The biggest political loser of the 2026 midterms wasn’t even on the ballot—because he’d died nearly four months earlier. This election was not so much a referendum on Donald Trump as it was a referendum on Sen. Lindsey Graham. The Republican Party that faced voters on Nov. 3 was not the party Trump led on election night 2024. It was instead a GOP defined by the late Senator Graham’s vision of the party, which the Trump administration had unwisely, indeed unfathomably, chosen to adopt as its own.
Trump had a successful formula. Why did he change it?
His critics will insist he didn’t: He was judged on his record of immigration enforcement, tariffs, and zero tolerance of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. These were themes he campaigned on two years ago, and in the time since then his administration has delivered dramatically hardline policies on all three of those fronts. Voters in 2024 just didn’t know what they were getting into, and this year, after they’d seen the results, they turned against the party of the man they had restored to the White House at the last election.