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Republicans were left reeling on Wednesday after voters swung decisively against them, setting off fears that President Trump and his low approval ratings would again drag down the party’s midterm candidates.
As the scale of their electoral defeats set in, Republicans sought to find culprits, blaming their candidates, the government shutdown, a misguided focus on demonizing transgender issues, and a weak economic message.
Speaker Mike Johnson used a news conference to cast Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City and a proud democratic socialist, as the new leader of the Democratic Party. In emails and group chats, Republican officials slammed their nominee for governor in Virginia as a fatally flawed candidate and chided their donors for not opening their wallets wide enough. And on Fox News, other Republicans argued that Democrats had prolonged the government shutdown for their own advantage.
The one person no Republican dared to blame: Mr. Trump.
Democrats benefited from the president’s role in the elections. He loomed over them but did not do much to actually help Republicans, hosting no fund-raisers or in-person rallies, merely phoning into campaign calls intended to turn out supporters in New Jersey and Virginia. He did not even say the name of Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears of Virginia when he endorsed her for governor in a conversation with reporters aboard Air Force One.
Democratic voters, as they have done in nearly every election since Mr. Trump first took office, surged to the polls to express their discontent with his handling of the presidency. And Republicans again struggled to turn out their MAGA base without the president’s name on the ballot.
In his own understated way, Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge the problems with Republican turnout.
“They say that I wasn’t on the ballot and was the biggest factor,” he told reporters at a Wednesday breakfast with Republican leaders. “I don’t know about that. But I was honored that they said that.”
In Virginia, not only did Abigail Spanberger win the governor’s race by a margin not seen for a Democrat since the segregationist Albertis Harrison was on the ballot in 1961, but Democrats also flipped at least 13 seats in the state House of Delegates, wiping out a generation of suburban Republicans.
In New Jersey, Democratic turnout surged as Representative Mikie Sherrill, the party’s nominee for governor, received 26 percent more votes than Democrats won in 2021. Republican turnout increased only modestly.
And early county-level results suggested that Republicans did not hold the gains that Mr. Trump made in 2024 with young men and Latino and Black voters. Places like Perth Amboy, N.J., a heavily Hispanic city Mr. Trump lost by just nine percentage points last year, delivered a 50-point margin for Ms. Sherrill.
The governor’s races in liberal-leaning New Jersey and Virginia were always long shots for Republicans with Mr. Trump in the White House, but the party’s defeats still underscored its central political conundrum ahead of the midterm elections.
If Republicans break with Mr. Trump, they risk a public flogging that could depress turnout with the party’s base or cost them in future primary races. But if they defend him, they energize Democrats and independents who are furious with his handling of the federal government and increasingly disenchanted with his stewardship of the economy.
Structurally, the midterm map still favors Republicans. A chain of redistricting efforts across the country is likely to give Republicans an advantage in the contests that will determine whether they maintain control of the House. On the Senate side, all but two of the 22 Republican seats up for election are in states that Mr. Trump carried by at least 10 percentage points in 2024.
Republican strategists say they see a path to keeping control of Congress, albeit a difficult one.
“It centers around three things,” said Corry Bliss, who led the party’s House super PAC for the 2018 election. “The economy being good, the president being motivated and engaged, and the Democrats continuing to be crazy.”
Still, there was clear evidence on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s actions were acutely damaging to Republican candidates. His approval rating hit a second-term low of 37 percent in a recent CNN poll, and more than six in 10 voters disapproved of how he was handling the shutdown.
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Republicans have a favorable midterm map, but this week’s elections provided new evidence that President Trump’s leadership in Washington is causing a backlash from voters. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
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