Referendum or Turnout Problem? GOP Insiders Split Over Who’s to Blame for Midterm Losses

Republicans lost Congress on Tuesday because voters felt the administration and the GOP stopped caring about them, several insiders told the Daily Signal.

“This is a middle finger,” one former senior administration official said of the midterm election results. “I think it comes down to affordability and the war, and Americans feeling like the administration and Republicans at large, including an unproductive Congress, don’t really give a damn,” the former official added.

Republicans suffered crushing losses Tuesday not just in swing states, but in seats they long held in reliable red states such as Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina. While most of the party was left shocked by the scale of the defeat, the White House was defiant on Wednesday.

Officials at the White House and the Republican National Committee told the Daily Signal that President Donald Trump’s voters just don’t turn out when his name isn’t on the ballot, and that weak candidates failed to do the necessary work to win in 2026.

However, several Republican operatives and officials close to the White House who spoke with the Daily Signal saw other reasons for defeat: high gas prices, an unpopular war with Iran and voters left feeling that the party in power just wasn’t working for them.

One official in Trump’s political operation put it bluntly: “I heard people say this was a realignment; it’s not. It’s a punishment election. We got punished.” The official added that the turnout problem wasn’t just Trump voters staying home, but some actually switching sides.

Another source close to the White House agreed, describing a GOP coalition that feels “neglected” rather than one that has been abandoned.

“Voters were desperate for answers on issues that directly impact their lives, and too often they got misplaced priorities and unserious responses. That’s a failure of leadership, not a failure of the electorate,” one source close to the White House told the Daily Signal. Yet, the source cautioned against reading into the midterm results as a “permanent ideological realignment.”

“You don’t have nearly 80 million Americans vote for a fundamental shift to the right and then assume they’ve all embraced the left two years later. Those voters haven’t disappeared. Their patience has,” the source close to the White House said.

Exit polling pointed to the economy as an area of deep voter frustration. In a CBS News exit poll, 38% were “angry” about the economy and 37% said they were “dissatisfied.” Only 18% said they were “satisfied,” and just 7% said they were “enthusiastic.”

“I think it’s clear that Republicans failed on countering Democrats’ messaging on affordability,” a second source close to the White House told the Daily Signal. “The Iran war is unpopular and causes gas prices to go up. Gas prices are the most tangible political issue that voters see and feel every day. It is hard to message your way out of real economic situations that Americans feel daily.”

Trump has maintained that the conflict with Iran is necessary, but on Wednesday he acknowledged that he “knew the war was going to impact” the midterms.

CBS News’ exit polling found that while the war was not as important to voters as the economy, it still had an impact on the midterm results. Most voters believe the administration made the wrong decision to attack Iran, including about a quarter of Republicans, polling shows.

“Dems were on a war path against [Trump] and don’t have any real plan on affordability,” the source close to the White House told the Daily Signal. “They motivated their base to come out and spite [the president.]”

Beyond Trump’s absence on the ballot, the White House and RNC officials pointed to candidate quality as another critical problem for Republicans.

“President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves,” the White House official told the Daily Signal.

But several candidates who lost the night’s most surprising races, including Senate contests in Texas, South Carolina, Ohio and North Carolina, were handpicked by the president.

“A loss like last night wasn’t about candidate quality or spending. It was a referendum,” a national Republican operative who worked on the midterms told the Daily Signal. “Voters were promised something by President Trump and Republicans in 2024: stability, prosperity, safety. They may have gotten safety, but on the other two pillars voters feel the President gave them war and a chaos economy that goes up and down like a yoyo. Americans are exhausted, angry and distrustful and they voted for something different because of it.”

The operative acknowledged that weak candidates made things worse in Georgia, Texas and Kansas, but said better candidates wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Even Republicans who took their races seriously and campaigned tirelessly, such as Sens. Ashley Moody of Florida, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, and Jim Risch of Idaho, barely held on, the operative said.

Furthermore, some of the party’s strongest candidates, including Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, lost.

“And yes, this field was picked and shaped by the President. Along with the messages voters were inundated with,” the operative added.

Several Republicans told the Daily Signal that Trump is directly to blame for the results of the midterms.

“This was a complete repudiation of Trumpism,” one GOP strategist told the Daily Signal. “When you lose literally everything, there is no one else to blame. Trumpism expired, and conservatives need to start rebuilding the coalition.”

However, not everyone in the party is ready to blame the president.

“To just blame the president, I think a lot of these people are very lazy and it kind of ignores the widespread problems that go beyond just one thing: all of these candidates begged the president to go out and do rallies with them in the home stretch, and if he was such an albatross around their neck, they would not have done that,” an official involved in Trump’s political operation told the Daily Signal.

“If the candidates really felt that way, they would have told him to stay away, and they didn’t,” the source added.

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