Republicans suffered a bad election night.
Now the finger-pointing has started, and the cable panels already have a villain picked out.
But one exit poll number points the blame somewhere the post-game crowd keeps skipping.
A Fox News Lesson Plan for the GOP
Democrats seized control of both chambers of Congress on Election Night. Fox News projections show the party flipping at least seven Senate seats and more than two dozen House districts.
The damage reached deep into red country. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the US Senate in Texas. Adam Hamilton knocked off Senator Roger Marshall in Kansas, making him the first Democrat that state has sent to the Senate since 1932.
Former US Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) sat on the Fox News election panel as the returns rolled in. The network headlined one of his segments with his line that losing is a “really effective” teacher.
He’s right about that much.
The trouble starts with the lesson plan. On the eve of the election, Gowdy went on Special Report with Bret Baier and pinned the Texas mess on one decision: President Trump backing Paxton over incumbent Senator John Cornyn (R-TX).
Gowdy ran the numbers on Cornyn’s voting record and said the party poured half a billion dollars into Texas that it could have spent in other states. “All you had to do was nominate John Cornyn,” Gowdy said.
And that’s the template forming across the media right now. Blame the MAGA candidates. Blame ICE. Blame the tariffs. Blame anything but the war.
The One Issue Republicans Still Won
The exit polls tell a different story than the one the panels are selling.
The NBC News exit poll asked voters which party could better handle immigration. Republicans won that question 44 percent to 41 percent. Democrats took foreign policy 44 to 39.
So immigration stood alone as the issue where the GOP beat the other side.
And the voters who cared most broke hard toward Republicans. Among voters who called immigration enforcement crucial to their vote, Republicans won 58 percent to 40 percent. Nearly three-quarters of the electorate called it crucial or a major factor, and the GOP carried that group 52 to 45.
The public’s appetite for enforcement hasn’t gone anywhere either. A Marquette Law School national survey in early 2026 found 56 percent of Americans favor deporting people living in the country illegally.
The deportations-sank-the-party theory has a math problem. A campaign doesn’t lose an election on the one issue where it beats the other side.
But the tariff theory runs into the same wall. The price shock voters felt hit at the gas pump, and it hit after the fighting started in the Middle East. President Trump himself suggested during Fox News election coverage that voters were reacting to higher gasoline prices more than to the military campaign itself.
Responsible Statecraft saw this coming months ago. The outlet predicted that if November went badly, plenty of Republicans would rush to blame tariffs and give the war a pass.
The War Nobody Wants to Name
The people who actually own this loss spent two decades begging for a fight with Iran.
US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and the rest of the interventionist wing pushed military action against the Iranian regime for years, using the same sales pitch they used on Iraq. They finally got their war. Republican candidates got the bill.
Voters soured on it fast. CNN data analyst Harry Enten cited polling showing 68 percent of Americans say the Iran war has not been worth it. Back in 2006, after three years of fighting, 58 percent said the same about Iraq.
Republicans lost both chambers in 2006, too.
Federalist co-founder Sean Davis drew the same line. “This will be the biggest national wipeout for Republicans since 2006, when voters brutally punished the GOP for an ill-advised and poorly planned war in the Middle East,” Davis wrote.
The Fox News Decision Desk found the GOP bleeding support among Hispanic voters, young voters, independents, and rural Americans. Commentators will look at that list and see ICE raids. But young men and rural voters formed the backbone of the America First coalition that sent Trump back to the White House in 2024, and a big part of his pitch to them was ending foreign wars. Nobody in that coalition signed up for another Middle East deployment.
What the Old Guard Wants the Party to Learn
There’s a reason the war keeps vanishing from the post-mortems.
If the lesson is “MAGA candidates lose,” the old guard gets its party back. Cornyn-style Republicans return to the front of the line. Cornyn led Senate Republicans in negotiating the 2022 gun control bill that Joe Biden signed into law. In 2018, he backed a Senate immigration plan that included amnesty for Dreamers.
And Cornyn showed his own loyalty after losing his primary. “I refuse to allow a flawed, self-centered and shameless candidate like Ken Paxton to risk everything we’ve worked so hard to build over these many years,” Cornyn said.
If the lesson is “endless wars lose,” the hawks lose their seat at the table. Vice President JD Vance has argued for restraint for years. That argument just picked up millions of new witnesses.
The fight over what to learn from this election will shape 2028 more than the election itself did.
Republicans have flunked this exact test before. It took a decade and a New York businessman to say the obvious out loud. On a debate stage in South Carolina in 2016, Donald Trump faced a Republican primary crowd and declared, “Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake.”
He won that primary anyway, and then he won the whole thing.
Losing is a teacher, all right. The party already sat through that class once.
Sources:
Fox News, “Losing is a ‘really effective’ teacher: Trey Gowdy”
RealClearPolitics via Yahoo News, “Trey Gowdy: ‘All You Had To Do Is Nominate John Cornyn,’ I Don’t Know If Paxton Will Win”
Fox News, “Democrat seize House control in stunning blue tsunami, vow retribution against Trump admin”
Fox News, “Republicans suffer historic Senate upset as Dem flips deep-red state for first time in nearly a century”
Fox News, “Trump’s gamble on Ken Paxton backfires as Democrat pulls off historic Texas Senate upset”
Fox News, “Trump pledges to veto ‘insane’ Dem bills, pinpoints issue partially to blame for Republican losses”
NBC News, “National Exit Polls: Election 2026 Results”
Marquette Law School Poll, national survey, January 2026
Mediaite, “‘Just a Devastating Number’: CNN Data Guru Warns Iran War Could Doom GOP in Midterms”
Responsible Statecraft, “‘Major wipeout’ of 2006 proportions could force a new GOP reckoning”
Tuzara Post, “Conservatives Stunned by ‘Catastrophic’ Midterm Blue Tsunami, Blame President Trump’s Iran War, High Gas Prices”
