Lame duck in Washington, exposed in Port of Spain: the Republican collapse and the Government that bet on Trump

Kansas last sent a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1932. Texas last did so in 1988 and South Carolina in 1998. On Tuesday all three did it again.68 Democrats took seven Senate seats from the Republicans. Six were in states Donald Trump carried in 2024, four of them by more than 13 points.110

By early Wednesday the Senate stood at 54 seats for the Democrats and the two independents who sit with them, against 44 for the Republicans, with Alaska and Mississippi too close to call. In the House, NBC News had called 242 seats for the Democrats and 151 for the Republicans, with 42 still out; 35 Republican seats had changed hands, and one Democratic seat. Democrats also took the governorships of Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.132 These are projections from incomplete counts, not certified results, and the figures below will move.

The numbers come first here, because they are the story. Then come the consequences: a Republican Party that has spent forty-eight hours turning on itself, a war in Iran that the Vice President now blames for the defeat, a strike campaign in Caribbean waters that a Democratic Congress can now examine, and a Government in Port of Spain that tied this country's foreign policy to one American President and spent the past year telling its critics to keep out of American politics.

The map

Read state by state, the Senate result is a list of places Republicans did not think they had to defend. Adam Hamilton unseated Senator Roger Marshall in Kansas. Josh Turek beat Representative Ashley Hinson for an open seat in Iowa. Sherrod Brown beat Senator Jon Husted in Ohio's special election. Roy Cooper took North Carolina's open seat by almost 20 points, and Susan Collins lost the Maine seat Republicans had held for 30 years.5619 Chuck Schumer, who will lead the new majority, said voters had “reduced the red brick wall to a pile of bricks”.4

How deep the red ran

The clearest measure is the swing. In 2024 Trump won Texas by 13.7 points. On Tuesday James Talarico beat Ken Paxton by 12.1 with 99 per cent counted, a movement of 25.8 points in two years. South Carolina gave Trump a 17.9-point margin; Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham by 4.4, a swing of 22.3. Kansas, a 16.1-point Trump state, moved 21.1 points.1017 A presidential race and a Senate race are different contests with different candidates, so the comparison describes direction and scale rather than a like-for-like change. In six of the seven states where a seat changed hands, the Democrat ran at least 16 points ahead of Kamala Harris's 2024 margin. Maine, which Harris carried, was the exception.

Money did not hold the line either. Elon Musk spent at least $474 million on the midterms, $224 million of it in Texas, where CNBC linked his spending to Paxton and to Governor Greg Abbott. Both lost.132 Reuters reported that Trump's chosen Senate candidates in South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas and Michigan all lost.32

Generational seats

The BBC described Talarico's win and Gina Hinojosa's election as governor as the end of a string of Democratic defeats in Texas lasting almost two generations; Hinojosa becomes the first Latina governor of the state. Kansas elected its first Democratic senator in nearly a century.5 Iowa and North Carolina had last chosen a Democrat for the Senate in 2008.69 Seats like these are not lost to a bad candidate or a local scandal. They are lost when voters who have backed one party for most of their adult lives decide, together, to stop.

History made

The same night produced a run of firsts. Keisha Lance Bottoms is projected to become Georgia's first Black governor, its first woman governor and the first Black woman governor in American history. Abdul El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, beat Mike Rogers in Michigan to become the first Muslim elected to the Senate. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota is the first Native American woman elected to the Senate, and Deb Haaland in New Mexico becomes the first Native American woman governor. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire is the first openly gay man elected to the Senate, and Annie Andrews the first woman South Carolina has sent there. With Juliana Stratton's win in Illinois, three Black women will sit in the Senate at the same time for the first time.5960627061

The firsts crossed party lines. Byron Donalds, a Republican, becomes Florida's first Black governor; Aaron Ford in Nevada and David Crowley in Wisconsin are the first Black governors of their states; Amy Acton is the first woman elected governor of Ohio. Voters in 17 states elected a woman governor, a record, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, though the number of women in the Senate will fall in January.59606869 In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who is Yup'ik, would become the first Alaska Native senator if her lead holds.67

No Palestinian American was elected to the Senate or a governorship. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, won a fifth term in Michigan, and Muslim candidates won at least seven seats in Congress, among them Adam Hamawy, New Jersey's first Muslim member.6663 Below Congress, Aber Kawas became the first Palestinian American elected to New York's state legislature, and Ruwa Romman the first to sit in Georgia's state Senate.6465

These are the candidates, and the coalition, that the Prime Minister's statements in January 2025 set themselves against. American voters, she said then, were “fed up with woke far left, nonsensical policies that are based on the use of identity politics, moral superiority and division”.50 On Tuesday the same electorate chose the first Muslim senator, the first Native American woman senator and the first Black woman governor in the country's history.

The House: maps drawn to win, lost anyway

The House result carries the same signature. Among the Republicans defeated were Ann Wagner in Missouri, Victoria Spartz in Indiana, Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn in Iowa, Monica De La Cruz in Texas and David Valadao in California.11 Fitzpatrick was one of four Republicans who voted with Democrats in July for a measure calling for an end to the war in Iran. It did not save him.25

Several states redrew their congressional maps in the middle of the decade to add Republican seats. CNBC reported that a number of Democrats won in districts drawn “with the intention of easing the way for GOP candidates”.57 In Texas, Democrats held all four of their targeted seats and took two more, the 15th and the 23rd. In Florida they held the three seats the new map aimed at. In Ohio they held two targeted seats and flipped two Republican ones.12

The party turns

On Wednesday the bleakest assessment came from a Republican. “This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans,” said Ron DeSantis, the outgoing Governor of Florida, “in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.” He called the result “the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States, blue states, red states, everything in between”.1415 He was careful about blame: “This was not a positive view of the Democrats. This was a rejection of Republicans in Washington.” Of the ten largest states, he said, only Florida would be under Republican control in January.14

The Vice President went further, and named the cause. “The reason we lost is the war,” JD Vance wrote. “The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”17 Trump did not dispute it. “I think it's largely true, because [the Iran war] drove the gasoline up a little bit short-term,” he said, before adding: “If I had it to do again, I'd have to do it again.”18

The anger then found a narrower target. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican, told CNN he would force a vote to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when Congress returns next week, and several Republican sources told the network they expected it to pass. “It was completely avoidable,” Massie said of the defeat, “if they'd just broken out of the cultish following of Donald Trump.”20 Senator Thom Tillis called Hegseth “not the right guy for the job”.22 Marjorie Taylor Greene, who left the party in June, said Republicans would have to “kick Donald Trump out of the party”.23 CNN reported that Trump has been sounding out allies about Hegseth's performance, while his confidence in the Secretary “hasn't yet wavered”.20

It is an old pattern in Washington: when a war becomes a liability, the party looks first at the Cabinet secretary, not the President who ordered it. Massie's draft articles reach further than the Iran war. According to Roll Call, the eight articles allege violations of the War Powers Resolution in Iran, illegal campaigns in Venezuela, Yemen, the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, and disregard for the protection of civilians.21 Those are allegations in a draft resolution, not findings. They also put the Caribbean strike campaign into articles of impeachment drafted by a member of Trump's own party.

The war voters punished

The war began with American and Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February.26 By mid-October the Pentagon put its cost at $47.1 billion.28 By September petrol was up 45 per cent and diesel 66 per cent, and the Congressional Budget Office attributed more than 40 per cent of second-quarter inflation to the war.29 On Tuesday about six in ten voters told the AP Voter Poll that military action against Iran had been the wrong decision, and 43 per cent of voters in NBC's exit poll said one reason for their vote was to oppose Trump.1930 Republicans who broke with him did not escape: Susan Collins and Thom Tillis voted with Democrats in September to end the war, and Collins still lost her seat.241

There is also a legal record. In September a fact-finding mission established by the UN Human Rights Council found reasonable grounds to believe the United States had committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks, in strikes on a school in Minab and a sports complex in Lamerd. The White House replied that “the only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime”.2726 The mission's findings are investigative, not a judgment, and they bind no one. From January, though, the committees that can subpoena the people who chose those targets will be chaired by Democrats.

The Caribbean front

Closer to home, the strike campaign that began on 2 September 2025 had, by 27 October this year, reached 72 strikes and 243 people killed, 23 of them missing and presumed dead, with three known survivors.43 Two of the dead are believed to be Trinidadians: Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, of Las Cuevas, killed on 14 October 2025 when a missile struck their boat, according to a lawsuit their families filed in Massachusetts in January. The case is ongoing, and its account is the families' allegation.4445

The first strike already carries the question a new Congress is likeliest to ask. The Washington Post reported that a second strike that day killed two survivors clinging to the wreck, and that the commander was following an order from Hegseth to leave no survivors; Hegseth called the report fake news. The White House said Admiral Frank Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law”.4041 Even then, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, promised “vigorous oversight”, and Representative Mike Turner said the follow-up strike was “completely outside of anything that has been discussed with Congress”.42 In August, Hegseth himself warned that the International Criminal Court might investigate.46

Outside Washington the legal assessment was settled early. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said the strikes had killed people “in circumstances that find no justification in international law”.33 His office said none of those aboard appeared to pose “an imminent threat to the lives of others”.34 The EU's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said force was lawful only in self-defence or with a Security Council mandate.38 NBC News reported, citing two sources, that Britain stopped sharing intelligence on suspect boats over the legality of the strikes.39 In September the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism, Ben Saul, called them “serial extrajudicial killings in violation of the right to life”.35 None of these is a court ruling. Together they are the considered view of the UN's human rights system and of the European Union's most senior diplomat.

Port of Spain's position

Port of Spain has taken the opposite view, and said so in Parliament. On 16 January the Prime Minister told the House: “If you had some good lawyers on your side … they will tell you there was no international law that was breached when we were taking out, people were being taken out in their boats.” She added: “That is what we were fighting and we make no apology today.”47 The same day she said she made no apology for “standing side by side, side by side, with our oldest trading partner, the leader of the free world in this hemisphere”.48 Five weeks later the State Department's readout of her meeting with Marco Rubio recorded that he had “acknowledged Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar's public support for U.S. military operations in the South Caribbean Sea”.54

Supporting an ally against drug trafficking is not a crime, and nothing in the public record suggests any Trinidad and Tobago official took part in a strike. The question is narrower. A Prime Minister told Parliament, on the strength of advice she did not publish, that no law had been broken, while two citizens were believed to be among the dead and the UN's human rights office was saying the opposite. If a Democratic Congress now obtains the targeting records and legal opinions behind those strikes, that assurance will be tested against them.

“Keep your mouth out of US politics”

The Government's position on American politics has never been neutral. Minutes after Trump's inauguration in January 2025, as Opposition Leader, she called the outgoing administration “a disaster for the American people and the world” that had pushed “a woke, extreme left-wing agenda”.49 The next day she doubled down: “It's time for the world to move on from the insanity and destructive, divisive policies of the Joe Biden democrat administration.” Voters, she said, were “fed up with woke far left, nonsensical policies”. “I firmly stand by my comments.”50

Three weeks before Americans voted, her Foreign Minister turned the charge around. In the budget debate on 17 October, Sean Sobers told the House: “It is clear to me, Mr Speaker, that there is some degree of obsession, obsession with the U.S. government and particularly the Republican Party. I don't know why this obsession with the Republican Party and with the current president who sits squarely and strongly in the White House.”58 “We warned them time and time again,” he said, “keep your mouth out of US politics.” He told Colm Imbert to “mind your business”.5152 The president still sits in the White House. After Tuesday he does not sit there strongly, and the party whose administration this Government's leader accused of “a woke, extreme left-wing agenda” now controls the Congress that writes America's budgets, confirms its ambassadors and oversees its military.

A lame duck, and a policy with one leg

Trump cannot run again. For his last two years he keeps the veto and command of the armed forces, but loses the Congress that protected him. Every committee will have a Democratic chair with the power to subpoena, and a Republican congressman is preparing to force a vote on impeaching his Defense Secretary.2055 A foreign policy built on access to that President has lost much of what it was buying.

The warning has come from the Government's own side. Rodney Charles, a former UNC MP and former representative to the UN, said on Wednesday: “Congressional investigations may reveal our roles in Maduro's removal and in alleged extra-judicial killings in Caribbean waters,” and advised the Government to “get legal advice asap on how to deal with the ICC—if issues arise”.53 He did not set out evidence for either suggestion, and this publication has seen none. That a former member of the governing party's own bench felt the need to say it publicly is itself a measure of how exposed the Government's position has become. At the time of publication we could find no statement from the Prime Minister or the Foreign Minister on the result.

The questions are straightforward. What legal advice told the Prime Minister that no international law was breached, and will she publish it? What did the Government ask Washington about the deaths of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, and what was it told? What co-operation, if any, did Trinidad and Tobago provide to the strike campaign? And how does a Government that called the Democratic Party a disaster for the world intend to work with the Democratic Congress that will sit in judgment of that campaign from January?

Small states survive changes of government in larger ones by never staking everything on one. This Government put every egg in one basket, in one President's hands. On Tuesday American voters took the basket away.