‘How did we get here?’: Inside a losing GOP campaign defined by Trump

By Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump was in the midst of his fourth political rally in three days when he asked a close associate the question that had been troubling him for some time: How did the Republican Party get in this bad of shape?

It was mid-October, and with just weeks to go to the midterm elections, the GOP was bleeding support in dozens of races across the country. The House majority was lost. Senate control was, improbably, a toss-up. And Trump had embarked on a monthlong salvage mission, crisscrossing the US to rouse apathetic voters in the kinds of blood-red districts that he’d carried easily just two years ago.

“It’s a sh*t-ton of travel,” said a person familiar with the private exchange. “And the question he keeps asking is, ‘How did we get here?’”

The president’s belated revelation underscored the dire state of affairs that Republicans around him had spent the last several months struggling to combat.

Already facing historical headwinds and an energized Democratic Party, Trump had plunged the nation into an unpopular war with no clear exit strategy. Gas prices soared as a result, fueling widespread inflation and a resurgence of voter anxiety over the cost of living.

The self-inflicted wounds sank Trump’s approval ratings to record lows. Faced with an angry and disillusioned electorate, Republican candidates were now desperately seeking ways to escape their leader’s downward gravitational pull.

“People are so mad,” one glum Texas-based GOP operative said in the run-up to Election Day. “And Trump hasn’t done anything to help any of that.”

In the end, the GOP paid a staggering political price. Frustrated voters decimated Republicans’ majority in both the House and the Senate, delivering a stunning rebuke of GOP governance that extended well into areas long considered conservative strongholds.

By late Tuesday, House Republicans were facing an electoral rout, losing several districts that Trump won by more than 10 points just two years ago. Two Democratic sources believe the sweeping victories could give them more than 240 seats in the House, a number that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

The Senate’s trajectory was, in some ways, even more disastrous for Republicans, who had entered the midterm cycle needing only to defend a handful of traditionally red seats to keep control. Instead, the chamber also flipped to Democratic control just hours after the polls closed due to losses in reliable Republican strongholds like Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina.

The aftermath is likely to leave Trump dramatically weakened and girding for a final two years in office marked by an onslaught of Democratic investigations and opposition that threaten to grind his agenda to a halt.

The broader Republican Party, meanwhile, suddenly finds itself adrift. Even before the results rolled in, it was awash in finger-pointing and second-guessing as GOP officials braced for a poor showing at the polls. That discord is only likely to deepen as Republicans sift through the rubble of a midterms that failed to meet their already low expectations, according to interviews with more than a dozen Trump aides and advisers, party officials and campaign operatives.

Those Republicans described a series of questionable calls and pivot points over the last year, including an overly optimistic strategy, indecisive messaging and the misguided selection of a handful of extraordinarily weak candidates.

But ultimately, they agreed, Republicans simply couldn’t outrun Trump. The president’s decision to go to war — then spend six months dismissing the economic fallout while pursuing his own vanity projects — unraveled his coalition and proved deeply toxic to Americans across the political landscape.

“Honestly, there’s just one person to blame,” said Barrett Marson, an Arizona Republican strategist. “If the war had not happened, it would be an entirely different election cycle. And only one person started that war.”

On Tuesday night, a White House official rejected any suggestion that Trump bore responsibility for the GOP’s losses, arguing it was candidates’ own fault.

“President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves,” the official said.

An unpredictable Trump

But White House efforts to now downplay those losses as inevitable — and wholly separate from Trump — represent a major shift from this time last year, when his advisers mapped out a plan to defy history and preserve the party’s slim majorities by putting Trump “on the ballot,” as his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, termed it last December.

GOP leaders at that point felt emboldened by Trump’s command of a diverse and seemingly durable coalition of MAGA voters. They were invigorated by the passage of a massive tax cut-and-spending package dubbed “The Big Beautiful Bill.” The economy looked resilient and inflation was easing, offering a potent contrast to the high-cost Biden years.

Republicans also had another weapon in their arsenal: An unprecedented redistricting scheme, orchestrated by top Trump political aide James Blair, to preemptively shift more than a dozen congressional districts toward Republicans and shrink the number of seats they might have to defend come November.

The smaller map of perceived competitive seats formed the basis of an optimistic midterm strategy that Blair and Wiles laid out in private meetings beginning in February, according to people in the room.

They urged top GOP lawmakers and allies to advance a disciplined economic message that emphasized Trump’s accomplishments, including progress on the cost of living and popular priorities like reining in drug prices. Based on that strong start, Republicans would then ask voters to grant them two more years to effectively finish the job.

The Republican Party needed to stay on the same page, they insisted — even as they acknowledged that an undisciplined Trump likely would not. The president, Blair told one group, would be “doing his own thing.”

That would turn out to be a massive understatement.

The war catastrophe

Fewer than two weeks later, Trump launched a surprise attack on Iran, killing much of the nation’s top leadership in strikes meant to collapse its regime and deliver the president a quick and resounding victory.

Instead, the offensive hardened Iran’s resolve, drawing the US into a war that within weeks had killed American service members and halted the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, sparking a global energy crisis.

Trump and his senior aides initially downplayed the repercussions, boasting that the war was nearly won and would ultimately last just four to six weeks. But even at that early stage, some of Trump’s advisers privately recognized that it could spell political disaster.

“There are a lot of people who don’t know why we needed to do this,” one Trump adviser lamented at the time, adding that the decision had immediately rendered months of meticulous midterm preparation “obsolete.”

“If oil hits $100 (per barrel), who knows?” the adviser said. “It’s a political risk, and there’s no ands, ifs or buts about it.”

The outlook darkened further over the next couple months, as the war swamped the political conversation and Trump’s own agenda. Plans to send the president on a sustained tour to tout his accomplishments were put on hold. Major strategic decisions — like where and when to begin spending Trump’s roughly $400 million war chest — were delayed.

Perhaps worst of all, allies fretted, Trump had betrayed his core political identity as a president devoted to juicing the economy and keeping the US out of foreign wars.

“They underestimated the backlash in the base,” one Trump ally said of the White House as the war stretched into its second month, oil hit $100 a barrel and US gas prices neared the $4-per-gallon mark. “If we’re not plenty concerned about that in April, then we’re dead in November.”

By the summer, it became clear that the war was not a “total and complete victory,” despite Trump’s repeated claims, and would instead loom over the entire midterm cycle. The June collapse of a short-lived ceasefire had left Republican candidates without a clear message on the conflict, as every economic pillar they had planned to run on melted away.

Gas topped $4 and continued to rise, grocery prices were marching upward and polls increasingly showed voters revolting against a president who had promised their costs would go down “on day one.”

In some GOP circles, lawmakers and their advisers privately calculated whether and how sharply to break with Trump on key issues in the campaign’s final stretch. A handful had already levied criticisms of his price-hiking tariffs or expressed displeasure with the war — though tentatively and, in several cases, not before giving the White House advance notice.

But even as Trump’s approval ratings bottomed out, most declined to take such a significant step.

Some concluded that, after defending and justifying Trump’s every move for the last 18 months, abandoning him now wouldn’t win much credibility with swing voters — and would assuredly tank their standing with the MAGA base. Others were simply too wary of inviting Trump’s personal ire, calculating instead that it was better to stick it out and hope his most ardent remaining supporters could pull them across the finish line.

Spiraling off message

Inside the White House, what had begun as an expansive plan to trumpet Republicans’ policy successes and cement the congressional majority was eventually whittled down to a last-ditch bid to turn out Trump’s MAGA base one final time.

The president had remained largely disengaged from the nitty-gritty political planning, at times remarking to those around him that he had already done his job: He’d won the White House. Instead, Trump spent inordinate time overseeing construction projects around Washington that he viewed as critical to his legacy. Americans, however, overwhelmingly saw it as a waste of time and money.

When he did address the issues at the top of voters’ minds, it was typically to wave them away. Trump regularly insisted gas prices would soon plummet and argued the Iran war was worth the “short-term pain.” He celebrated tariffs and unreservedly embraced the artificial intelligence sector, despite polls showing deep bipartisan skepticism of both.

As for the affordability worries dominating Americans’ concerns, he’d initially dismissed them as a “hoax,” sparking a scramble among his aides to clean up his remarks, an administration official and an adviser said. To their dismay, Trump then went out and said it again and again, eventually turning it into a regular component of his stump speech.

“It was a word they made up,” Trump complained during a September rally in North Carolina. “And I got hit with this affordability word for a year-and-a-half.”

Trump’s hand-picked candidates

The midterm map that Trump aides sought to shrink, meanwhile, had widened — in part due to the weakness of several of Trump’s hand-picked candidates for Senate.

In Texas, where Trump elevated Ken Paxton over the objections of GOP Hill leaders, the scandal-plagued candidate was performing so poorly that some operatives in the state privately questioned whether he even wanted the job.

Michael Whatley, a close ally of the president, got off to a slow start and never recovered in North Carolina despite the tutelage of several close Trump advisers. Darline Graham, who Trump impulsively endorsed to replace her late brother, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, looked every bit the political novice in a state that went for Trump by 18 percentage points in 2024.

And to the Trump team’s deepening frustration, several House and Senate lawmakers in typically safe seats had been caught flat-footed by their stronger-than-normal challengers.

“They were coasting, even when there were signs,” one adviser griped as Republicans raced to shore up Sen. Roger Marshall’s flailing campaign in Kansas, where Democrats are now projected to win for the first time in nearly a century.

As gas and diesel prices spiked, dragging down Republicans across the country, the White House searched for any policy levers that might assuage voters facing fresh economic strain.

Trump endorsed access to cheaper forms of gasoline and cleared the way for truckers to use tax-free diesel typically reserved for off-road vehicles. He promised payouts to buoy farmers that by Election Day totaled roughly $15 billion.

But those gestures largely fell flat, and at points were directly undermined by steps Trump took to try to shore up other parts of the ailing GOP base. Among the most damaging was the decision to temporarily boost beef imports — a move designed to lower grocery prices that ultimately succeeded only in enraging Republicans throughout the Midwest.

The war, one Republican operative close to the White House said, was not only unpopular on its own, but had generated widespread domestic fallout that the administration could not contain.

“It created an inflation issue that became directly relevant to the president, and a thousand other things cascaded from that,” the operative said.

That rising threat to Republicans across the political landscape only further heightened the importance of perhaps the party’s biggest advantage: the roughly $400 million that Trump had accumulated in his super PAC, much of it from wealthy donors and corporations seeking to curry favor during the first year of his presidency.

Yet for months, that PAC, MAGA Inc., declined to spend amid Trump’s reluctance to give away money he’d raised to help other candidates and Republican officials’ own difficulties in deciding how and where to deploy cash across a worsening map.

After extensive wrangling, the president finally greenlit pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into contests around the nation across the final two months.

It was a welcome infusion for the GOP that allowed the party’s two main super PACs to concentrate their spending on swing districts and pickup opportunities, officials said, while Trump’s MAGA Inc. focused on triaging races deeper into red territory.

Yet there was still the matter of how best to utilize the president himself.

Within Trump’s orbit, some allies felt Republicans’ best shot was to localize their races and keep the focus on Democrats, in hopes that GOP voters’ fears of empowering “socialism” would win out over their more immediate frustrations. Others believed that Democrats had already made the midterms about Trump and, alarmed by the lack of grassroots enthusiasm within the GOP, they argued there was nothing to lose now from unleashing the president in full.

“There’s no counter message,” said another ally, “because they’re taking out ads for the [Big Beautiful Bill] and nobody gives two f**ks.”

Trump on the trail

Trump eventually settled the debate himself. In mid-September, after growing agitated by internal polling showing Republicans consistently trailing in races across the country, he determined he’d take the matter into his own hands, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump’s team hastily organized a final-month sprint that put him in a different town nearly every day, barnstorming the nation to plead with his devotees to go vote — even if, this time, it wouldn’t be for him.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” Trump said during one stop in Michigan, echoing an appeal he made at nearly every rally. “When I’m not on the on the ballot, people don’t show up. Please show up and vote.”

At times, the near-daily travel invigorated Trump, who basked in the crowds and relished his reputation as what one adviser described as “the greatest turnout machine in the history of American politics.” In other moments, he raged at having to work so hard in the closing stretches of campaigns that were not his, people who spoke with him said.

Top Republicans also viewed the tour as a mixed blessing; they hoped the return of Trump’s signature rallies could resuscitate enthusiasm within an inert GOP base, yet worked to steer him toward solidly red districts to minimize any harm to toss-up races.

The rallies, GOP officials insisted in the final days, showed signs of boosting turnout — even as Trump offered an inconsistent and sometimes-baffling closing message.

During several visits to Ohio, for example, the president publicly fixated on the shape of GOP Sen. Jon Husted’s “ass” — a uniquely Trumpian compliment borne from his disbelief that Husted hadn’t done more on the trail to emphasize his past as a Division III college football player, people familiar with the matter said.

Yet for all the enthusiasm on the ground among Trump’s diehards, it did little to assuage voters’ concerns about the war and high prices, or visibly move polls that increasingly showed Republicans being overtaken by a blue wave.

As Trump approached the end of his tour, his mood had darkened significantly, those who spoke with him said. So with less than 24 hours to Election Day, Trump returned to a topic that he’s often described as “relaxing” to him: Construction.

Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday, Trump devoted much of his final pre-midterm speech to detailing his battles with the pool’s algae and the key decision points involved in repairing pipes and replacing grass.

It was a bizarre decision, GOP officials said, but not a fateful one. Trump had set his party on this path eight months ago — all that was left to do now was brace for impact.

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CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Manu Raju contributed to this report.