WASHINGTON: Rep. Richard Hudson had hoped to return to Capitol Hill this week celebrating another Republican majority he helped engineer. Instead, the North Carolina congressman, who chairs the House GOP campaign arm, is coming to terms with the fact that he and dozens of his colleagues will soon be packing up their offices.
"It was really people coming out to send a message," Hudson said in a brief interview, adding that voters "rightly so, felt gas was too high, things were too expensive." The mistake Republicans made, he said, is that "we didn't convey to them that we cared about that and cared about them."
Returning to Washington this week for the first time since the party's sweeping midterm losses, Republicans appeared dazed. While they conceded the scale of their defeat, there was little interest in a wholesale break from President Donald Trump. Instead, they gathered behind closed doors to examine what went wrong and studied the calendar to determine how much of their agenda they can pass before Democrats take control of the House and Senate in January.
Frustration ran high among members who felt a party handed full control of the White House and Congress only two years ago had lost touch with voters. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who tried without success to delay Senate leadership elections, offered a blunt assessment: "You cut rural healthcare spending, when you abandon pro-lifers, when you abandon the poor, when you abandon the needy, when you abandon working people, you're gonna get your butt kicked. And you're gonna deserve it."
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who trails her Democratic challenger in a district Republicans won by more than 18 percentage points in 2024, said simply, "We collectively failed." Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, also trailing a Democratic rival, said people kept insisting she could not lose. "I couldn't get anybody to listen to me," she said. "People just didn't think it could happen, but we knew it could."
House Speaker Mike Johnson had spent the campaign's final stretch dismissing the historic headwinds a president's party typically faces in a midterm, touring the country and insisting the polls were wrong. This week, with Democrats flipping more than 40 Republican-held seats and on track for their most robust majority since the early years of Barack Obama's presidency, Johnson said voters made the "wrong choice."
The two chambers charted different courses for what comes next. House Republicans remaining next year largely hail from deeply conservative districts where Trump is popular, and their choice of Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and a top Trump ally, as their next leader signaled a combative posture. "The way that Jim fights says a lot about where this conference is," said Rep. Brian Mast of Florida.
In the Senate, the appetite for a fight was weaker. Hawley and a small band of conservatives spent hours in the Old Senate Chamber pushing to delay leadership elections so alternatives to John Thune of South Dakota could be weighed, but no challenger stepped forward. Republicans ultimately backed Thune without even a voice vote. "We're going to let our leader be the leader," said Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, who was also chosen to lead the party's effort to regain seats in the 2028 election.
The largest looming question is how Republicans handle their relationship with Trump, whose trade policies and the war in Iran contributed to the losses and whose Make America Great Again movement now faces doubts about its durability. Still, there was no stampede away from him. House Republicans overwhelmingly blocked an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, with only Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie breaking ranks. "What I found out tonight is they still haven't broken from the spell of Donald Trump," Massie said after the vote. "He still controls this conference."
Yet there were signs Trump's sway has limits. Few Republicans echoed his social media claim this week that the election had problems, and in conceding a tight Mississippi Senate race, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said she would "respect the decision" of voters. Several Republicans, including Sens. Joni Ernst, Tim Scott and John Cornyn and Rep. Mike Lawler, posted photos of the Democrats who will succeed them or represent their states. And Rep. James Comer of Kentucky rejected White House warnings that planned Democratic investigations could amount to "blatant criminality," saying the Oversight Committee should check the executive branch "regardless of the political scenario."
