By Aaron Blake, CNN
US President Donald Trump Photo: AFP/CHANDAN KHANNA
Analysis: As it was becoming clear that Election Day 2025 was a very bad one for Donald Trump's Republican Party, the president weighed in with his own electoral analysis. He posted a quote Tuesday night (local time) that he attributed to unspecified "pollsters" - apparently ones he was watching on Fox News.
"TRUMP WASN'T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT," the quote read.
Trump echoed those comments when speaking to GOP senators Wednesday morning (local time), again pointing to the shutdown and adding, "They say that I wasn't on the ballot was the biggest factor."
That shutdown's impact on the elections is debatable. It didn't seem to be a major subplot in the races Tuesday.
But the other part - Trump not being on the ballot - is actually very important when it comes to assessing the fallout from Tuesday. Indeed, it crystallizes the GOP's problem moving forward.
That's because term limits make it so Trump can never be on the ballot again, despite his sometimes musing about the possibility.
And Tuesday's results reinforced how the GOP really needs to figure out what to do about that.
Trump has demonstrated a talent for bringing out casual voters to vote for him. But if those low-propensity voters don't show up or don't vote Republican when he's not on the ballot - like he won't be in 2026, 2028 or any other election - it's a big problem to be so reliant upon them.
The question now is whether Republicans start recognizing the need to chart a new course and treat Trump as more of a lame duck. Tuesday won't settle that debate, but it does inject it with new urgency.
"Lame duck status is going to come even faster now," predicted conservative commentator Erick Erickson. "Trump cannot turn out the vote unless he is on the ballot, and that is never happening again."
Republicans have shown that they almost always do quite poorly when Trump's name doesn't grace the top of the ticket.
Perhaps the biggest exception to that was the 2021 elections in the same states that voted Tuesday, when Americans seemed to vote for checks on then-President Joe Biden and the Democrats. But by 2022, Republicans reverted to form, having one of the worst midterm elections for an opposition party in a very long time. The opposition party - i.e. the one that doesn't hold the White House - almost always wins midterms; the GOP somehow didn't.
(Part of the GOP's poor performance seemed to owe to Trump elevating flawed candidates; the GOP also struggled after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade - a decision made possible by Trump-appointed justices.)
What stings about Tuesday for Republicans is that there was some thought that the 2024 election opened a new era - one in which Trump had recast our political landscape and coalitions in a more lasting way.
No, Trump's 2024 win wasn't nearly as resounding as he bills it; he failed to win a majority of the popular vote. But he did win a plurality and sweep the swing states. Latino voters swung hard in his direction. And he made significant headway in states like New Jersey, which went from a 16-point Trump loss in 2020 to just a 6-point Trump loss in 2024.
But those swings swung back on Tuesday, pretty hard.
New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) delivers remarks at her election night watch party. Photo: AFP / EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ
Democratic New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill won Latinos by more than a 2-to-1 margin, 68 percent-31 percent, according to CNN's exit poll. Sherrill is winning that race overall by a surprisingly wide 13-point margin.
Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger is winning her race by 15 points, the largest margin for a Democrat in the commonwealth since 1961.
Democrats also easily won the other much-watched elections Tuesday. That includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom's contentious redistricting ballot measure passing with more than 60% of the vote and Pennsylvania voters retaining a trio of Democratic state Supreme Court justices by 20-plus-point margins.
Democrats even won big in a pair of statewide races in Georgia, both for the state's Public Service Commission. Those are the first statewide constitutional offices Democrats have won in the state since 2006, and they're currently winning both races by 26 points.
Democrats even managed to win the Virginia attorney general's race, despite nominee Jay Jones' violent text messages about his political opponent and his opponent's children. Polls showed a competitive race; Jones is winning by more than 7 points.
In one way, it's not at all surprising that Democrats would win the 2025 off-year election. The party that doesn't hold the White House usually does, just like it usually wins the midterm elections.
But the resounding nature of the results has to register with Republicans and instil them with at least some fear about what their post-Trump future portends. What happens if the party really has become all about Trump, and their base doesn't vote Republican when he's gone?
We've already seen what can happen to a party that becomes so defined by one man and then struggles to figure out what comes next or who will lead it; that's what happened with Democrats at the end of the Barack Obama era.
But it's even more pronounced with Trump, who is the singular figure in the GOP - the sun around which everything orbits.
That doesn't mean Republicans are going to start ditching Trump en masse; That's not feasible in a party that has become so defined by fealty to him.
But it does matter if they start distancing themselves from him around the margins.
That's because so much of Trump's current project - his rapid expansion of presidential power - is built on acquiescence. Republicans didn't like the tariffs, but they've tolerated them even as they've jeopardized the economy. The GOP has largely looked the other way as Trump has done a bevy of things that have proven to be pretty unpopular.
Trump has done a ton of things that rather transparently make it more difficult for his party over the long term. Republicans have either lost the will to resist him or decided to just give him boatloads of slack.
But nothing gets lawmakers' attention like worrying about their own jobs and majorities. And now Republicans have very good reason to start worrying about those things.
- CNN
