The midterms’ most deserving losers

Not to gloat (much) but here are some that really deserved it

Tom Schaller

Donald Trump and his MAGA cult were the biggest losers in Tuesday’s midterm elections. 

The results delivered a stinging rebuke to a wide range of political actors in the conservative Republican universe, including people and institutions who never have and likely never will run for office: Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, Fox News and the so-called “manosphere.”

But a number of notable Republicans — most but not all of them elected officials on the 2026 ballot — suffered epic, overdue, even karmic-level defeats.

The following list is hardly exhaustive. But the eight groups of losers categorized below are best described as the “Comeuppance Caucus”: Republicans who in 2026 got what was coming to them.

1. The Gerrymanderers

In 2025, state Republicans succumbed to Trump’s demands to redistrict US House maps in as many GOP-controlled states as possible. Much of the post-election attention this week has focused on House Republican defeats in the mid-decade redistricted states of Texas and Florida, especially in Latino-heavy districts. Governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis deserve the lickings they took Tuesday night.

But North Carolina merits special attention as the Republican Party’s “dummymandering doomsday” state.

Last year, NC state Sen. Ralph Hise led the GOP-controlled legislature’s plan to further tinker with House districts that four years earlier had already been drawn to significantly favor Republicans. The GOP aimed to win 10, maybe 11, of the state’s 14 seats in 2026, specifically targeting for defeat moderate African American Democrat Don Davis’s rural NC-1 district. With NC’s own US Rep. Richard Hudson, chair of the Republican National Congressional Committee, at his side, Hise pushed through the new map.

How badly did this gambit backfire? Democrats so far have captured at least nine seats, including NC-1. They have a razor-thin lead in a tenth district (NC-5) and an outside shot of flipping two more seats once final ballots are tabulated. And — womp, womp — Hudson lost in NC-9 to Democrat Richard Ojeda. Yes, the House Republican chosen by his colleagues to elect or reelect House Republicans for the 2026 cycle lost his seat.

2. The Medicaid Betrayers

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill slashed Medicaid benefits, and cynically timed those cuts to start in 2027 to help congressional Republicans evade electoral accountability in 2026. Some Republicans, however, declared they would oppose any bill that cut this healthcare program for the poor.

Joe Katz diligently tracked the 11 Republican House members who broke their promises by caving to the White House and voting to pass the OBBB despite the Medicaid cuts. Of the 11, CA-40’s Young Kim lost to another Republican. Among the 10 who faced Democratic challengers Tuesday, four more already lost (PA-8’s Robert Breshnahan, VA-2’s Jennifer Kiggans, CA-22’s David Valadao, and NJ-2’s Jeff Van Drew) and a fifth (AZ-6’s Juan Ciscomani) is trailing by 8 points with most precincts reporting. VA-1’s Robert Wittman trails his Democratic challenger by 2 points, so the casualty count should rise to seven unless late ballots there break Republican. (Van Drew deserves special mention because he switched to the Republican Party to ride the MAGA tiger that devoured him Tuesday.)

Such is the fate of what Katz aptly calls the “Medicaid Betrayers Caucus.” Buh-bye.

3: The Great Replacement-mongers

We turn next to the race-baiters and religious bigots.

GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner Bo French published a picture of a group of Southeast Asian-American students cheering from the stands at a University of Texas football game, accompanied by his warning that it’s problematic “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” Michigan US Senate nominee Mike Rogers gleefully insinuated that his Democratic opponent and Muslim, Abdul El-Sayed, was a terrorist sympathizer. Catholic House Republican Mike Lawler, NY-17, made an antisemitic crack this week about fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer being a “shanda — a disgrace.”

How’d things go Tuesday for this trio of haters? Democrats replaced all three.

4: The Evil Tech Overlord

Elon Musk (R-Ketamineville, TX), spent a half-billion dollars trying to mitigate Republican losses this year, especially in Texas, where he relocated his business from California. Musk plowed an estimated $224 million into the state in a desperate effort to save scandalous Ken Paxton’s plummeting US Senate fortunes and perhaps stymie Democrat Gina Hinojosa’s efforts to unseat Republican incumbent Gov. Abbott.

Too bad Tuesday wasn’t a weight-loss reality TV show, because measured as a return-on-investment Musk is by far the cycle’s biggest loser. Musk is getting nervous, too: After Tuesday’s drubbing, he scrubbed his X feed of pro-Republican tweets.

Next up for the world’s richest man? A spate of congressional committee investigations into his government contracts, election meddling, and interference in the Ukraine-Russia war.

5: The Amoral Opportunists

Colorado’s Rep. Lauren Boebert turned a failed career as a restaurateur into stardom as a Trump-fawning political performance artist in the US House. Despite her lewd public sexual behavior and weirdly dysfunctional family, the MAGA mouthpiece survived in Colorado by switching her residency to run in a different, post-2021 redistricting House district. She got beat Tuesday.

Ohio Rep. Max Miller shamelessly ran for reelection despite compelling evidence he physically abused his daughter and wife, who is Republican US Sen. Bernie Moreno’s daughter. Despite mounting calls for him to resign by his father-in-law and almost every other notable Ohio Republican, an undeterred Miller sought a third term in his OH-7 district. He got beat Tuesday.

If there is a slimier and more ambitious MAGA opportunist other than Trump and JD Vance, it’s Vivek Ramaswamy. After his failed 2024 presidential bid, during which he mostly glazed Trump in an effort to build his own political brand, Ramaswamy opted to run for Ohio governor. The attack ad he ran against Democratic opponent Amy Acton — which exploited Acton’s childhood rape by her stepfather — will be remembered as one of the most despicable campaign ads ever. He got beat Tuesday, too.

6: The Hand-picked Trumpers

Trump told Americans to vote as if he were on the ballot; they obliged him by issuing a resounding, nationwide rebuke. But Trump also wielded indirect influence on the ballot by endorsing candidates to be Republican nominees, including two deserving losers already discussed: Paxton and Ramaswamy.

But no Trump-picked candidate imploded quite like South Carolina’s Darline Graham, sister of the late US Senator Lindsay Graham, who died last July.

Appointed to fill her brother’s vacancy in a state Trump carried by 18 points two years ago, Graham ran a horrible campaign marred by her poor political skills and profound policy ignorance. In this deeply red, Deep South cornerstone of the Republican “red wall,” Democrat Annie Andrews beat Graham by four points. Graham’s defeat revived memories of her brother’s infamous prophecy about the risks to Republicans of nominating Trump for president in 2016.

7: The Retributionist

In his effort to purge the Pentagon of those who fall short of some mythic standard of Aryan white machismo, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (R-Whiskeytown, TN) had to watch Tuesday night as Nancy Lacore won the South Carolina House seat vacated by Nancy Mace. (Mace is another 2026 loser: She resigned from the House only to lose the 2026 GOP primary for governor in which she failed to carry a single SC county.)

A three-star Navy vice admiral, Lacore decided to run for the House after Hegseth fired her without cause in 2025. She won. As for Hegseth, he’s about to be haunted by a different kind of campaign — and impeachment campaign led by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie.

8: Every. Single. Texas. Republican.

Lone Star Republicans got slaughtered Tuesday. They lost every statewide contest, starting with James Talarico’s 12-point drubbing of Paxton in the US Senate race and Gina Hinojosa’s 7-point defeat of Abbott to win the governorship. Democrats also swept all six other statewide offices, captured all four state Supreme Court seats, and flipped the state House majority from red to blue.

Those major races obscure a small but important county-level result. In suburban Tarrant County outside Dallas, Republican judge Tim O’Hare sought reelection. Despite public objections from the local NAACP, O’Hare and the Republican-controlled county commission shut down 92 county polling locations weeks before the election, including 21 located in precincts that not coincidentally contained at least 75 percent non-white voters.

Tarrant voters stripped wannabe vote suppressor O’Hare of his robe. In a fitting irony, they replaced him with an African American woman, Alisa Simmons, who beat O’Hare by 13 points. Case dismissed.

Karmic justice

The scale and breadth of Republican losses in the 2026 midterms are being compared to similar electoral waves.

For Democrats, the analogs are the 1974 post-Watergate midterms, and George W. Bush’s post-Katrina “war on terror’ fatigued second midterm in 2006; for the GOP, the obvious comparisons are the 1994 “Republican Revolution” midterm and the 2010 midterm “shellacking” suffered by Democrats, to borrow Barack Obama’s description.

This year’s demolition of the GOP was deep and geographically broad. Republicans suffered severe losses in Senate and House races, gubernatorial and other statewide offices, state legislative seats, and county-level contests. Outside the already solidly Democratic Northeast and Pacific Coast, no region was spared from the 2026 blue wave, including the Republicans’ Deep South stronghold. Democrats made gains in cities and suburbs, but rural areas, too. Few Republican candidates were safe, and many who survived won narrowly.

The total number of Republican casualties will be known once all votes are tabulated. But a special subset of GOP losers suffered karmic justice in defeat Tuesday. Their comeuppance was deserved and, in many cases, long overdue.

Thanks for reading Public Notice. This post is public so feel free to share it.

👊 Subscribe to PN 👊