Republicans return to Washington to sift through wreckage of midterms rout

With weeks left on the congressional calendar, House and Senate representatives have a host of issues they still need to tackle

On their first day back in the Capitol after comprehensive defeats in last week’s midterm elections, Republicans were divided into two camps: those who saw the catastrophe coming, and those who did not.

“I told you exactly what was going to happen. Over and over and over, I told you,” said West Virginia senator Jim Justice. “I said really and truly, if you weren’t concerned and you were a Republican, you were living in a cave. That was my exact words.”

“No one anticipated the magnitude,” said congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio. “I mean, you can’t tell me that the guy that ran as a Democrat for senator in Mississippi thought he was going to win.”

While Scott Colom hasn’t officially been declared the winner in Mississippi’s knife-edge US Senate race – a state that has not sent a Democratic to the chamber since 1982 – there was indeed plenty of evidence before the Tuesday vote that Republicans were in for it.

Not only does the party in power historically suffer defeats in midterm elections, but Donald Trump’s approval ratings had cratered with voters, even on issues that he had previously polled well on, while Democrats had surged in both special and off-year elections.

Nonetheless, few pollsters or political analysts were publicly forecasting the 54-seat Senate majority and 254-seat House majority Democrats won – both of which may expand even further as ballot counting continues.

“People are mad, and they have a right to be mad. They’re disappointed, and they feel like we haven’t delivered, and we deserve exactly what we got,” said Senator John Curtis of Utah. His state is deeply red, but last Tuesday Democrats managed to break the Republican supermajority in the state house of representatives by gaining at least 14 seats – a feat repeated in legislatures across the country.

For the past two years, Republican lawmakers have oscillated between either doing what Trump wants – they sprinted to pass his main domestic policy bill in time for last year’s 4 July independence day holiday – and standing aside, including when he’s taken actions that appear to fly in the face of Congress’s constitutional role.

That’s meant voting down efforts to end the war with Iran – which Congress did not authorize – as well as to repeal his tariffs. Last year, Republicans were tormented by a bipartisan rebellion over the investigation of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, before ultimately capitulating and voting to release documents that Trump has insinuated would come out if he was elected.

It all led up to the worst midterm a party had suffered since the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in 1974, and among Republicans, theories abounded as to where they’d lost the plot.

“Every election, at the end of the day, it’s a pocketbook issue,” said Glenn Thompson, the Pennsylvania Republican chairing the House agriculture committee. He insisted that brighter days were just ahead, “within months”, due to the “long-term success of the president’s policies”.

“Unfortunately, all those things are going to happen too late for this election,” Thompson said.

Davidson, the Ohio representative who is among a small group of House Republicans to have voted against the Iran war, said: “If we had delivered on those things that we campaigned on in 2024, we would have probably had a different election outcome.”

Asked to elaborate on what Republicans failed to accomplish, he said: “You can drill down on a number of things, but you know, it’s a mix. But I think a lot of people felt unheard, and they went out to make sure they got everyone’s attention.”

Missouri’s Republican senator Josh Hawley had an idea of something Republicans did wrong: slashing Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill and imperiling the finances of rural hospitals.

“Congress spent months talking about how we can cut Medicaid to the bone, and you know, simultaneously, as it turns out, they’re finding ways to fund data centers. Big mistake,” Hawley said.

An anti-abortion lawmaker and outspoken Christian, Hawley has announced an hour of fasting and prayer next month for people “worried about the direction of the country” under the incoming Democratic majority.

Congress still has a long to-do list to push through before the year ends and the new political configuration is cemented.

Government funding runs out on 11 December and must be extended, ideally through next September. A major defense policy bill remains unfinished, as does a long-delayed agricultural measure. All of this legislation will need buy-in from both parties to advance.

“The House will work. We will stay here around the clock if necessary,” the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, told reporters Monday evening, while calling the election results “a moment of sober reflection for us as a party”.

But first, House Republicans will have to deal with the unpalatable question of whether to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The resolution is the swan song of Thomas Massie, a Republican dissident who has been a thorn in Trump’s side for much of his second term, and lost his primary because of it.

There’s some in the GOP who say the party should think bigger – after all, who knows when they’ll be back in control of Congress under a Republican president. Perhaps they could push forward with another party-line bill on some policy like fighting fraud or funding defense, these lawmakers say.

The votes are technically there to do such things, but it’s unclear if the time is, because the House of Representatives is scheduled to wrap up on 17 December, and the Senate the day after. Democrats will probably do their utmost to resist the enactment of any further planks in Trump’s agenda, while members of their incoming majority are already circling – literally.

In the tunnels beneath the Capitol, Ohio’s once-and-future Democratic senator Sherrod Brown fielded questions from a mob of reporters, while Maine’s Troy Jackson, Texas’s James Talarico and New Hampshire’s Chris Pappas were spotted pushing their way through the throng outside the Senate chambers. All were on Capitol Hill for new member orientation.

Looking to pivot after voters gave him a thorough rebuke, Trump has said he’d like to work with Democrats on certain areas where he thinks there’s a deal to be done, though few in the party think he means what he says, particularly after he appointed immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as his chief of staff.

What can be accomplished under the soon-to-be sharply divided government was on the mind of veteran Texas senator John Cornyn, who is leaving office after Trump orchestrated his primary defeat in favor of Ken Paxton, only for Talarico to beat him.

“It’s going to be fascinating to watch,” the senator said, “from my TV.”