Republicans were expecting hard-fought races in California, but thought they would prevail, reports Politico.
That's not what happened. Democrats flipped seven seats in the nation's largest state, a big chunk of their approximately 40 total.
“We never had any indication, any poll, that we’d see anything close to the margin we got,” said Matt Rexroad, a Republican consultant who worked on the losing campaign of Rep. Steve Knight (R-Calif.).
Knight's loss was one of the races Politico describes as "nasty midterm shocks."
"The nightmare results were the end result of a toxic brew of overconfidence and presidential unpopularity, as some Republicans failed to recognize and reckon with the unprecedented negative reaction to President Donald Trump," the report reads.
What's wore for the GOP, "while Republicans agree they’ve witnessed a wipeout" which one national Republican called “a nuclear political holocaust” they are still fighting about why, with some refusing to acknowledge that Trump's deep unpopularity in the state was a factor.
The Republicans who remain loyal to Trump blame Democratic spending for the losses in district's Hillary Clinton carried
“What we didn’t anticipate was the money tidal wave, and it’s pretty clear to me that the billionaires run the Democratic Party,” said one Republican.
Democrats in the state say Trump is the issue.
“If you were running for dogcatcher in Orange County – or in a lot of places in California – and you had an ‘R’ next to your name on the ballot, you lost,” said Andrew Acosta, a Democratic consultant in the state. “It was Trump. Trump created this. There wasn’t much Republicans could do to stop it.”