trump and his predecessors have been carrying by double digits going back years, if not decades. That outcome demands a wholesale reevaluation of US politics and the blue-state, red-state paradigm the US has lived under for a quarter century.

Trump does not seem much interested in doing so. And if past is prologue, that means Republicans would not be either. They might need to lose some more, first.

David M. Drucker is a columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a contributing writer for The Dispatch and the author of In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.