“I Hate My Fucking Life Right Now”: A Night Out With DC Republicans as the Blue Wave Crashed Down

It’s not easy to throw an election night party in Washington when your side is bracing for a wipeout. But at Butterworth’s, the bistro that has been a hub of MAGA Washington in Donald Trump’s second term, the DC Republicans were intent on trying. Women in business casual and men in the party uniform—blue suits, white shirts, and red ties taut to the collar—drank specialty cocktails including “The Elephant in the Room” and “The Senate Majority Martini.” The bar might have been busy, but the mood was precarious. As Dua Lipa blasted from the speakers inside, a man on a smoke break out on the street took big gulps of a pint of lager and stared down at his phone. “Darline Graham just plummeted on Polymarket,” he said, exhaling from his cigarette. “I hate my fucking life right now. Everything just sucks. Jesus Christ, we’re gonna lose it all.” A car drove past Butterworth’s with the windows down. A woman leaning out of an open window screamed, “Oh yeah, Democrats!”

Inside, at first, revelers were upbeat. It was early enough that the rising of the blue tide had yet to inspire fear—to an extent. A man waiting for drinks at the bar monitored the results in Florida, one of the few bright spots for Republicans. When informed that Senate candidate Ken Paxton and incumbent governor Greg Abbott were down bad in Texas, he clutched his head dramatically. “Oh my God! I just got here. I need to go home.” He looked at his phone in anguish. Within minutes, he darted for the door. A White House staffer wearing a red hat emblazoned with “45/47” on the side and “WINNING” on the front made the rounds. “Optimistic? I was a lot more earlier,” he said. “If we lose Texas, it’s a catastrophe.” Minutes later, Decision Desk called Texas for James Talarico, the first Democrat to be elected to the Senate in the Lone Star State since 1988.

As Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” blared through the speakers, two men at the bar lamented the cruel irony of the song playing as Talarico’s comfortable lead expanded over Paxton, his Republican challenger.

“I’m not trying to crash out,” said one of the men, a Republican volunteer. “But we nominated Hitler with Down syndrome. And guess what?! He lost! He lost! And now we lose a Supreme Court justice. It is a fucking disaster.”

The mood at Paxton’s watch party down in Dallas was not upbeat.

Adam Gray/Getty Images

It was a fucking disaster indeed. Republicans lost almost every Senate seat that mattered, with the small consolation of Florida quickly washed away by the titanic loss of South Carolina. Trump had spent the election telling voters, “Pretend that I’m on the ballot.” By all measures, they had. By 10:40 p.m., Trump offered his verdict on the night: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Trump only has himself to blame for the Republican wipeout. The executive decisions that have defined his second administration were like something cooked up in #Resistance laboratories to alienate the vast majority of Americans from his political project. The candidates he backed in these midterm elections, against the wishes of the Republican establishment, are those who wiped out the hardest. Darline Graham, the political-neophyte sister of the late senator Lindsey Graham, lost to Democrat Annie Andrews in South Carolina. Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general whom Trump backed in the primary against incumbent senator John Cornyn, lost to young Democrat James Talarico.

“We got SMOKED. BIGLY,” one source close to Trump texted me. “He’s not the kingmaker he was, or still thinks he is. This is a referendum on him.”

In the 1994 midterms, when Bill Clinton’s presidency was bludgeoned half to death by the Newt Gingrich revolution, The New Yorker’s Michael Kelly described the punch-drunk shock inside the White House. “No one can be expected to grasp immediately the full implications of being struck between the eyes by a two-by-four,” he wrote in the wake of the Gingrichian curb stomp, “so it was not surprising that the initial White House response to what had happened, and why it had happened, contained an element of stunned denial.”

The train that flattened Trump and Republicans this year had been barreling down the track for some time. No one could claim to be blindsided. Never in history has a party tethered itself so helplessly to one man, much less such a historically unpopular one. In December of last year, The Washington Post reported that Vice President JD Vance invited a conservative pollster to the White House to deliver an urgent message to the president: Americans don’t feel like you are fighting for them, Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports explained as Trump ate a crab cake lunch. Mitchell urged him to focus on a message of “pragmatic economic populism.”

Trump ignored all that. Soon after the meeting, he started a war with Iran that triggered a global energy shock and by one study’s estimate has cost the average American household $2,000. “The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least,” pro-Trump pundit Matt Walsh wrote on X. “A catastrophically stupid decision. An unforgivable betrayal of America First principles.”

A year after the calamity he dubbed “Liberation Day,” Trump conjured up a new plot to liberate Americans from economic security: an escalated trade war with Canada that battered states in the upper Midwest that Republicans needed to hold the Senate. All the while, the president dismissed concerns about the cost of living in his public statements. He referred to “affordability” as a hoax, and fixated on lavish renovation projects, like the $600 million ballroom and the messy renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The pool, of all things, ended up anchoring Trump’s closing argument. In a press conference held there on Monday, Trump spent more than 20 minutes regaling reporters with war stories from his summer campaign against algae. “They’re brand-new pipes put in, and the pipes being very important in terms of the algae and other things,” he said sternly, brandishing a poster board with photos of the pool base. The next day, gasoline and diesel prices hit their highest national average in history. The president’s approval ratings sat firmly at a record bottom. “I don’t think Trump cares,” said the source close to Trump.

The scene at soon-to-be House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries’s watch party was starkly different.

Tom Williams/Getty Images

The White House line on these elections is that Trump did all he could to help the party, holding a blitz of rallies in the run-up to Election Day and deploying more than $350 million of his sizable MAGA Inc. war chest to boost Republican candidates. The money might have helped, but it isn’t clear that the rallying did. Trump’s unpopularity is now seismic, and there’s a growing feeling that his movement, after a decade of dominating the frontal lobe of the American mind, is petering out. Even the president’s very generous offer to every American—$5,000 each if Republicans held both chambers of Congress—didn’t seem to sway our particularly plutomanic populace. Seventy-one percent of Americans, according to one poll, said they didn’t believe they would ever receive the money.

Trump’s approval among young men, a key voting bloc that ensured his return to power, has plummeted, and popular podcasters who cater to a younger audience have abandoned him. CNN’s exit poll on Election Day found Democrats won young white men by 17 points, two years after Trump won the same group by 28 points. “We all have to move to Florida,” said a dejected young Republican wearing a tie covered in elephants at Butterworth’s. “It’s a disaster.” Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” was blasting.

Around 20 minutes north, at Metrobar, a few hundred Democrats assembled in the garden for a victory party. Emerging from a taxi, I was met with the roar of the crowd. NBC News had just announced that Democrats had won the Senate. As Steve Kornacki broke down the results from Ohio on a jumbotron erected in the garden of the bar, the crowd chanted, “USA!”

Michelle Meoh, a young Democratic volunteer, told me the night had gone “extremely well” for her party. “Basically every race, even races that I hadn’t thought would go in our favor, were wins.” What does she want Democrats to do with their newfound power? “I guess show that we’re worthy of the trust that the voters are placing in us. I want us to prove that we’re tapped into the feelings of ordinary Americans and that we really do feel their pain. And that we don’t take that support for granted.”

Two burly men embraced. “Susan Collins is fucking gone!” one shouted.

I made my way to the exit as the hysterical celebrations died down, and Kornacki on the jumbotron read the latest results in Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed held a narrow lead over Republican Mike Rogers. “How am I feeling?!” asked a visibly overserved woman. I hadn’t asked. “Fucking great!”

This story has been updated.

Tails from the Trail: The 2026 Midterms