Walking by a tattoo studio and medical spa on the pretty main street of Round Rock, in Texas Hill Country, Tarik Bakir recalled voting for Barack Obama in ۲۰۰۸ and Donald Trump in ۲۰۲۴. But when it came to the ۲۰۲۶ midterm elections, he was firmly back in the Democrats’ column.
“I’m not happy with the Iran war,” said Bakir, ۴۱, a financial adviser who served with the US military in Afghanistan. “The economy’s OK, but not great. This election was a rebuttal to Trump. This time people said they didn’t like him, or his policies.”
Once a reliably Republican suburb north of Austin, Round Rock is the birthplace of James Talarico, whose victory this week in a US Senate election – Democrats’ first in Texas since ۱۹۸۸, the year before Talarico was born – symbolised a nationwide “blue-nami” that swept away Trump’s Maga (Make America Great Again) coalition.
It was the most sweeping midterm repudiation of a sitting president since the Watergate election of ۱۹۷۴. Unlike typical midterms, where losses are concentrated in swing districts or isolated suburban pockets, the ۲۰۲۶ midterms saw the Republican floor drop out across deep-red strongholds, suburban corridors and rural heartlands alike.
Democrats stormed once impregnable fortresses such as Kansas and South Carolina, taking control of both chambers of Congress and redrawing the political map. In Texas, for decades a bedrock of conservatism, the senator Ted Cruz is now the last statewide Republican still standing.
For Trump, it was a scathing rebuke after a madcap campaign that left some wondering: if the president had deliberately tried to sabotage his own party’s chances, what, precisely, would he have done any differently?
The president heaped praise on Ohio senator Jon Husted’s “ass” but, in the words of Cruz, his party got an “ass-kicking”. Florida governor Ron DeSantis called it “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country”.
Patrick Gaspard, a former official in Barack Obama’s White House, said: “Anyone who says that they were not surprised is lying. This busted all of the models across all demographics and geography. You would think that ۲۰۲۴ was the last century, not just two years ago.”
Why did Maga fall apart so fast, and in such colossal fashion? The short answer is that costs, corruption and conflict with Iran left Trump supporters feeling betrayed.
Frank Luntz, a veteran pollster and strategist, hosted a focus group on the eve of the election with people who voted for Trump in ۲۰۲۴, but would be voting for Democrats in ۲۰۲۶.
Affordability issues were “hurting Trump voters more than others because they are more likely to be paycheck-to-paycheck voters”, said Luntz. “They are more likely to have no money at the end of the week, and very little money at the end of the month, and so they were susceptible to food and fuel prices more than the average voter.”
“They were promised in ۲۰۲۴ that prices would come down, and we wouldn’t have forever wars, that we would drain the swamp,” Luntz added. “They looked in ۲۰۲۶ and they felt not nearly enough had been accomplished on this and so they wanted to punish Republicans. This is not about rewarding Democrats. This was about holding Republicans accountable for these voters believing what they were promised.”
‘His fingerprints are all around’
Instead of focusing on the economic pressures hurting many of his own supporters, like farmers struggling to pay for diesel and fertiliser, Trump diverted his public commentary towards vanity projects, legal grievances and high-profile spats.
“He lost the plot,” according to Luntz. “He was talking about topics that they didn’t fully understand and didn’t care about. He wasn’t talking about the things that mattered most to them and in the end they took it out on the Republican party.”
Gaspard, a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington, agrees that the Maga coalition fractured because Trump violated every pledge made to working-class voters – from sweeping tariffs on foreign goods and an unpopular military conflict in Iran to cryptocurrency self-enrichment schemes and federal immigration overreach that terrorised local communities.
The result has broken the psychological chokehold Trump exerted over his party, Gaspard believes. “We’re seeing it already. When your approval hits the low ۳۰s, politicians think about survival,” he said. “What happened creates a permission structure finally for Republicans to develop a spine to move away from him on their political choices, their policy choices and how they navigate their cultural choices as well.”
He added: “Donald Trump can’t act as if he wasn’t present at the scene of the crime. He personally picked the candidates in Texas and South Carolina. His fingerprints are all around it, and he can’t proclaim his innocence.”
Republicans lost most of Trump’s gains with Latino voters in ۲۰۲۴, according to an Associated Press voter poll, while only about one in ۱۰ Black men voted Republican in their local House race, down from roughly one in four who backed Trump in ۲۰۲۴. Voters under ۳۰, who had been roughly evenly divided between Trump and Kamala Harris two years ago, backed Democratic House candidates by about seven-to-three this time.
Gaspard noted that the collapse extended to Trump’s prized demographic strongholds: “When you end up in an election where the Republican party ended up splitting men ۵۰/۵۰ with Democrats, that is a death knell for the manosphere, the bro platforms that they saw as their firewalls.”
Some observers were quick to pronounce the death of Maga and the end of the Trump era. But the past decade of US politics has been characterised by whiplash elections with both parties lurching between triumph and disaster. Trump was written off after his defeat in ۲۰۲۰ only to bounce back four years later. He still has more than ۸۰۰ days left in office.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “Is this the end of Maga? No. As long as Donald Trump is in the White House, it’s still a danger. But it’s been badly wounded and, like a cornered ferret, it can still be quite dangerous. But this is a collapse of generational significance across the map and it has to deliver a massive shock to a Republican party that has been enthralled to Donald Trump for ۱۰ years.”
Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, added: “It takes a massive defeat like this for a political party to come to its senses. That’s what history tells us. It’s not because of op-ed pieces or commentators, or critical podcasts. It’s losing on this kind of epic level.”
The populist right may have lost some recent battles in Brazil, Serbia and Hungary, where close Maga ally Viktor Orbán was defeated, but it has hardly lost the war. From Argentina to India, its leaders remain in power, while in France, Germany and Britain its movements are challenging the established political order.
‘Like a cornered ferret’
Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, cautioned against assuming that the midterms marked the permanent demise of populist conservatism, comparing its persistence to illiberal movements in Europe.
He said: “I would hesitate to say that it’s the end of Maga, any more than the defeat of Viktor Orbán means the permanent defeat of illiberal democracy, any more than Donald Tusk’s comeback in Poland means that the forces arrayed against him have gone away.
“Maga has deep social roots in the American population. It expresses something that’s real and isn’t going away. But the question is whether it will be as dominant as it has been for more than a decade inside the Republican party in the United States and around the world. I think the answer to that question is no.”
Galston does believe that the midterms have created a vacuum within the Republican party and an opening for a reform candidate to challenge the Maga orthodoxy before ۲۰۲۸.
“These questions are never settled in the abstract,” he continued. “They’re settled when someone steps forward and says: ‘I stand for something different,’ and then convinces enough people that that is the right thing to stand for. That’s the way Donald Trump took the party away from the Reaganites.
“I don’t think we’re going back to the status quo ante, but is somebody going to stand up with a coherent counter-agenda? I don’t know who that would be but there’s a market opportunity.”
Trump responded to his humiliation at the ballot box like a man in denial. The following morning, he retreated to his safe space, the construction site of a new White House ballroom, and concentrated on signing a structural beam rather than addressing the electoral defeat. “Trump is still your president,” read an official White House social media post superimposed over an image of the ۸۰-year-old, glowering into the camera.
But the race to succeed him has been blown wide open by the Republican debacle. Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, wrote on social media: “The scale of the Republican defeat is so great that it makes the race for the GOP presidential nomination wide open.”
The biggest loser was the vice-president, JD Vance, who responded by posting an essay-length message on X, publicly identifying Trump’s deeply unpopular war in Iran as the catalyst for the defeat. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote in what many saw as a calculated move to align himself with rightwing podcasters – and to put daylight between himself and his boss.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “It’s going to be very challenging for JD Vance, because he’s hitched his wagon to Donald Trump so closely as his vice-president. But he’s going to try: he’s a professional political chameleon. I don’t think he has the chops to do it. He’s not very good at this.”
Other Republican contenders for ۲۰۲۸ could include DeSantis; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations; Utah governor Spencer Cox; and former Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin. Winning the nomination may depend on harnessing Maga populism while also presenting a new vision.
“Trump is a toxic brand, underwater with every demographic, including his own base,” added Setmayer. “It’s fair to say it’s the end of Maga as we know it under Donald Trump. Be prepared for it to morph into something else with the same basic foundation.”
For Democrats, the challenge meanwhile will be to turn an anti-Trump coalition into a positive political programme. The midterms highlighted a new wave of young, dynamic leaders including Talarico in Texas, Jon Ossoff in Georgia and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, a progressive and the first Muslim elected to the Senate. His victory could encourage the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to throw her hat into the ring in ۲۰۲۸.
‘Our economy’s hurting’
Galston believes that the sweeping wins across deep-red states have effectively rendered traditional debates over candidate “electability” obsolete in the upcoming Democratic primary contest.
“There was something for everyone,” he said. “The arguments over electability have been mooted because it turns out that different kinds of Democrats can win in different kinds of places. That’s good news because, rather than shadow-boxing about electability, Democrats can actually have the discussion that they need substantively.”
They will be aware that Trump has an unearthly survival instinct. He has weathered controversies, impeachments, assassination attempts, criminal charges and electoral defeats and is not yet halfway through his second term. But this week’s national reckoning suggests that, after pulling off a comeback for the ages in ۲۰۲۴, he has squandered his last shreds of political capital.
Back in Round Rock in Texas, the epicentre of this week’s electoral tremors, there was little sympathy for the president.
On Main Street, Billy Joe Wilson, ۴۷, who was wearing a long beard, tattooed arms and a bright yellow T-shirt, said: “The guy’s given us six years now of who he is and we keep believing him, and yet everything he says is going the opposite way: gas is up, diesel is up, cost of goods is up. Our economy’s hurting.”
Wilson, who runs bars and restaurants in the area, added: “Texas was a big supporter of the Republican party and Trump. But my generation got tired of realising that we’re getting screwed in the deal. We want to make sure that our kids or grandkids are set up to be successful, not living under a rule where the rich eat the poor.”
