Many in President Donald Trump’s orbit braced for a brutal midterm night Tuesday, but Democrats’ landslide outstripped even their grimmest predictions, multiple insiders told Zeteo.
“That was worse than we imagined,” a senior Trump administration official told Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng “in the middle of the night,” speaking on condition of anonymity.
Democrats are projected to secure at least 258 seats in the House, an overwhelming majority not seen in more than 30 years, outside a brief period in 2009 that lasted less than two months. Democrats are also projected to reclaim control of the Senate, something thought near-impossible mere months ago.
Countless Republican operatives, donors and Trump administration officials described Tuesday night as a “bloodbath,” with one Trump adviser telling Zeteo it was an “utter bloodbath.” Several others told the outlet they had steeled themselves for a rough night and were still floored by the scale of the rout.
“Trump’s party lumbered into election night knowing it would be bad, perhaps even really, very bad. But many of these Republicans, as they told us as the clock ran well past midnight, were not predicting Tuesday’s midterms would be this titanic of a disaster for the Republican Party,” Zeteo’s report reads.
“For instance, several of them told us their worst-case scenarios for Tuesday did not involve Texas swinging as hard toward the Democrats as the GOP stronghold did on Election Night. In Ohio — another red state that swung for Trump three times in a row — highly pissed-off voters sent Democrat Sherrod Brown back to the U.S. Senate… and elected its first Dem governor, Amy Acton, in two decades.”
The losses leave Trump facing a Democratic-controlled Congress for the final two years of his presidency — one poised to stall his legislative agenda. Early exit polls showed Trump’s approval rating at 38%, with about 60% of voters saying the president factored into their House vote, CBS News reported.