The Guilty Without Names - How Republicans Explain Their Defeats Without Looking at the Man in the Mirror

Washington - It was a day of speechlessness, a day of excuses and evasions. Hardly were the votes in Virginia and New Jersey counted when the feverish search for culprits began within the Republican Party - and ended, as so often, in front of a mirror no one dared to look into. The headlines were devastating, the numbers clear, the mood icy. Yet the name that hung over everything like a sword of Damocles was never spoken: Donald Trump. The president’s party stumbled through Wednesday like a boxer after a knockout. Speaker Mike Johnson tried to rally the ranks with platitudes and declared New York’s newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani - a 34-year-old Democrat - the “new face” of the Democratic Party. In chat groups, campaign managers raged about their own candidates who should never have been nominated. Others cursed stingy donors. Still others blamed the Democrats for the government paralysis that has gripped the country for weeks. But no one dared to look for responsibility where it truly belongs - at the center of power, in the Oval Office.

Donald Trump himself seemed surprisingly calm that morning. At a breakfast with party leaders, he said, half mockingly, half self-satisfied, “They say I wasn’t on the ballot, but I was the biggest factor. I don’t know if that’s true. But I’m honored they say it.” The sentence was telling. It was the admission of a man who knows that everything revolves around him - even the defeats.

In Virginia, Democrats celebrated a result not seen by any gubernatorial candidate in more than sixty years. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and moderate in tone, won by a historic margin. In the suburbs, once Republican strongholds, they lost thirteen seats in the House of Delegates. An entire generation of conservative politicians was swept away in one night. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot, won with a 26 percent increase over her 2021 result. The break was especially stark in cities with large Hispanic populations: in Perth Amboy, where Trump narrowly lost in 2024, Sherrill now took a 50-point lead.

The causes are plain to see. A president with an approval rating of 37 percent. A country paralyzed by a government shutdown. An economic narrative no one believes anymore. And a party that shackles itself because it does not dare to criticize its own leader. Those who distance themselves from Trump risk the wrath of his base - those who remain loyal lose the center. So simple, so fatal. Republican George Allen, once governor of Virginia, put it bluntly: “The independent voters of our state were clearly against Trump - for many reasons. And then came a historically bad campaign on top of that.” In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli failed because of his proximity to a president who had cut funding for the state’s most important commuter rail tunnel out of the federal budget - a symbolic slap at all those who travel daily between Newark and Manhattan.

Trump himself did little to help his candidates in these campaigns. No major rallies, no fundraising dinners, hardly any public appearances. Instead, brief phone calls from the presidential jet, filled with vague promises and distant niceties. He didn’t even mention the name of his own gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Winsome Earle-Sears, in his supposed “endorsement.” In party headquarters, officials tried to simulate structure. Strategists pointed to the coming midterm cycle, which on paper favored the Republicans. Thanks to new redistricting, they might retain the House of Representatives. And in the Senate, they noted, 20 of the 22 Republican seats were in states Trump won in 2024 by double digits. Yet even optimistic planners admit: the math won’t help if the political magnet divides its own base.

Ronna McDaniel, once chair of the Republican National Committee, said openly what many whisper privately: “Without the MAGA voters, no one can win. You’ll never get them all, but if a large part stays home, it’s over.” The problem: the stronger Trump dominates, the more stay home who once formed the backbone of the party - moderate conservatives, middle-class women, business owners who want stability instead of chaos.

While Governor Glenn Youngkin in Richmond lamented the consequences of the budget impasse and Trump adviser Chris LaCivita dismissed Earle-Sears’s defeat as “the result of a weak candidate,” the party drifted further apart. Some call for an end to identity politics, others for more of it. Vivek Ramaswamy, trying to reinvent himself in Ohio as a mini-Trump, demanded in a video that Republicans finally focus on “affordability” - lowering costs, making life livable again. A conservative mantra that now sounds hollow.

Because, as right-wing radio host Erick Erickson dryly remarked, “Unfortunately, it’s the president, his base, and the MAGA-dominated institutions themselves that are pushing the very policies driving prices up - and they just can’t admit it.” So today the Republican Party resembles a ship that cannot criticize its own captain, even as he steers it into disaster. Mike Johnson, who as Speaker of the House should be offering a strategy, stuck to slogans on Wednesday. A Democratic Congress, he warned, would immediately impeach Trump again. “He doesn’t have four years - only two,” Johnson said. “In a sense, he himself is on the ballot.”

That may be true. But if Republicans continue to wallow in this self-inflicted paralysis, it won’t just be Trump on the ballot in the end - it will be the legacy of a party that has forgotten how to take responsibility.