The Shocking Math Behind The Midterm Disaster

This is a republished monologue with permission from the creator. You can hear the original and the complete show, “REPUBLICAN MELTDOWN! The Brutal Truth Behind Trump’s Midterm Disaster,” here.

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This isn’t the moment to look for comfortable answers to an election blowout. This is the time to say, “All right, what is really going on? What’s really turning people off?” Challenge yourself and hope to meet the moment because that will lead to a better Republican Party, a conservative movement willing to address the issues. And that’s what I really wanted to do. Make sure I don’t go to my defaults in this moment. Look at liberal Vox; they asked me, to the effect of, “How do you know if your priors are wrong? I said, “Listen, everyone does this. Everyone says they don’t like to be challenged on their ideology.”

Look at the amendments over not allowing biological men in female spaces and female sports, which passed unanimously across the country in blue states like Colorado and Washington, and passed overwhelmingly. Could you find 100 members of this current Democratic Congress, 50% or 52% who would sign onto a bill saying that? Could you find 50 members who would say there are actually only two biological sexes? The answer is no. The electoral class is almost always more extreme than the general public; remember that. They fear the political class and its judgment. They will ignore very obvious things most Americans believe. So the only way we’re going to be able to do that, to challenge ourselves to find better answers, is to examine the data.

First, the generic ballot looks like it’s a D +13 electorate. That means that the Democrats won the overall popular vote in the House of Representatives by a 13-point margin, which is near historic. It’s Watergate levels — very high. We don’t know the exact number yet because, of course, California will be counting votes until the next election. They’ll finally finalize the vote, and then we’ll go to another election. But in 2024, the generic ballot was R+2. So it’s about a 15-point swing — 15 points overall. That’s what the New York Times is estimating, and they were very right in their polling.

Looking at the polling, the two groups that swung hardest against Republicans were young people, who moved 33 points toward Democrats, followed by Latinos, who moved 29 points toward Democrats. Now, those aren’t mutually exclusive groups. There are a lot of young people who are Latinos. So when one moves, the other one moves with it because they’re kind of the same group in a lot of cases.

Two things about that: Latinos who are younger swung more to the left than Latinos who are older. Likewise, Latinos who make $50,000 a year or less also swung further to the left than Latinos who made higher amounts of income — $100,000 or $200,000. That’s both a persuasion part of that element of why they swung. It’s also a turnout part of that. There are two different things to dissect from that. Democrats persuaded more Latinos on policy, but they also persuaded more Democrat Latinos to turn out, which affects how aggressive that swing towards Democrat Latinos was. Florida is a great state to examine because it has a lot of data, a large Latino population, and, unlike Texas, it registers people by party. This is going to be, by the way, the thing that I do for the rest of my life: encourage states to register people by party because it makes examining data much easier.

And unlike other states that do register by party, like Arizona and New York, which also have large Latino populations, Florida actually counts all their votes on election night. Can you imagine a world where, in New York, which is still counting votes, and Arizona, which is still counting votes, we could all count our votes on election night? It would be nice.

In the early vote — Florida is a state where a majority of people, over 80% of the population, vote early — Latino Democrats outvoted Latino Republicans in every age category except Latino senior citizens. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, Latino Democrats outvoted Latino Republicans by a margin of three to one. Latino Republican voter totals among the R groups were anemic. It was so small, in fact, among the youngest population that Latino independents outvoted them, and independents always vote less often than Republicans or Democrats.

If you register with a party, you feel like you have more skin in the game. Latino independents actually voted at a higher proportion than Latino Republicans among 18- to 24-year-olds. Latino Democrats between the ages of 18 and 34: 32% of all registered voters in that group – of all Latino Democrats between 18 and 34 in the state of Florida – voted early. Only 14% of Latino Republicans in Florida voted early in that same age category.

Now I can assure you, I know some of you were saying, “Ryan, it’s because they voted on Election Day.” I can assure you they did not. I can assure you that that gap did not close by Election Day, not even close to it. Maybe it got a little tighter, maybe it was two to one, but two to one is still pretty bad. And what happened in Florida regarding this likely happened all over the country.

I was saying for weeks that the sheer number of first-time Latino voters in Texas who came to the polls, and the number of Latinos who had voted in just one previous Democratic primary, were in excess; it was very high. So in fact, the Latino difference in other Republican states like Texas was probably three to one or four to one, not two to one, or two and a half to one like it was in Florida. It was probably much, much higher. One thing that protected Florida from turning blue was that the Cuban votes stayed Republican, and Latinos in Florida actually had a lower voter turnout than Latinos in Texas. So those two things actually really helped protect Florida from turning blue. So yes, these were swings that, in fact, because those who did show up among minorities tended to be more Democrats, that’s part of the swing.

So put that into a caveat. Democrats got their voters out, Republicans didn’t, and that’s part of the 20, 30 point swing toward Democrats nationwide.

Let’s talk about the persuasion argument. This is where Republicans need to challenge themselves. We could probably think about why we didn’t get our voters out. There’s a million answers for that after spending a billion dollars. Giancarlo Sopo put together a wonderful series of tweets examining the Latino vote, especially the Florida-based Latino vote. Their main priority — and this is true in a lot of excess polling, even polling by Atlas Intel — said immigration was number one, but they split the economic argument into different categories, so that’s why economics was not number one, but it would’ve been number one if it’d all been in one category. Their main priority, Sopo writes, is that tariffs were the main thing, and tariffs/high prices like inflation were the number one driver. And then the second thing was immigration.

Now the tariffs make complete sense because if you look at white working-class counties, counties with virtually no Latino population to begin with, they also experienced huge swings. West Virginia had a tremendous swing to the left. Appalachia as a whole, tremendous swings to the left. According to NBC News, Latinos spend a higher percentage of their budget on essential items like food and energy than the average American. And which products, because of the Iran War, have the biggest spike in costs? Gas, energy, food. So it makes perfect sense why they would be more heavily impacted by the war than, let’s say, a WASPy Connecticut woman with a million dollars in the bank. A report from Moody’s found that the Iran War cost the American household an extra $2,000 this year because of higher prices on those two items, energy and food.

And if you’re already reeling from years of high inflation under Joe Biden’s presidency, you feel like you still haven’t caught up. You’re still not caught up after the pandemic. It’s been half a decade, and you think, “I can’t get to where I was in 2019, and then this happens, and now I feel really, really far behind.”

Now, I can’t overstate how much the war in Iran impacted the president’s approval on these issues. According to progressive data analyst David Shor, President Trump’s approval rating on gas prices was about 50% before the war, but by Election Day it had halved to 28%. His approval rating on the cost of living was near 40%. It was close to 30% by Election Day. Trump’s approval on the economy was 19 points worse during this midterm than the 2018 midterm.

So yes, a big part of the Latino flip was the economy, specifically ramifications from the cost of living because of the war. I obviously also think the narrative around tariffs — the tariffs that increased prices so much also fed into that. And the Republican response with that One Big Beautiful Bill was very, very small, saying, “Hey, if you work in restaurants or as a nurse or do overtime or whatever, you’ve got all this money back, and you kept tax cuts. The Democrats voted to increase your taxes by $10,000.” They didn’t do a good job amplifying that. They didn’t do that at all. And what they were feeling in the real-time increases was because of these policies. That’s the economic part of it.

The other part is immigration, and this is tough for me. I’m an immigration hawk. I’m not shy about it at all, but I need to challenge myself because we have these election results, and I need to challenge my priors and get uncomfortable.

It wasn’t a secret that Trump campaigned on mass deportations and Latinos overwhelmingly embraced him in the 2024 election. It’s not a secret. Many of you are probably wondering, “Hey, Latino voters, you wanted to end the chaos of the border. You voted for the guy who campaigned on mass deportation. Why are you upset now?” And what I want to understand, what I’m trying to understand and what I understand that I think many Democrats don’t, is an unspoken value in America, an unspoken value in our political system: the idea of fairness. Fairness is a concept we very much believe in, and that includes immigration. And we understand that, I think, as Republicans, we understand open-border activist Democrats heard the argument of fairness.

Latinos see people coming across the border, many of whom are not Latino, and they’re demanding free stuff, and they’re getting free stuff from the government and all of these protections. And they’re saying, “This is not fair. I work hard. I pay taxes. I don’t get things from the government. My family waited in line. They’re not getting kickbacks. Why are you getting this and I’m not getting it? I pay taxes. You’re abusing the system. This isn’t fair.”

We won the Latino vote in part because of the fairness argument. This is a fair thing. You should have to wait in line. You should have to respect our laws, and if you are a criminal, you should be deported. That is a fairness argument that overwhelmingly people understood, especially Latinos, and that is part of the reason they moved so heavily Republican in 2024. They did not care about anything else. But the administration, especially under the guidance of Stephen Miller and the mismanagement of Kristi Noem, focused too heavily on numbers for numbers’ sake. They said we need to deport as many people as possible and felt the pressure from conservative influencers to get mass deportations done as fast as possible, no matter what. You got to deport 10 million people. Any way you can get them, get them. And mass deportations did happen. I know a lot of people who black pill constantly who try to feed you negative stories, saying, “There were no mass deportations; we’re not getting them.” All you need to do is look at the current CDC birth data and see how many fewer foreign-born women in this country are having children. Because if they’re not here, they can’t have children here. The number of births to women born in China in America is down 6% in 2026 from 2025. Afghans are down 5%. Mexicans are down 10%. Guatemalans are down 10%. Hondurans are down 11%. El Salvadorians down 7%. Haitians are down 14%. Somalians are down 12%. These people aren’t here because a lot of them are leaving, and they’re not being replaced because Trump changed immigration guidelines. So we’re getting what we want.

We should celebrate it, and we should not black pill about it, but we should also look at how we are doing mass deportations a little bit indiscriminately, where people are getting arrested trying to get their papers in order out of court or seeing their son off at the military.

It’s very easy to see how somebody could be like, oh, this person overstayed their visa, which is a crime – they should have to pay some kind of consequence for that. I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but they go to the courthouse to get that fixed, and they’re being handcuffed and dragged off, and it looks overly aggressive. I understand how an average person says this is not fair. And then we lose the same fairness argument we won around immigration, especially when it comes to somebody who never committed a crime. If you’re a child molester, I don’t care what they do. Honestly, they shoot you. If you’ve raped a five-year-old and you’re trying to evade deportation, I honestly don’t care if they shoot you. I’m not talking about those people. I think we’re all in agreement. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about people who seemed to be getting an unfair shake from the system.

And I think it’s wrong that the administration was not counting self-deportations as a factor in the mass deportation. We were not talking about the millions who were just leaving because Trump was finally enforcing the laws, period. And maybe part of that was the scare tactic of just being arrested anywhere, but they might’ve had those wins even if they didn’t do it as aggressively as they currently did. Now, I am for an aggressive immigration policy where we protect the border, and we deport illegals, but there’s got to be a softer way to do it. I think maybe going after employers who are sometimes very wealthy; they’re not all just small restaurant owners. A lot of them are wealthy agricultural companies, even bakers. I don’t know if it’s true, but there’s a famous story of the bake shop in Illinois where a black worker called ICE on the fact that half of the employees were Latino and they were illegal immigrants. And a black worker basically got hired for every job that was then open — replacing that illegal immigrant — and got a wage increase.

Those are good stories. We should have gone after employers who did mass illegal alien hiring, not necessarily the aggressive arresting on the street and chasing down people when they were dropping their kids off at school. The problem is that the few times it was really aggressive fueled rumors about how aggressive ICE would be. And I don’t know how aggressively they actually were, but it’s a problem that there were enough stories where the belief was that ICE was systematically arresting people who were really basically doing nothing wrong, and everyone was in fear. And I think that explains a dramatic swing among Latinos when it comes to this issue. Not that all of a sudden they all become open border activists, not that all of a sudden they become anti-deporting anybody; it’s just that it was overly aggressive and it looked unfair.

So, Latinos are seeing a swing towards Democrats in part because Latino Democrats outvoted Latino Republicans, especially young Latino Democrats, by very large margins. In Florida, it was about two to one. I think in Texas it was probably three to one or four to one —a big part of it. That helped flip a lot of places with Senate seats. The visualization of mass deportations being too aggressive and being unfair to people trying to work within the system to become legal or do it legally who otherwise have not committed crimes created an idea that this was not a fair way to do immigration policy. And the Iran War made the group that was most susceptible to wild price swings and inflation dislike the economics. That’s why I believe Latino votes swung so heavily.

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Ryan James Girdusky is an author, podcaster, political consultant, and writer whose work has been featured in multiple publications including the Washington Examiner, The American Conservative Magazine, The Week, Human Events, and The Daily Caller. He is the host of “It’s A Numbers Game with Ryan Girdusky” podcast. Follow him on X: @RyanGirdusky

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