Thursday, November 05, 2026

ANNALS OF DeSANTISTAN: DeSantis wants special session to implement ‘taxpayer bill of rights’ (Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix, November 4, 2026)

From Florida Phoenix:



DeSantis wants special session to implement ‘taxpayer bill of rights’

He sees it as the best way to prepare for Amendment 3 property tax cuts.

BY -

 Gov. Ron DeSantis hosted a news conference at the Florida Capitol following the 2026 elections, on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix)

One of the last actions Gov. Ron DeSantis wants done before leaving office in January is to implement a “taxpayer bill of rights” via a special legislative session, he said Wednesday.

He established that expectation during a news conference following passage Tuesday of Amendment 3.

The specific date for the session is up to the two chambers of the Legislature, he said. But, when asked before the election, incoming legislative leaders were non-committal on an Amendment 3-focused special session. Neither chambers responded to requests for comment Wednesday afternoon.

“That has to be done by January 1, and we will do it by January 1,” DeSantis said.

The amendment takes effect Jan. 1, but the first two years of its property tax exemption are set in the Florida Constitution already. The amendment allows legislators to eventually expand homestead exemptions to the full value of homes.

Tax shift?

DeSantis wants a special session, in part, to prevent local governments “from doing an end-run around the amendment and taxing them in other ways.”

Lawmakers skeptical of the amendment and local leaders from around the state questioned how governments will function with the decreases in revenue, and some insisted that shifting taxes, perhaps through fee-based government, could be the only way to maintain services.

Former state Sen. Jeff Brandes, who has rallied hard against Amendment 3, questioned the governor’s approach. He serves as president of the nonpartisan Florida Policy Project.

“I don’t know how [DeSantis] would exempt non-ad valorem taxation, or try to prevent some other type of fee shift. [Local governments] have all these statutory fees available to them,” Brandes told the Phoenix Wednesday. “I just don’t understand where he’s going, because so many have already built this into their system.”

Brandes sees no need for a special session.

“I don’t think there’s any reason that the Legislature should go back into special session under a DeSantis administration,” Brandes said, going on to say that an implementing bill for Amendment 3 can be the first bill of the 2027 session.

“Understand, many legislators are reading this amendment for the first time and trying to understand what it really does now. They didn’t think it was going to pass,” Brandes said.

Legislators “are going to have to build an entire process” for cities that operate under Amendment 3 to consolidate into counties — particularly counties that aren’t interested in absorbing cities.

To do a special session, Brandes said, “you’re going to be basically putting out a skeleton, an outline, and then you’re going to be filling in the holes for the next five years.”

“None of this is going to go smoothly,” he said.

“The cities and counties, before they were concerned; now they’re terrified and the Legislature itself is terrified,” Brandes said.

Legislative leaders dubious

On the “Between the Lines with Dara Kam” podcast, recorded and published before the election, the two incoming legislative chamber leaders didn’t sound committed to a special session before January.

“We in the Senate believe a lot of it in what we did was self-executing. However, there may be some implementation language we need to put around it — we do understand that,” Senate President-Designate Jim Boyd said on the podcast. “Personally, I believe that it can wait until we reconvene in January. I think the new administration ought to have a say in that.”

House Speaker-Designate Sam Garrison told Kam that Amendment 3 “will dominate the upcoming session, and not be something that can be rolled out and just implemented in three days. This is a very, very complicated issue.”

“I personally am of the belief, I’d rather be right than be quick,” Garrison said at the time, prefacing that comment by saying, “I don’t want to pre-judge it because I’m a big believer of you play the hole you’re on.”

The amendment was the only one of three on the ballot to garner more than 60% support from voters, the threshold required to pass state constitutional amendments.

The amendment will increase the homestead exemption for non-school taxes from $50,000 per year to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028.

At full implementation, state economists estimate Amendment 3 could reduce local revenues by as much as $12 billion annually.

The amendment did not receive 60% in any individual county among the five least populated counties in the state. Rural counties voiced concern they would not be able to function in a world in which Amendment 3 passed.

In Liberty County, the least populous in the state, the amendment received near 58%. In the next least populated counties, Franklin and Lafayette, the amendment received 47% and 57% support, respectively.

DeSantis said he wants to work with legislators to create a fund for smaller counties to ensure they can pay for core needs.

The amendment, DeSantis said, “that’s going to be such a breath of fresh air for people.”

“I’m glad that since I was involved with this, I want to make sure that we land it right,” DeSantis said.

Lawmakers will be in Tallahassee for a mostly ceremonial organizational session the week of Nov. 30.

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ANNAL$ OF De$ANTI$TAN: Once again, the Democratic blue wave misses Florida(Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix, November 4, 2026)

When will our Florida Democratic Party disorganization answer for its delusions of adequacy.?

From Florida Phoenix:

Once again, the Democratic blue wave misses Florida

Some analysts argue the wave did come to the Sunshine State, noting big wins in the Legislature and how none of the Republicans who ran in newly created congressional districts won Tuesday.

BY -

 Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly with his wife Laura while addressing a crowd at the Tampa Convention Center on Nov. 3, 2026. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)

Tuesday night saw the near virtual destruction of the Republican Party power structure in this country.

Except in Florida.

Democrat David Jolly lost to Republican Byron Donalds by 1.3% in the race for governor. The races for attorney general, chief financial officer, and agriculture commissioner all went to the Republican incumbents by similarly close margins. And Angie Nixon, the Democratic candidate for Senate, lost by 3 points to Republican Ashley Moody, 51%-48%.

However, the Democrats did net 15 seats in the state House and one in the state Senate, moving them out of their superminority status in the state Legislature. The House District 33 seat is now in the recount process, with Democratic candidate Dan McDow ahead. Currently, the House Democratic Caucus is at 49 members. If McDow wins, the Democrats will have 50 members to the Republicans’ 70 in the 120-member House.

Some analysts say the blue wave, or tsunami, did hit Florida, noting that approximately 68% of registered Democrats voted statewide, compared to 63% of Republicans, according to the Fresh Take Florida Project. That’s the highest turnout for a midterm election for Democrats in living memory, said Matt Isbell, a Democratic data consultant.

Republican Byron Donalds celebrates his win in the Florida governor race on Nov. 3, 2026, flanked by his wife, Erika, and running mate Bryan Ávila. (Photo via Donalds Facebook page)

“A blue wave did hit Florida,” said University of Central Florida political science professor Aubrey Jewett, noting not only the wins in the state House but also how the Democrats staved off the Ron DeSantis’ redistricting map, specifically drawn to allow Republicans four more seats in the state’s 28-member congressional delegation.

Instead, Democrats appear to have won all four, including Darren Soto in Florida’s 9th Congressional District, which voted for Donald Trump by 18 percentage points in 2024. (Soto leads Republican Dan Green, 50.26% to 49.74%, a race so tight that the Associated Press has not yet called it).

Isbell says Florida Democrats overall overperformed Tuesday, especially with independent voters and even some “soft Republicans.”

So why did Florida Democrats not win statewide when Kansas Democrats and Texas Democrats did? Isbell believes that’s because of the Republicans’ 11-point lead in voter registration, which Jewett calls their “insurance policy.”

Massively outspent

Following Jolly’s narrow loss, don’t overlook is how massively outspent he was. The Donalds campaign raised nearly $174 million, while Jolly’s campaign took in less than $28 million. During a campaign event in Tampa in late September, Jolly said he needed the national Democratic Party to start spending money on his behalf, arguing the only way he could lose was if national Democrats “chose to take a pass on Florida like they have in the past 10 years.”

Speaking to reporters on a remote conference call Wednesday morning, Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried acknowledged that, “for years, Florida has been written off by people who believe this state is no longer competitive and too expensive.”

It is not about spending in Florida. It is about investing early in Florida the infrastructure that is necessary to win the third-largest state.

– Nikki Fried, Florida Democratic Party chair

“Well, I hope that they are paying attention this morning,” she said. “Because what we saw last night should send a very clear message to our national Democratic Party and our partners: Florida is worth investing in.”

Noting Democrats’ wins in the Legislature, Fried said, “We demonstrated what can be accomplished with very limited resources.”

“Florida Democrats are looking at the results across the country and can only imagine what kind of a day we would be having if we had sustained national support and the investment this state deserves,” she said. “It is not about spending in Florida. It is about investing early in Florida the infrastructure that is necessary to win the third-largest state.”

Isbell noted that the national Democratic Party and its political committees that fund races pulled out of Florida after 2018 and 2020 election cycles, and voter registration efforts since then have fallen off a cliff. Only 67% of eligible adults are registered to vote in Florida, the fourth worst registration rate in the country, he said.

“That’s because we as Democrats of Florida have a couple of coins and a shoestring to try to register people in a state where if you make mistakes with forms you can be hit with lawyer fees and all of this other crazy stuff. And the Republicans, who have more money than God, have been able to at least sustain their level,” he said.

Limits on voter drives

In 2023, the Florida Legislature passed SB 7050, a law that imposed new regulations on the activities of third-party voting registration organizations. Under that law, those groups must re-register with the state before each election cycle to collect voter registration forms, and they have a shorter time to return forms to the county supervisors of elections, with a penalty of $50 per late day, up to $2,500 per application.

Meanwhile, during a press conference in Tallahassee Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said it would be an understatement to call the electoral earthquake that took place Tuesday simply a “wave.”

“It’s the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States,” he said — adding that the one state able to “hold the line and withstand that was right here in the free state of Florida.”

The reason for that, DeSantis said, was that Republicans in Florida had built a record of achievement and trust from voters “that even in the worst situation that you can imagine politically, we were able to hold the line and prevent the worst from happening here.”

Specifically, the governor cited Central Florida Republican state Sen. Jason Brodeur’s loss to Democrat John Lowndes in the Senate District 10 race by 10 points as an example of how no Republican was safe from the national headwinds against the GOP. “That wasn’t a reflection of him. He got caught up in a wave,” he said.

In addition to the recount in the Florida House District 33 seat, Fried noted that the race in Florida’s 27th Congressional District between Republican incumbent Maria Salazar and Democrat Eliott Rodriguez was headed for an automatic machine recount. The latest totals have Salazar up 50.23% to Rodriguez’ 49.77%, within the 0.5% margin that triggers a recount.

Salazar won the seat in 2024 by 20 points. “The voters have spoken loud and clear all over District 27 and the rest of my country, that my party — my Republican Party — needs to course-correct on the economy and on immigration,” said Salazar, according to WLRN Public Media.

With additional reporting from Jay Waagmeester.

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ANNALS OF TRUMPI$TAN: The Republican missteps that laid the groundwork for a historic midterm rebuke (Liz Goodwin, Natalie Allison, Theodoric Meyer, Isaac Arnsdorf, Nancy Cook and Katherine Doyle, Washington Post, November 4, 2026)

From The Washington Post: 

The Republican missteps that laid the groundwork for a historic midterm rebuke


The Republican missteps that laid the groundwork for a historic midterm rebuke

A campaign that put a distracted President Donald Trump front and center, and a war no one asked for, led the party into a wall of voter anger.

22 min
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party thought they had a plan to survive a midterms backlash. (Samuel Corum/Pool/For The Washington Post)
By 
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Earlier this year, as President Donald Trump and his top advisers stared down increasingly grim polling for Republicans, they devised a strategy for staving off losses in the midterm elections: Put Trump front and center.

The president appeared in taxpayer-funded campaign ads that showed him and U.S. forces in the Iran war, created a new midterm convention to star in, and crisscrossed 20 states to appear in 30 rallies in the campaign’s final weeks. 

Democrats would make the elections about him anyway, his advisers reasoned, and at least this way the president could motivate his core supporters to get to the polls in a way no other Republican could.

“We turned the typical midterm scenario on its head,” said Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Trump’s 2024 campaign, in an interview shortly before Election Day. “Instead of running to the middle or running away, we decided to just run right into it.”

They ran into a wall of voters’ anger. 

Trump — who entered his second term last year with some of his highest approval ratings on record and optimism from an expanded electorate that believed he could lower prices — led his party to generational losses, including a Senate seat in Kansas that hadn’t gone blue in nearly a century.

Supporters of Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate candidate in Kansas, celebrate during an election night watch party in Overland Park. Hamilton defeated Sen. Roger Marshall (R) in an upset. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

He underestimated how angry voters had grown at his handling of the economy, tariffs and the war he launched in Iran this year, alienating key segments of the coalition Trump built in his historic 2024 win, including young men, Black men and Hispanics. He leaves the future of the party reshaped by him unclear.

Republicans began the campaign with a favorable Senate map, aggressive plans to redraw House districts and access to enormous sums of money. They ended up losing at least seven Senate seats, most of them in states Trump carried by double-digit margins just two years ago, as well as control of both chambers of Congress.

On the eve of the election, standing in front of the newly renovated Reflecting Pool, Trump offered a historical explanation for his party’s predicament.

“For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms,” he said. “But we gave this a very strong shot.”

But Tuesday’s steep losses point to more than the usual political pendulum swings. The president drove down his own popularity, squandered his trust with voters on the economy and created an impossible environment for many incumbents. He started a war that spiked fuel prices, failed to focus on affordability while seeming preoccupied with White House renovations, and backed candidates whose liabilities required expensive interventions.

As the political environment deteriorated and the map expanded, weak incumbents who had rarely faced competitive races in their lifetimes faltered in deep-red states, compounding their troubles.

Democrats, despite their own fissures, took advantage of the mess: They recruited established candidates in some key races and attacked Republicans over the costs of Trump’s second term. Republicans significantly out-raised Democrats overall as Elon Musk and other big donors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs and other groups, but Democratic candidates nonetheless out-raised Republican candidates, helping make up the gap.

Despite Trump's backing, Republican Ken Paxton lost the Senate race in Texas, giving Democrats a win there for the first time in decades. (Matt McClain/For The Washington Post)

In the end, Republicans outspent Democrats in competitive midterm races $2.6 billion to $1.8 billion, a Washington Post analysis of AdImpact data found. It didn’t matter.

This account of how Republicans lost their majorities is based on interviews with dozens of people in both parties involved in the races, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

The early bet

Republicans began the campaign season believing they had a plan to survive the usual backlash against a president’s party.

Their Senate majority stood at 53 seats, and all but one of the GOP-held seats up for election were in states Trump had won in 2024. The House, where the margin has hovered around five seats, was more vulnerable, but party leaders hoped a mid-decade redistricting effort would strengthen their position.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) scored early wins working with Trump to shape the field. In hours-long Oval Office meetings, Johnson secured endorsements for his preferred House candidates. Thune and Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, persuaded Trump to back Mike Rogers, a former congressman, in Michigan and Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa, avoiding potentially divisive primaries with two polished candidates who had extensive experience.

Democrats focused early on recruiting candidates who had won in red states before: former governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina, former congresswoman Mary Peltola in Alaska and former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Even so, few Democrats initially believed that they could retake the Senate this year. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, predicted shortly after Trump’s 2024 win that it would take “at least two cycles” to recapture the chamber.

“When I first talked about taking back the Senate in 2025, people rolled their eyes,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) told reporters just before midnight on Election Day. 

Early in the campaign cycle, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) persuaded Trump to endorse several of his preferred candidates in House races. (Nic Antaya/For The Washington Post)

But by late 2025, Trump’s approval rating had fallen to around 40 percent. His tariffs, announced earlier that year, had driven up the prices of some goods, and the president often defended them in ways that could sound insensitive.

“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said at an April Cabinet meeting.

Much of the year had also been consumed by the push to release files on disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which a House committee voted to subpoena from the federal government that July, over Trump’s prolonged objections.

Senior White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance and chief of staff Susie Wiles, arranged meetings with outside pollsters and analysts tracking Trump’s losses among newer members of his coalition, according to three people involved.

One pollster, Mark Mitchell, urged Trump over lunch in November to refocus on affordability. Mitchell, whom Vance had invited, said the president seemed more interested in discussing golf than how to regain support among working-class voters.

Trump’s advisers urged him to travel the country to demonstrate his attention to the cost of living. In December, they privately described plans for near-weekly rallies throughout 2026. That schedule failed to materialize until the campaign’s final weeks.

Several of the president’s political advisers also worried that top White House adviser Stephen Miller’s emboldened army of immigration agents and the mass-deportation agenda was hurting them, especially after agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in separate incidents in Minneapolis in January.

Republicans, knowing the challenge they faced selling themselves on the economy, instead settled on a contrast message that they believed would disqualify Democrats to voters.

“It’s a contrast between common sense and crazy,” Johnson said at a recent Iowa event, crediting former House speaker Newt Gingrich with coining the slogan.

They also planned to push the sweeping tax cut legislation the GOP passed in 2025, emphasizing provisions including no taxes on tips and investment accounts for children intended to appeal to middle- and lower-income voters.

But Trump’s attention was often on foreign affairs, as he authorized an unorthodox strike on Venezuela and bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Trump on the campaign trail in Salina, Kansas, on Sunday. He ramped up his rally schedule in the weeks before the election. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

On Feb. 28, Trump launched coordinated strikes with Israel against Iran. Iran then closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving up fuel prices and adding a new burden on voters already frustrated by high prices.

The action violated Trump’s pledge not to start wars, and his top advisers were divided on its wisdom. But Republican lawmakers and strategists believed that the war would not necessarily doom them in November, provided gasoline prices fell by late July or August, before voters fully turned their attention to the campaign.

The administration’s mid-June memorandum of understanding with Iran offered hope that gas price relief was coming. But many Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), criticized the deal as soft on Iran. 

“We think if we can get a 2 in as the first number in the price of gas nationally, that this whole thing blows wide open,” Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said in late June on the sidelines of his group’s annual convention. The average price of gas at the time was about $3.92 per gallon nationally, and by Election Day it had climbed to more than $4.

Democrats, still wary of the GOP’s financial edge, began to hope that their party would prevail as Republicans turned to attacking their candidates on transgender issues.

“Our bet was the economy is going to outweigh culture war fights,” said Mike Smith, the president of House Democrats’ super PAC, the House Majority PAC.

Still, Democrats faced their own challenges. Schumer’s top recruit in Maine’s Senate contest, Gov. Janet Mills (D), dropped out of the race in April, clearing the field for Graham Platner, a scandal-plagued political novice who had excited grassroots Democrats in the state in their bid to take out Republican Sen. Susan Collins. The primary in Michigan, where Schumer had been unable to recruit Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg into the race, became a messy three-way battle that often revolved around the issue of Israel, which divided Democrats.

The cost of Texas

Even before the war, Republican leaders had identified Texas as a potential problem they hoped Trump would help them avoid.

The morning after Sen. John Cornyn narrowly finished first in the state’s Republican primary, Trump told Thune something GOP leaders had been longing to hear: He was going to endorse the incumbent as he faced a runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The Alamo, an icon for Texans, in San Antonio. Texas became an unexpected midterm battleground this year. (Matt McClain/For The Washington Post)

A Truth Social post in Trump’s voice was drafted, according to several people who saw it. Republican leaders believed that Cornyn could comfortably hold the seat. A runoff win by Paxton, however, could force them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars defending Texas — money they needed elsewhere.

But the endorsement never appeared.

For weeks, Republican leaders appealed to Trump with polling, warnings from donors and even the words of Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas), who said Cornyn would be impossible to beat. Thune and Scott urged Trump not to endorse Paxton; the president’s own top political advisers also favored backing Cornyn. Paxton’s allies countered by appealing to the president’s resentment of Senate Republicans and the preferences of his base. In May, Trump endorsed Paxton.

“I’m laughing at it in a kind of a sad way because it’s just an unforced error,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who retired rather than seek reelection in his purple state after clashing with Trump. “That’s just laying the ground for historic gains for the Democrats. And Democrats aren’t winning these elections; we’re losing them.”

Trump, furious over the Senate’s refusal to fund his ballroom project and to change its rules to pass a voter ID law, also did not believe Republicans’ central argument against Paxton: that he was so flawed he could lose, even in Texas.

Trump wrote of Talarico in late March: “Any human being running against him, sick, incompetent, close to death or, even a child, would win.” 

The endorsement delay inflicted damage. Cornyn continued to pound Paxton with advertisements branding him “Crooked Ken,” mentioning his alleged affairs and questioning his growing wealth while in office. Later, Talarico would borrow many of the themes from Cornyn’s ads, describing Paxton as the most corrupt politician in Texas.

As Republicans fought each other for months after Paxton defeated Cornyn in the May runoff, Talarico spent more than $32 million introducing himself to general-election voters in ads between the primary and the end of August, according to AdImpact. Paxton’s campaign, by contrast, ran little advertising for months after his primary win. Top GOP officials acknowledged that Talarico was given too much time to introduce himself unchallenged.

“There were perhaps some sore feelings from the primary that caused people to be a little delayed in that,” one Republican official said.

Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, and James Talarico, the party's nominee for Senate, rally voters in Austin on Monday night. (Matt McClain/For The Washington Post)

By September, Texas threatened to consume money needed across an expanding Senate battlefield. During the national midterm convention in Dallas, Chris Young, a top operative in Elon Musk’s political operation, met with Alex Latcham, who leads the Senate Leadership Fund, to work out a rescue plan, according to two people briefed on the effort.

Musk ultimately donated $158 million to the group, freeing up money that SLF desperately needed to spend on other toss-up states.

Republican ads attacked Talarico as soft on crime and replayed his past comments that cast parents as abusive if they failed to recognize their trans children’s identities. Trump gleefully branded him “Talafreako,” leaning into the liberal arguments he made on transgender issues and veganism. The Democrat’s favorability ratings began to fall. But Paxton’s were even lower.

“It’s the worst general-election candidate polling on image I’ve seen in the state of Texas in my history,” a Republican strategist working on the race said of Paxton’s numbers.

Talarico connected Musk’s donation to his larger argument that Paxton was corrupt, telling voters in one of his own ads that Musk wanted to “buy” Paxton.

After the endorsement debacle, other tensions between Trump and congressional leaders emerged, with some believing that the president was uninterested in notching accomplishments on the economy for their incumbents to sell on the trail.

In June, Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for bipartisan housing legislation that was co-authored by Scott. Johnson, who is close with Trump, interceded for a week to try to prevent him from vetoing the legislation altogether. The president was still angry that the Senate had not changed its filibuster rules to pass a voter ID law, the Save America Act. In the end, Trump didn’t sign the housing bill, but he backed down from vetoing it, allowing it to become law.

The September reckoning

Texas was not the only Republican state looking worrisome.

Over the summer, officials noticed softening support for incumbents in Kansas and even Mississippi. Scott had established an incumbent protection program that tracked fundraising, time spent at home, local media appearances and other measures. He warned senators including Roger Marshall of Kansas, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi and James E. Risch of Idaho against complacency.

“People got tired of me saying the same thing over and over, so I started yelling,” Scott said. 

At a summer confrontation at NRSC headquarters, Scott told Marshall that his fundraising and strategy were not cutting it, according to two people familiar with the encounter. Marshall pointed to high gas prices, something he could not control, to explain his poor poll numbers. Scott countered that he could control how often he showed up in his state. (Marshall was selling his Sarasota, Florida, home that had become a sore point in his campaign.)

Democrats in San Antonio urge people to vote after a Talarico rally on Sunday. (Matt McClain/For The Washington Post)

In July, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) died. Trump endorsed his sister, Darline Graham, to fill his seat, and quickly backed the untested new candidate in the race to be her brother’s permanent replacement. That angered Rep. Ralph Norman, who argued that he had better experience for the role. 

That same month, Democrats also caught a break in Maine, when Platner dropped out of the Senate race following a sexual assault allegation, which he denied. The party quickly coalesced around Troy Jackson, an unexciting but less-controversial nominee who previously led the state Senate.

As Republicans’ concerns about the Senate map grew, Trump prepared a different response to the party’s troubles: a two-day convention in Dallas designed to showcase his role as leader of the MAGA movement. 

The Republican National Committee had changed its bylaws in January to accommodate the idea of a first-ever midterm convention. There would be no official business conducted — it would just be a party for die-hard supporters and donors, as a well as a chance for Republicans to raise more money.

But shortly after the convention, internal Republican polling showed support cratering, according to several party strategists. Voters had begun focusing on the election and remained angry about the high cost of living. Corruption climbed higher on the electorate’s list of concerns. Trump’s rapidly rising net worth while in office — plus bad headlines about his family, including a Russian oligarch bankrolling Trump’s son’s wedding party — collided with Americans’ dour feelings about their own economic situations.

An atmosphere of “doom and gloom” descended on the White House in September, according to a person involved in Trump’s midterm strategy.

As his popularity continued to sink, some candidates scrubbed Trump’s name from their websites and avoided mentioning him in advertisements or on the stump.

In September, sitting in his dining room off the Oval Office, Trump watched on a laptop as aides showed him an advertisement in which Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar (Florida) criticized his immigration policies. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” she said. 

The president asked an adviser how to respond. The staffer advised him not to, according a person with knowledge of the conversation.

Trump complied for several days, but then shared multiple social media attacks on the Miami Republican, including one calling her “nothing but a back stabber.” (On Tuesday, Salazar appeared to be narrowly leading her opponent.) But her warning was prescient, as many Hispanic voters who had flocked to Trump in 2024 turned against him in Texas and other parts of Florida. 

In Kansas, meanwhile, the party’s problems were becoming acute. Marshall’s internal polling showed him losing to Democrat Adam Hamilton outside the margin of error, even though the state had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Marshall’s campaign budget was so disorganized that it was unclear how much money was left for the final weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter.

As Democrat Adam Hamilton gained ground in the Kansas Senate race, national Republicans sent in a veteran operative to try to boost GOP Sen. Roger Marshall's campaign. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

The NRSC, Trump’s team and Thune’s team pressed for Chris Grant, a more seasoned campaign operative, to take over the campaign, and Marshall’s chief of staff, Brent Robertson, eventually complied, texting Grant for help in October, just weeks before Election Day.

Grant’s team reworked the advertising and overhauled the budget. Marshall had attacked Hamilton, a popular preacher, as a “millionaire megachurch CEO with four homes.” Party officials wanted instead to portray Hamilton as a partisan Democrat beholden to Schumer, while running positive advertisements explaining why voters should reelect Marshall.

“He got caught asleep at the wheel. There’s no sugarcoating it,” one Republican said of Marshall.

The final sprint

On Oct. 1, Trump’s aides saw a change in the president’s mood, which had been glum for much of September, as he began to get out on the stump and interact with his fans at red-state rallies.

At one point, severe storms scuttled a planned helicopter trip from Denton, Texas, to a rally in Durant, Oklahoma. Trump took to the road instead, instructing the Secret Service to drive as fast as possible. His motorcade reached nearly 100 mph on closed highways.

An official traveling with him recalled thinking: “He’s actually serious that he’s going to go out and do this.”

The rally sprint gave advisers a measure of hope. They did not expect the events alone to transform the election, but they thought that Trump could give his supporters a reason to turn out in a campaign otherwise dominated by bad news.

In Ohio, his advisers believed his attention had helped Sen. Jon Husted, who was trying to hold off Brown. At rallies, Trump touted Husted as a former college football star and lavishly praised his backside. 

“He, quite frankly, has put Jon Husted on the map more so than anyone ever thought that Jon Husted could be put on the map,” one adviser said.

In Michigan, Trump called Democrat Abdul El-Sayed a “jihadist” during an October rally full of dark themes about the Senate candidate. Republicans hoped lingering tensions between El-Sayed and his Democratic primary rival, Rep. Haley Stevens, would split the party enough to allow Rogers to slip through.

Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers and Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, center right, address reporters in Detroit on Sunday after Stevens endorsed Rogers. (Nic Antaya/For The Washington Post)

Trump had also opened the coffers of MAGA Inc., the super PAC backing him, announcing in late October that his political operation would spend $400 million in the midterms, all told. Earlier in the year, Republican strategists and donors worried that he had not approved a plan to deploy its enormous war chest.

The party was nevertheless running out of room. The Senate Leadership Fund cut spending in North Carolina and Georgia, effectively conceding those races as it tried to protect other seats.

In the end, Republicans lost Senate seats in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina. Mississippi, which has not elected a Democratic senator since 1982, remains too close to call, as does Alaska, another Republican stronghold. A Republican in Louisiana, where Trump endorsed against GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy in the primary, narrowly won the red state.

On Monday night, Trump asked voters to treat the election as if his own political future were at stake.

“I’m just asking everybody to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

Voters may have done exactly that, leaving Republicans to rake over the results.

“We’ve got to start thinking about running in a post-Trump world,” Tillis said. “If we’re at a low-water mark now, I see us having to look to new leadership moving into the next presidential cycle and moving on beyond Trump.”

Luke Connors contributed to this report.

What readers are saying

The comments reflect widespread criticism of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, focusing on issues such as corruption, incompetence, and divisive policies. Many commenters express relief at the electoral defeat of Trump and his allies, attributing it to their disregard for... Show more
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