Opinion

Here's What I Think About The Catastrophic Midterms Disaster

A nuclear-armed Iran is nowhere near as dangerous to Americans as a socialist Democrat Party running the government, which is what's about to happen.

Matt Walsh

Just two years after Donald Trump retook the White House and Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, voters have made it clear — overwhelmingly — that, all things considered, they would prefer to be governed by the Democrat Party, which has been fully captured by communists who want half the country dead and openly seek to destroy Western civilization itself. 

This is a disastrous and profoundly irrational outcome on many levels, but it's also not unexpected. Donald Trump abandoned the America First principles that got him elected, and voters responded accordingly. 

In fact, in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed literally ran an "America First" ad. A guy named Abdul El-Sayed was able to co-opt the America First message because the president wasn't interested in it anymore. As a result, Democrats will take control of both houses of Congress. They're picking up seats in the reddest states on the map, including Mississippi and Texas.

There's no way to soft-pedal this. It's a political catastrophe of historic proportions. The Republican Party needs brand new leadership. No one should be spared from blame, starting at the top. 

The people running the party right now, who led us to this slaughter, will not and cannot be its leaders in the future. In every state he went to, Trump told voters to pretend he's on the ballot — and in the end, guess what, they did. And that was the problem. And now, after the total domination we saw on Tuesday, it's not unthinkable that Democrats could get enough GOP support to impeach and remove Trump from office. That's how monumental this defeat was.

What this means is that Iran, ironically enough, just did far more damage to this country than whatever Trump was warning us about. A nuclear-armed Iran is nowhere near as dangerous to Americans as a socialist Democrat Party running the government, which is what's about to happen — in large part because the White House launched a pointless, indefinite war in the Middle East. 

Trump saw how the other Republican president this century derailed his presidency and destroyed his party with an unpopular, pointless war and decided that he'd go ahead and do exactly the same thing. 

The great, almost Greek tragedy here is that Trump launched his movement and seized control of the party in large part because he was one of the only Republicans willing to criticize Bush's disastrous foreign war. 

Now Trump's tenure will end in ruin because he launched a disastrous foreign war of his own. 

The justification for this war, which raised the price of fuel enormously, was to prevent a "nuclear-armed Iran." I'd certainly rather have a nuclear-armed Iran than communists running my country. 

The catastrophe that's about to unfold, unlike any nuclear weapon, legitimately has the potential to destroy the entire country. You can look forward to D.C. statehood, Puerto Rico statehood, unlimited foreign voters, and a packed Supreme Court (made easier by the fact that the elderly conservative justices pulled a Ginsburg and refused to retire this year). 

All of this is much, much worse than Iran getting a nuke. But that's our future now, in no small part because this war resulted in a much higher cost of living for almost everyone.

As devastating as the Iran quagmire has been, we also can't ignore the larger, macro trends at play here. This is a far greater political realignment than anything we've seen in the modern history of this country. It's far more dramatic than even 2016, when Trump first took the White House. 

This is arguably a permanent realignment, one that immigration hawks have warned about for decades and yet, for some reason, the GOP never took seriously. And it largely explains why the entire South is in play now. 

To be sure, immigration alone is not the whole story. According to exit polls, only 51% of white voters went for Republicans. Democrats won young white men by 17 points on Tuesday, according to CNN exit polls — while Trump won young white men by 28 points in 2024. 

In other words, in just two years, the Republicans have completely alienated one of the major demographics that their policies were supposed to help — by eliminating anti-white discrimination, deporting illegal foreigners competing for jobs, and so on.  

It's a stunning failure. You can't help but think about that Sarah Huckabee Sanders ad where she portrayed the typical welfare queen as a young white male. The exact demographic least likely to be on welfare was nonetheless turned into the mascot for welfare. 

That ad obviously isn't why Republicans were obliterated on Tuesday. But it illustrates the deeper problem, which is that Republicans need white men in order to have any chance of winning any race at any level — and white men have been their most loyal constituents — and yet Republicans still won't speak to white men, or acknowledge them as a group, except to cast them as the villains. The Democrats speak very specifically to the core demographics that they need to win elections. Republicans won't do that. In fact, they do exactly the opposite. 

Putting that aside, as it turns out, what people care about — whether they're white or not — is being able to afford a home, get a job, and raise a family. And that's not possible for many young people right now. 

There are much larger issues than immigration alone, although there's no question that the scale of the Democrats' victory was greatly assisted by foreign migration. You'll hear pundits comparing this election to when Reagan or Clinton lost a lot of seats in the midterms, but there's a very important difference here, which is that our country has become unrecognizable over the past decade or so. 

Young people are struggling to get jobs and compete with AI. Social media feeds are overrun with slop, outright fabrications, and mass hysteria — and tens of millions of Americans are consuming this garbage on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, every day. Plenty of podcasts contribute to the problem as well. 

Additionally, foreigners now dominate major cities in this country — and they're both desperate for handouts and furious about immigration enforcement. Put it all together, and we're on the fast track to becoming Canada by 2030, with even more third-world demographics, along with a Democrat president and a Democrat supermajority in Congress. 

In no uncertain terms, this would mark the end of the country as we know it. Or maybe the more accurate comparison would be to Brazil, which became minority-white in 2010, and where opposition candidates have to flee the country after election day. That's what's coming for us if this wipeout in 2026 is the precursor to an even greater defeat in 2028. No Republican will ever be allowed to win a national election ever again.

Take a look at Texas, which has now been turned blue. Consider this: Is there any path for Republicans to win national elections that does not include Texas? Is there any road map to victory for Republicans that routes around Texas? The answer is no. That route doesn't exist. It's like trying to find a way to get from New York to London without a plane and without even a boat. You can't get there. What are you going to do? Swim? Republicans will be swimming alone in the ocean if they don't have Texas. They cannot be a national political party without Texas. It's impossible. 

The problem is that Democrats have utterly transformed the demographics of the state through the importation of foreigners, and they've done it efficiently and without the slightest hesitation or apology. 

This was the political map of Texas in 2024:

Trump won easily, by more than 1.5 million votes. In 2022, Greg Abbott won by more than 10% of the vote. On Tuesday, he went down — along with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Senate race. Actually, Democrats swept every statewide office in Texas, including attorney general, land commissioner, agriculture commissioner, and so on. There were similar upsets in several other states, including Mississippi. 

By pursuing an agenda that ignored key social and economic issues, Republican governments throughout the South created a demographic time bomb that has finally detonated, in spectacular fashion.

Nothing like this would ever happen in California. No one honestly believes the GOP could ever flip California red. But Democrats have had their sights on Texas for some time, because (unlike the GOP) they understand the importance of demographics. They understand that, after decades of importing foreigners who vote a certain way, your victory eventually becomes inevitable. And then you have dozens of electoral votes in your pocket, forever, for all future elections. As the saying goes, in a democracy, demographics are destiny. And that's what we saw on Tuesday.

Then there's Ohio, where Trump's endorsement of Vivek Ramaswamy resulted in another crushing defeat in a once-red state. Then there's South Carolina, which also flipped blue when the Trump-endorsed Republican Darline Graham lost in convincing fashion. 

Darline Graham is the sister of Senator Lindsey Graham, who recently died. What was her pitch to the voters? What relevant experience or qualifications did she bring to the table? Why should anyone have voted for her? Why did she earn Trump's endorsement? Apparently, the answer to all of those questions was that she's the sister of the gay Republican who just died. 

This was one of the most crucial races in the country, and the strategy was to run a woman with no political experience and no political skills and no resume of any kind, on the theory that voters would support her because she's the sister of the last guy they had in office. A staggeringly stupid strategy. And that was the theme for Republicans across the country. A lot of staggeringly stupid strategies, and all of them blew up exactly as any reasonable person would have expected. 

To be clear, I'm not defending anyone who voted for the Democrat candidates on Tuesday. What we saw was not a rational response, no matter how much time you spend trying to make sense of it. No matter what you think of how the Trump administration and the Republican majority in Congress handled the past two years, there is still no conceivable justification for electing Democrats to replace them. 

The party that wants to eliminate the fossil fuel industry is not going to lower your gas prices. The party that wants to flood the nation with millions of foreigners is not going to make the job market any less competitive, or the housing market any cheaper. The party that wants to imprison its political opponents and nationalize companies like SpaceX because they don't like Elon Musk is not going to grow the economy — they're going to destroy it. 

Any Republican who voted for a Democrat Tuesday as some kind of protest vote made a horrifically idiotic decision that cannot be justified either morally or strategically. You cannot, under any circumstances, willingly hand power over to people who hate you and your family and your country and seek to destroy all three. 

None of that actually matters in the end, practically speaking, because voters who are disaffected and frustrated — with good reason — are going to punish the incumbents, every single time. Many of them will stay home and passively allow the revolution to take place. We've seen that many times throughout history. 

Therefore, our elected leaders have an obligation to govern with competence, restraint, and purpose. Instead of simply talking about a "golden age" as they impose massive tariffs that destroy everyone's 401(k), they should lower taxes across the board, eliminate regulations, and reduce the deficit. 

Instead of talking about ballrooms, or Sean Hannity's paycheck, or the asses of various Republican politicians, our leaders are supposed to empathize — or at least pretend to empathize — with what life is like for average Americans. It's one thing to say "No tax on tips." But when you start a war that makes the waiter's gas more expensive, and you impose tariffs that make his toddler's clothes more expensive, and when you spend so much that interest rates have to remain so high that he can't afford his home (or pay off his debts), he's not going to vote for you. 

Even if he resents everything the Democrats stand for, he's going to stay home on Election Day. I'm not saying what I think he should do. I'm telling you what he will do. And did, in fact, do. And that's just the way it goes. 

This chart is from the financial firm Raymond James:

You can see how Trump's approval rating maps almost perfectly onto gas prices. It's precisely inverted. As gas prices went up, Trump's approval rating went down. It's a reminder that, sometimes, politics isn't that complicated.  Sometimes being a bad politician has consequences. Do we need to do a 5-hour-long deep dive to elaborate on that point? Probably not. 

When a guy has to spend $100 to fill up his truck on his way to work, you're going to have an extremely hard time convincing him to vote for you. Another way to look at it: It's hard to get someone to vote for you when he can barely afford the gas it takes to get to the polls in the first place. 

That's why it is unbelievably reckless to make a decision — like launching a war with Iran — that you know will directly raise gas prices. You are doing something that is guaranteed — not maybe, guaranteed — to piss off an overwhelming majority of voters, because it will make their lives worse and more difficult in a measurable and immediate way. 

So if you're going to do it, if you're going to not just play with fire but play in fire — throw yourself into the flames, in an act of political self-immolation — you'd better have a very, very compelling reason that you are able to articulate in an extremely clear and persuasive way. 

But the Trump Administration never presented anything approaching a compelling, articulate, or clear argument for the Iran War. Instead, they vaguely said it was about destroying a nuclear program that they had previously told us had already been destroyed. They said it would be quick and painless and over before we knew it. 

Much like Trump's "two weeks to slow the spread," the quick and painless war has dragged on indefinitely. So this is the worst of all worlds. You have done a thing which has had the immediate effect of — among other things — raising gas prices, while at the same time being increasingly vague and uncertain and ambiguous about why you're doing it, what the point is, what the objective is, and what the end game is. And then you got crushed in the midterms. 

Acting surprised about the result is like acting surprised that you totaled your car after deliberately driving it into a brick wall at 75 miles an hour. 

What we needed was an administration with some sense of stakes, and some sense of purpose. And we probably needed to take some extreme and out-of-the-box measures. Instead of importing a handful of refugees from South Africa, maybe we should've beaten the Democrats at their own game. Open the floodgates from Poland and Hungary. Flood the zone with Right-wing voters to counteract what Democrats have been doing for generations. 

Make a serious attempt at turning California red, just as they turned Texas blue. They want to make America a minority-white country, very deliberately, and we're ruled by Republicans who are too afraid to even say what's happening, much less do anything about it. 

We needed low taxes across the board. We needed dramatically lower spending — which admittedly would've required some cooperation from Congress. Instead, Republicans in Congress blocked the president at almost every available opportunity. We needed no more wars — especially since, according to exit polls Tuesday, "74% of voters said the Iran war was a crucial or major factor in their vote," and "62% of those voters sided with Democrats in the election." 

Instead, we bombed Iran on the theory that Iranians would rise up in the streets, overthrow their government, and build a thriving pro-American democracy in the Middle East. That was Trump's explicit promise, the night he announced that the war had begun. 

When that never happened, we just kept bombing. Americans never got an explanation for any of that. Were we tricked by Israel? Did Israeli intelligence tell us that Iranians would rise up? If so, why exactly did we believe them? 

We've been governed by Republicans who appear to have no interest in actually governing — or holding onto power for very long. So we never got any answers. We've been treated with maximum contempt. 

Meanwhile, everything Democrats have been doing — all of it — has been directed towards gaining power and destroying their political opponents. That's why Democrats have been mocking Charlie Kirk's assassination from the moment it happened. 

Instead of being punished for it, they've been rewarded. Killing Charlie Kirk helped them. All of the Democrats who celebrated Charlie Kirk's death did not deter any voters from supporting Democrats. If anything, it encouraged them. This is the norm in the third world. Now it's the norm in the United States. 

The lesson these people have drawn is that political assassinations work. So from their perspective, why not do more of them? 

If the government's not going to punish it with a ruthless and widespread campaign of arrests and prosecutions against not just the violent leftists but the networks that fund and facilitate them, and there won't even be any measurable political consequences, then what's to stop them? Why should they allow any conservative with a large platform to live? 

If they can kill us without any apparent downside, why not just pick us off one by one? Perhaps those are the dots they're currently connecting. And as a conservative with a large platform, I'm very aware of that possibility. 

 Meanwhile, in New Hampshire on Tuesday, a Turning Point USA volunteer was assaulted by a Leftist boomer — he was slapped in the face — simply for voicing his political opinion:

An 18-year-old stood his ground at the polls in New Hampshire today and was assaulted for it.

He stayed calm. The left got violent.

Don’t cede the ground, show up to the polls. Your vote helps us outnumber these people. pic.twitter.com/aX43b5EFIT

— Turning Point Action (@TPAction) November 3, 2026

Again, nothing happened to this guy. He knew the Republican volunteer wasn't going to fight back. He knew the police weren't going to arrest him. Leftists — and only Leftists — operate with total impunity in our political system. They're mobsters. They can get away with anything. And they know it.  They're already planning their next wave of lawfare and political prosecutions.

LAWYER UP.

— Congressman Robert Garcia (@RepRobertGarcia) November 4, 2026

LAWYER UP.

As I said, we're turning into Brazil. When you lose an election, you get thrown in jail. You have to flee the country. We've been on this trajectory for a decade, and now it's a fundamental part of our political system. The loser goes to prison. 

If we're going to recover from this and reclaim a semblance of the country we used to have, we need to look ahead to the future of the Republican Party. This isn't going to be easy for a lot of Trump supporters to come to grips with, but it's true. 

For the last 11 years, Donald Trump has shaped this country in a more meaningful way than any other modern political figure. That chapter is coming to an end. Trump is an extremely unpopular 80-year-old lame duck with no credibility with the voters, no future, and now no real power. 

Even if Republicans had won, that would still be mostly true, at least in the long term. Trump has defined the party and the conservative movement for a decade. That is now over. It has to be. The person setting the course for your movement for the next decade cannot be an 80-year-old unpopular politician who will be out of office permanently in two years. It doesn't matter how much you like Trump. That's just a fact. 

The country is radically different from what it was before he rose. This means there is going to be a huge battle for the future of our party. And as of today, it's fully underway. Ron DeSantis is blaming the defeat entirely on the war in Iran, perhaps as a way of distinguishing himself from JD Vance. And he's not necessarily wrong to do so. Expect to see other Republicans, like Marco Rubio, come up with their own rationales.

The direction the party should go is obvious. Many Republicans voted Tuesday, but they were motivated by the sheer awfulness of the Democratic lunatics. We need a Republican Party that people are excited to vote for — not a party that's a lesser of two evils. 

The best sales pitch you could give for Republicans heading into the midterms — and the one I did give — was that even if Republicans haven't done much, at least they aren't anti-American, anti-white communists who want to kill you and your family. And that pitch is true. It's also the only available pitch. 

I would have liked to say that the Republican Congress has done a tremendous job and achieved many tangible and measurable things for the American people, but that would require me to lie, and I won't do that. So we were left only with "Vote for Republicans — they suck, but the other guys suck a lot more." And that pitch, which is the only one we can give, just isn't all that compelling.

The fact is that when the Republicans are a minority, they vote like conservatives. When they're the majority, they do nothing at all. Voters were sick of that in 2015, and that's why they nominated Donald Trump. Voters are sick of that in 2026, and that's why many of Trump's voters didn't show up for Republicans. Why would they? 

They passed nothing. They were consumed with infighting. They slow-rolled many of Trump's own nominations. They even failed to pass basic, universally popular reforms like the SAVE Act, which had the support of 90% of voters. It was a straightforward way to reduce voter fraud. It would have just required ID when you registered to vote. But Republicans didn't want to abolish the filibuster to pass it — supposedly because they were worried about protecting the "traditions of the Senate." 

Do you think Democrats are going to care about honoring the "traditions of the Senate"? How many "traditions" or "norms" do you think will be left standing in 2030 if Democrats have control of Congress and the presidency? 

You're dealing with an opposition that not only doesn't care about traditions, but actively seeks to erase them. These are the people who tear down statues of the Founding Fathers. Do you think they'll have any compunction about violating "congressional norms"? To be a viable political party, you cannot simply "oppose" the other side. You must learn to govern. That means securing some meaningful victories.

One of the reasons Congress does very little to support Trump's conservative agenda is that they don't support it, especially in the Senate. Many of these people will rush to tell us that Trump's stances on immigration and DEI are an aberration — that the party must go back to what it was in 2014: a party of free markets, open borders, and foreign wars. The party of Reagan. 

The thing is, the Party of Reagan worked in 1980. It does not work in 2026 — in part because Reagan granted amnesty to millions of foreigners. And for the same reason, it won't work in 2028. And unless Republicans in Congress realize this — or, more accurately, until we start electing Republicans in Congress who realize this — there can be no successful "America First" agenda.

So what should the future Republican Party focus on? Exit polling showed domestic issues like inflation and the economy were hugely important. It's hard to imagine what this would be like had the Iran War not happened — had Trump kept his promise to be a peacetime president. But if you watch videos of young voters explaining their decisions, it becomes pretty obvious what our messaging should be, going forward:

This is what happens when you randomly slap tariffs on everything, then start a war. Prices go up. And especially for young people, even a small increase in the cost of living can be devastating. And when these young people complained about it, Trump told them to shut up and look at his ballroom. It's obscene. 

I'm not going to pretend that Donald Trump didn't have any major victories. He reformed the food stamps program, which is easily one of the most corrupt and fraudulent government programs in existence. He used the military to drop crime in D.C. and Memphis, all without the help of Congress. 

At the same time, the unfortunate reality is that, in democracies, you can be a victim of your own success. By closing the open border and getting crossings down to zero, Trump motivated a lot of Leftists to take to the streets and organize. He also neutralized one of his biggest issues in the eyes of Republicans. That was a major domestic policy achievement. It may have saved the country, at least temporarily. But it ultimately hurt him politically. 

That's not to say good governance is pointless. Some states — Florida, for example — show that consistent good governance over a number of years can transform a state. Florida was one of the few bright spots for Republicans (barely). 

Florida was able to weather the storm in part because, among the foreigners who live there, many of them are anti-communists from places like Cuba. And many of the domestic transplants have fled from the destruction of liberal policies in places like New York and California. But in addition to the demographics, Ron DeSantis has done a good job making Florida a relatively affordable, safe place to live. And that matters to voters, even in a terrible election year.

This level of focus has not been found in other states. Republicans in Texas were no more focused than Trump has been. What mattered for voters in that state was the fact that Democrats were promising to get rid of the tariffs and stop deporting their friends and family members. The deportations were good and needed to happen — and should have happened even more than they did — but because Republicans never made a compelling case for why we need the tariffs, or why we need the deportations, that messaging from Democrats won:

Texas homebuilder is voting Talarico because ICE raids are deporting the cheap labor he uses to build his shoddy houses.

By staying home, you're allowing this to win. pic.twitter.com/FGHF4zHCrv

— johnny maga (@johnnymaga) November 3, 2026

The Trump administration made no effort to arrest business owners who employed illegals, so they feel comfortable going on camera and bragging about doing it. It's incredible to watch. That's the really remarkable thing about the Trump administration — they weren't even 1/10th as aggressive as the Democrats pretended they were. And they might as well have gone all the way, because in the end, they got blamed for everything anyway.

After what happened on Tuesday, to borrow a cliché, America is in a time for choosing. Things are changing faster than ever before. Not just politically, but technologically and culturally. Everything is shifting — quickly and permanently. 

America is in a period of transition comparable to the 1960s and the 1860s. And the GOP's role needs to be representing the interests of legacy Americans, promoting sanity, Christianity, the supremacy of Western civilization, and building on Trump's successes while digging ourselves out of the holes created by his failures. 

That means focusing on social issues, promoting the family, putting America and Americans first, and a foreign policy grounded in serving the country's actual interests. They also need to have answers for the major, Earth-shattering changes that are coming in the future and, to a large extent, have already arrived. 

The issue of AI may not have shown up very prominently in the exit polls, but I will tell you right now that in 2028, it will. AI has already begun swallowing up entire industries and thousands of jobs along with them. 

Over the next couple of years, that process will hit warp speed. There's already a major backlash brewing across the country against the data centers that these trillion-dollar Big Tech companies are plopping in the middle of communities, while offering no compensation or incentive to the people who live in those communities. The anger and resentment over job losses will only grow exponentially. 

The Republican Party must take this seriously and have a plan. But so far — in a way that perfectly illustrates and encapsulates the mind-bogglingly out-of-touch messaging that got us destroyed — Trump's only answer to the AI issue is to insist on giving it a fun new name. 

For Trump, the only thing we have to do with AI, or about it, is call it SI (superintelligence). If Trump complains about the AI issue, it's only to whine that the media isn't using the nickname he came up with. Ask yourself: how many voters, as a percentage, care about renaming AI to SI? Out of all the voters who have anxieties about AI, how many of them have anxieties that can be addressed by changing the first letter in the initial? The answer to that question is exactly zero percent. 

The Republicans aren't just ignoring a major issue that will become one of the defining issues of our time. They are homing in on the least relevant, most inconsequential, most infinitesimally insignificant aspect of that issue. That is actually worse than simply ignoring it entirely. 

Maybe you think that there are no regulations or restrictions we can or should put on these AI companies. Maybe you think that it's actually good that AI is going to wipe out thousands of jobs. I disagree with both points. Whatever you think about it, whatever your opinion, the point is that this is an enormously important issue and a source of deep and justified anxiety for regular Americans, and you need to have some kind of answer, some kind of plan, some kind of strategy.

Republicans had none. Trump had none. And that was the pattern and theme for this election. If you have no answer and no plan, then your party has no future, and shouldn't have a future. 

This is the situation we're facing. It is dire. Even catastrophic. The loss on Tuesday was considerably worse than even I expected, and I expected it to be very bad. There is no way around it. There is no positive spin. 

The simple fact of the matter is that it may very well have been merely the prelude to the even more disastrous losses that will soon follow. All of that is true. And we have to be honest and face it with moral courage and intellectual integrity. 

Does it mean that our situation is hopeless? Are we doomed? No. God is still in control. There's no reason to fall into despair over what happened on Tuesday. Democrats are still underwater in approval polls. They're not popular. 

This is a rejection of an old and fading president more than an affirmation of Democrats. Things can change very quickly. Just two years ago, this was a supposed "golden age," and everyone was talking about how great things were going to be. A lot more could change in the next two years. 

There are lots of omens, but you can't predict the future with certainty. And instead of trying to, we should do everything in our power to undo the damage our leaders have done to this country, and present an actual agenda that will make life better for Americans — not foreigners in the Middle East or anywhere else. That's the agenda that got Trump elected in the first place. 

The "America First" principles are the reason he rose to power. The fact that he forgot about them doesn't mean voters did. 

In two years, those same voters will perhaps see a country ravaged by incompetent socialist Democrats, and they'll be looking for a candidate who genuinely cares about those principles. 

Sometime between now and 2028, we need to do what our leaders have failed to do. We need to rally around America First principles. We need to put our nation and its people first — always and in all cases. 

We need to promote a vision for the country that speaks to regular people and is concerned with their well-being and their flourishing. 

If there is any way forward for conservatism, and for the country itself — and there must be — then that is it. We need to be America First and always. And we need to win.

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