Mark Hillman

Maybe this election was the cold shower Republicans badly needed.

In Washington, they have increasingly strayed from conservative governance or standards of integrity and become apologists for one man. The justification is always, “Because Trump.”

On election day 2026, voters resoundingly gave them the boot. Voters’ response was also “Because Trump!”

Democrats won the cumulative vote for for U.S. House of Representatives 55% to 43%. In every single U.S. House district, more voters chose Democrats than they did two years ago when Donald Trump won the popular vote by just 1.5 points.

Democrat candidates didn’t win simply because more of them turned out to vote. They won because many voters who had favored Trump and Republicans over Democrats and Kamala Harris two years ago voted for Democrats this time.

In a year when the Senate map favored Republicans, they lost at least eight seats including, remarkably, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, South Carolina and Mississippi. Democrats will hold most of those seats for six more years, creating a roadblock against any GOP comeback until 2032.

Despite Trump’s record of selecting losing candidates, Republican primary voters blindly followed his endorsement, nominating nasty, corrupt candidates like Ken Paxton (a vile millstone that sunk Republicans all across Texas), Mike Collins (Georgia), Vivek Ramaswamy (Ohio governor) and the embarrassingly unprepared Diane Graham (South Carolina).

Trump wanted more Republicans he could control; instead he got Democrats – lots of Democrats.

In the states, Donald Trump has done to Republicans what Barack Obama did to Democrats. At the end of Obama’s term, Republicans held 33 governor’s offices and controlled 32 state legislatures to 14 for Democrats with four divided. In this election, Democrats flipped six governorships (giving them 30) and six more state legislatures, giving them control in 24 to Republicans’ 23 with three divided.

If history is any guide, it could get worse for the GOP before it gets better. In 2006, the second mid-term under George W. Bush, Republicans lost 31 seats in Congress, but Bush remained and an unpopular war in Iraq continued. Add the financial meltdown in 2008, and Republicans lost 24 more seats and the White House. If we know one thing about Trump, it’s that he’s unlikely to change.

But this election wasn’t just about bad candidates or the war in Iran or Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums or self-enrichment by the Trump family and associates or mid-decade redistricting or ham-fisted immigration raids or running up $2 trillion in debt just this year or Trump’s obsession with putting his name on everything or his penchant for kissing up to dictators while kicking sand on our allies or his unhinged comments about Iran, Greenland, the Nobel Prize, etc.

It was about all of those things.

Each time Trump has won election, he has mistaken the win as a mandate for him. Sure, some voters (about 25%) love Donald Trump, but the voters who put him over the top in 2016 and 2024 merely found him to be less repulsive than Hillary Clinton and not as clueless as Kamala Harris. Many of those same voters grew weary of Trump’s first four years and voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Republicans no longer seem to know what they are for, and many have lost the backbone to say, “Hell, no!” to tariffs, trillion-dollar deficits, coddling dictators, deserting our allies, and appointing clowns to key positions. Many who thought for themselves were driven off by Trump.

Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to know what socialism is. Vice President J.D. Vance recently defined socialism as “that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls' sports."

The President’s lapdog may have a law degree from Yale, but he doesn’t know basic economics. Socialism is government owning the means of production. Vance couldn’t say that because the Trump administration has made the U.S. government an owner of some 30 companies. Trump thinks that’s shrewd, but a future president will leverage that to control companies in ways Republicans won’t like. That’s why the best practice is to keep government out of private business.

Hopefully, this journey through the political wilderness will help Republicans rediscover timeless principles like market capitalism, limited government, rule of law and fiscal discipline, as well as teaching a valuable lesson forsaking principles to follow one man.

Mark Hillman served as Senate Majority Leader and State Treasurer.