It is a bad, bad US midterm election result to lose over eight per cent of the party popular vote from the election two years previously. And losing 63 seats in the House of Representatives is really, really bad. So first thing to say is that I got the midterms badly wrong. I thought the Republicans would keep the Senate and had a play at the House. Badly wrong! And indeed, I’m waiting on an address to send a bottle of amber liquid away to settle a losing bet. Trump and the Republicans got smoked.

That said, a little perspective is needed.  You see Trump and Republicans didn’t lose 63 House seats. That was Barack Obama in his first midterm – the one where he also lost a higher percentage of the party popular vote than Trump just did. You see in this month’s midterms the Republicans actually lost just 54 House seats. Sorry, wrong again.  That was the Bill Clinton midterm loss in the 1990s. Nope, the 2026 tally was a Republican loss of about 42 to 45 House seats. So what’s the long-term average House seat loss for a President’s party? About 30 seats.

Now the Senate was undoubtedly worse.  After Alaska and Mississippi declare a winner the Democrats will have between 54 and 56 Senate seats. So don’t get me wrong. This was a really bad result for the Republicans and Trump. But it was no worse than midterm results Obama and Clinton suffered.

Why did it happen then? It is clearly not just because Republicans stayed home. Some did. But lots came out and then voted differently to what they’d done in 2024. Why? The top two exit poll reasons were the Iran war and affordability. There is no doubt President Trump has badly bungled the former. None of us knows what evidence there was for thinking the Iranians were close to building a nuke. If it were credible I would have bombed them too. Again and again. But what you can’t do politically is make clear these people are completely untrustworthy. Bomb them. Then say you’ll cut a deal with those same people. Then bomb them again. Then promise a deal, the greatest ever deal. Then pretend there are no affordability costs associated with the war. Etcetera ad infinitum. Either you come on TV to say you had good evidence. It had to be done. But it will definitely have economic consequences. And then you never talk about making deals with the Ayatollahs, the people you’ve just said you couldn’t trust. Or, you don’t bomb them. Now true, Trump has not put troops on the ground. It is not an Iraq nor Afghanistan forever war in that sense. But he has certainly bungled explaining this to his core voters and all Americans.

Affordability is obviously linked in large part to that same war. Okay, the US right now probably has the best economy in the West. Productivity. Wage gains. GDP per capita growth. Investment. Business’s energy costs. But the price of gas at the pump for the average punter, a proxy for affordability, is not good for Americans. (I emphasise ‘for Americans’ having just been in Indianapolis where the price of a gallon of gas was US$3.70, so about US97 cents a litre or A$1.41 per litre. That’s under half what it is in parts of Australia and way under half of European prices.) Here, too, Trump’s bluster really hurt him because the man can’t seem to admit when anything is not going well or when his actions clearly involve downsides.  And, yes, I know that inflation was way worse under Biden and that it gets baked in.  (Jim Chalmers take note.) But it’s also true the Iran war has had costs. So admit them.

I should also point out that the third or fourth reason Republicans who voted Democrat this time gave to the exit pollsters was the uselessness of the Republicans in Congress.  By that they meant the Senate Republicans.  How many noteworthy or important Bills did Congress pass in the last two years? I would say ‘one’. Hundreds and hundreds of Bills, some crucial, passed the lower House of Reps and the Senate majority leader John Thune left them there. He refused to try to pass them, not even the one codifying Doge government spending cuts. Thune also refused to fire an Obama-era parliamentarian and to put the Senate into recess so Trump could make judicial and other recess appointments, about 230 are in limbo. Put bluntly, Trump’s Republican Senate did almost nothing for him and voters saw that. It was as though Tony Abbott had had Malcolm Turnbull running the Senate and obstructing everything.

Anyway, you’ll all recall that in his last two years as President, Obama faced a 54-seat Republican Senate plus a solidly Republican House. That’s almost exactly the Congressional opposition Trump will face. Obama got out the veto pen and used it. His approval ratings went up and up. If, a big if, Trump can control his desire to be liked and his need to exaggerate he needs to do two things. One is to finish the Iran war. And then just let the booming US economy slowly help affordability. Trump is undoubtedly a better fighter than a cajoler of his own side. There’s a decent chance the Dems will over-reach anyway.

And so the million-dollar question: who will be the 2028 nominee? Before the midterms near on everyone thought it was down to Vance and Rubio. In fact, our magnificent editor and I had bet a bottle of wine on who we thought (not wanted, but thought) would get the Republican nomination. I had Vance and he had Rubio. But this terrible midterm result now makes it a three-horse race. Because Ron DeSantis is back in the picture. He is probably the best governor of a US state in all of our lifetimes. He would make a terrific President. His problem is that the last time he ran his campaign was woeful. He’s got all the charisma of a tree trunk. If we could blink our eyes and magically make him President, he’d be terrific. But you do first need to win the nomination. And to bring out the vote and charm enough voters to win. Can DeSantis now do that? Maybe. He’s got an incredible track record to run on – one that puts Gavin Newsom’s to utter shame. And it now sure sounds as though DeSantis is going to run. In office, he was tough on the border; solid on immigration (a weakness for Rubio given his one-time views); did an amazing job on the economy; lowered taxes; and is a clear America First guy. It’s possible that wooden personality might even be seen as a nice change from the Trump years. Plus, he hasn’t fallen out with the Don.

As for the Democrats, almost all their Senate pick-ups were won by actual middle-of-the-road centrists. But I can’t see any way that that sort of candidate wins the Democrat Presidential nomination in 2028. At the national level the progressive left has the enthusiasm. They’re still brutally woke and basically socialists. Let’s all hope they get the nominee they want. Remember, the two-year political fortunes in the US can, and generally do, swing wildly.