Trump’s biggest gambles backfired. There’s only one option if the Republican party wants to avoid another country ass whoopin’ in 2028: SCOTT JENNINGS

There’s an academic term for what happened to Republicans on Tuesday night: ‘a country ass whoopin.’

I’m a Republican. I wanted my party to win. But respecting the voters means respecting their verdict, even when it hurts, and this one ought to command the attention of every Republican in Washington, including President Donald Trump.

The next presidential election will be an open contest and we do not yet know who will carry the Republican banner.

Whoever wants that nomination should be studying this defeat. The next nominee will have to explain what Republicans learned on Tuesday, what they changed as a result and why Americans, especially independent voters, should trust them again.

It starts with the cost of living. In CNN’s exit poll, about three-quarters of voters rated the economy negatively. Six in ten were very concerned about gasoline and diesel prices. Similar numbers were worried about groceries and health care. Voters were more than twice as likely to say their family finances had gotten worse rather than better.

That is not because Republicans had no record to run on. The US economy grew at a 3.4 percent annualized rate in the third quarter, up from 2.2 percent in the second. Manufacturing expanded for a tenth consecutive month in October, with new orders, production and employment all growing. Violent crime has fallen. Provisional estimates show overdose deaths declining. And Trump closed the border, as promised, which means safer neighborhoods and fewer families burying loved ones. Sustaining those gains, long after the campaign commercials stop, matters.

But voters can recognize progress in one part of their lives while demanding relief in another. A safer community does not make filling the tank cheaper. An expanding manufacturing sector does not erase the grocery bill.

The price at the pump is America’s scoreboard. You see it driving to work. You feel it every time you drive your children to school. When the number goes up, people assume something is wrong, and no amount of good news elsewhere changes what the sign says.

Here is the simplest explanation for Tuesday: the costs of the president’s biggest gambles arrived before the benefits he promised. Call it the timing gap. Tariffs and the war with Iran have imposed real economic and political costs, and Trump knew they would. He accepted that risk because he believed a stronger industrial base and a more secure world were worth it. He may yet be proven right. But the bill came due first.

Audi’s proposed $4 billion plant in Georgia, expected to create roughly 4,500 jobs, is exactly the kind of investment Trump promised his trade policies would attract, and reported negotiations over tariff relief show how he hopes to turn access to the American market into leverage for American production. Production, though, is not expected until the early 2030s. A family paying more for goods today cannot cash a paycheck from a factory that has yet to open.

Iran is the more consequential test. Iran’s military has been shattered, its economy wrecked and its currency tanked. Oil is flowing out of the Middle East at higher volumes than before the war began. The naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has worked. By any reasonable measure, that is a victory. Yet most Americans still experience the conflict as open-ended, because no one has told them it is over. The White House has not declared the win it has every right to claim.

The question all year was whether the president could turn the sacrifices Americans have made into benefits they can recognize, and how long they were willing to wait. Tuesday’s answer was that their patience has limits, no matter the righteousness of the mission.

The exit polls carried one more message: roughly seven in ten voters said Congress was not doing enough to restrain the president. It turns out Americans like checks and balances. Republican lawmakers cannot claim credit for everything a president from their party accomplishes and then plead helplessness when voters dislike the results. If policies need changing, Congress has its own authority, and its own obligation, to help change them.

Republicans also need to study the people who survived. Start with Florida Governor-elect Byron Donalds. Florida was hardly immune to the Democratic surge, and Republican congressional ambitions there suffered setbacks despite favorable redistricting. Donalds nevertheless won the governorship and will become the first elected black Republican governor in American history. 

On a night when the Republican label was a liability across much of the country, he persuaded Floridians to renew Republican leadership of their state, building on the governing record Ron DeSantis handed him. The lesson: Sustained confidence in how a state is governed can carry a candidate through a hostile national environment.

Kelly Ayotte won re-election as governor in New Hampshire, and her governing identity deserves study, too.

Arkansas has two formidable figures in Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who now has another term to build her record, and Senator Tom Cotton, who remains a consequential voice on national security and the party’s direction. Beyond the national figures everyone already knows, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio among them, these are the leaders who earned the confidence of their own constituents on a very bad night. The next presidential contest will require that skill.

And to Republicans licking their wounds, remember 2010. Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats. Obama called it a shellacking. Two years later, he won re-election. Fortunes change dramatically between a midterm and a presidential election, and they can change again.

Which brings us back to Trump, and to the question of what he wants to do with the two years he has left.

Facing large Democratic majorities, he will have to decide where to fight and where to negotiate. He retains the veto and the powers of the presidency. Democrats will have the votes to block his legislative ambitions.

There will be investigations, confrontations and provocations. But the way to close the timing gap is to put points on the board that voters can see. Energy permitting reform, the farm bill and the National Defense Authorization Act could all be done in the lame-duck session, and each would deliver something real.

Democrats face a corresponding test, and they should exercise some humility about what they have won. Americans can be furious with Republicans without being enamored with Democrats. A voter who wants to punish the party in power has only one practical place to go, and casting that ballot does not mean he has endorsed every policy the opposition might pursue. 

‘It’s Trump’s fault’ was an effective campaign argument. It is insufficient as a governing agenda. If Trump offers a workable agreement that would materially improve Americans’ lives, will Democrats take it? Or will they reject anything coming from him as illegitimate, as has been their mantra for nearly a decade?

Trump has always presented himself as a dealmaker. His final two years may be his most demanding test.

Republicans earned this rebuke. Democrats now share responsibility for what happens next. Neither party should mistake the American people’s willingness to change their votes for a willingness to wait forever.