President Donald Trump’s Republican Party just suffered the worst midterm defeat since the Obama years, and everyone wants to know who or what is to blame. One popular explanation is that the GOP ran bad candidates, which it did, but that is not why it lost.
If bad candidates were the deciding factor, the Democrats would have been on the receiving end of the 2026 shellacking. They really rolled out James Talarico, the guy who calls God “non-binary” and is obsessed with “trans children,” and Abdul el Sayed, the terrorist-tied candidate who centered his campaign strategy on blaming Israel for every domestic problem we face — and won! They ran a woman, Aber Kawas, who literally sported a Hamas headband and blamed America for 9/11 — and won!
Republicans absolutely rolled out some bad candidates, too. I was on record in May saying that the “Winner of Paxton-Cornyn Texas Senate primary runoff” was Talarico after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), handing the radical leftist his best chance to be the first Texas Democrat elected since the 1980s. Selecting Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio primary was another own goal by Republicans, who leaned into MAGA candidates in an election in which only 25% of voters identified as MAGA. But if we’re holding a competition for which party nominated the worst candidates, the Democrats win all day.
It simply didn’t matter who was on the ticket for the Left as long as it wasn’t a Republican. It might have helped the GOP in a few states to run better candidates, but this “blue tsunami” was happening regardless.
So why did the Republicans get killed on Tuesday? I’d argue it wasn’t as much a policy issue as it was a marketing one. According to the exit polls, 74% of voters considered the Iran war to be a crucial or major factor. Trump’s war is unpopular, but it was absolutely the right move. Under no circumstances can a jihadist dictatorship obtain a nuclear weapon. This is common sense. The public was terrified of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions a decade ago. Where is the same fear over Iran?
Earlier in my career, I was a pretty prolific high-end audio/video equipment salesman. The average consumer does not want to spend thousands of dollars for Stranger Things to look and sound better. Yet people would come in looking to spend $500 on a new TV set and leave with the biggest smiles on their faces after spending $20,000 on a surround-sound system. What makes someone a good salesman is the ability to demonstrate the value of the product they’re selling. That is one of two major points of failure in Trump’s Iran ambitions. He spent more time renaming everything from the Gulf of Mexico (America) to artificial (super) intelligence than he did showing the public the value of his Iran war.
The general public will not see the value on its own until it hits home. That’s why the public supported World War II after Pearl Harbor or the War on Terror after 9/11. We don’t need another mass-casualty incident for the public to get on board, but people need to understand the real danger of one. Instead of seeing the crisis Trump averted, if only temporarily, by attacking Iran, the public only saw the cost: high gas prices. Any rational person would agree that paying more for gas would be worth it to avoid another Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Trump’s problem was that he never “showed the value,” so to speak. In other words, he didn’t do enough to make the public take the Iran threat seriously. This same problem applies to Trump’s economic and immigration agendas, which I largely agree with, but whose value was not adequately demonstrated to the voting public.
THE MEDIA LIED TO YOU, AGAIN. TRUMP DID NOT SAY IRAN SHOULD ‘TAKE OUT’ LOS ANGELES AND SAN DIEGO
The other point of failure was policy-related, and it’s that Trump was frankly not strong enough to finish what he started in Iran. The war should have been over quickly and forcefully, with the terrorist regime toppled. Instead, Trump took his foot off the gas and rushed to the negotiating table, supposedly at the behest of Vice President JD Vance. In chess terms, Trump had the king dead to rights and blundered into a stalemate. Instead of a swift and resounding victory, those short-term consequences became a war of attrition between the blockaded regime and the American public paying $4 a gallon for gas. Given the results of the election, it’s safe to say the regime won that battle.
Trump said the reason Republicans lost is that he wasn’t on the ballot. He’s dead wrong. Trump’s ability to sell the public on his agenda was absolutely on the ballot, and Republicans, good and bad candidates alike, paid dearly for it.