Maryland polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, and the door was barely locked before Maryland Republicans had the same cards it has held since 2022.
Dan Cox won the June Republican primary with 43.3 percent of the vote in a field of nine, defeating the disastrous Democrat Ed Hale and seven other candidates. Wes Moore had beaten Cox by roughly 32 points in 2022. This time, with unofficial returns showing Moore ahead by more than 29 points, the rerun was a rerun.
The UMBC poll assessment had been that Cox never rebuilt the Hogan coalition and drew nearly all his support from the Republican base. That was a polite way of saying this would happen.
It happened.
So here is my question for everyone who spent the summer insisting this time would be different: What did you expect?
Cox was the least interesting entry on the ballot, and the night did not stop in Maryland.
Dan Cox (MD-Gov): Lost by 32 points in 2022, got shellacked in the 2024 Maryland 6th Congressional District primary, and spent 2026 pretending to be a normal Republican. Lost again.
Ken Paxton (TX-Sen): Beat an incumbent senator in a runoff after Trump’s late endorsement. Lost to James Talarico in a state where Republicans had not lost a Senate race since 1988. Paxton conceded on election night.
Vivek Ramaswamy (OH-Gov): Won his primary with more than 80 percent of the vote and Trump’s endorsement. Lost to Amy Acton in a state Trump carried by double digits after the most offensive ad possibly in the history of modern politics. Ohio had not elected a Democratic governor since 2006, and Sherrod Brown won back a Senate seat on the same ballot.
Mike Rogers (MI-Sen): Lost this exact race by a whisker in 2024 and returned as the party’s near-miss nominee with little meaningful primary opposition. Lost to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat Republicans had spent the summer calling unelectable.
Mike Collins (GA-Sen): Won the Republican runoff over Brian Kemp’s preferred candidate with a late Trump endorsement. Lost to Jon Ossoff.
Rick Jackson (GA-Gov): A billionaire first-time candidate who spent his own money to beat Trump’s preferred candidate for governor, then ran as the outsider. Lost to Keisha Lance Bottoms, who became the first Democrat elected governor of Georgia since 1998 and the first Black woman elected governor in American history.
Darline Graham (SC-Sen): Not the original nominee. Lindsey Graham won his primary and then died in July. Trump backed his sister, a political newcomer who had never run for office and showed little interest in doing so, and she narrowly defeated a sitting congressman in the special Republican runoff. She went on to lose to Annie Andrews, ending 28 years of Republican Senate victories in South Carolina.
Roger Marshall (KS-Sen): An incumbent Republican senator in a state that had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Lost to Adam Hamilton, a Methodist pastor who campaigned on affordability and bipartisanship on the back of Marshall not bothering to campaign, a history of suing his constituents, and a bizarre late campaign ad. Ninety-four years of Republican victories ended in a single night.
Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS-Sen): An incumbent Republican in a state where a Democratic Senate victory was supposed to be almost unthinkable. Instead, she found herself in a race so close that no winner had been declared by Wednesday morning. Democrat Scott Colom held a razor-thin lead, with outstanding ballots still to be counted. We knew that this would be close after Donald Trump made a susprise stop in the state, but nothing like this. Even Mississippi was no longer a sure thing.
Trump himself: Not on the ballot, which has not stopped him from being on every ballot according to himself
Start with the man who was on all of them.
Trump entered Election Day with approval ratings deeply underwater. Democrats enjoyed a substantial advantage in the national political environment, and Republican enthusiasm was struggling to keep pace. The proximate cause was not mysterious. Inflation, rising energy costs, and the economic consequences of the February strikes on Iran had turned affordability into a political liability for the party in power.
Vance has already blamed the Iran war for the losses. It is hard to argue that the war was not a major factor, and harder still to explain why the party kept nominating candidates least equipped to survive the political environment it helped create. Somehow, this is supposed to help Vance launch his 2028 Presidential campaign.
Now consider what Republicans did with that environment.
In Texas, Senate Republican leadership spent months pressing Trump to back John Cornyn, arguing that Paxton would be weaker in November. Cornyn’s allies spent heavily trying to save his nomination. Trump endorsed Paxton anyway, and the primary electorate did the rest.
Then came the general election. Talarico won the Senate seat, and Gina Hinojosa defeated Greg Abbott for governor. Texas, which had not elected a Democrat statewide since 1994, suddenly elected two to its highest-profile offices.
The warning from the Republican establishment was stated plainly, publicly, and repeatedly. It was right about Paxton’s vulnerability, and it lost the argument anyway.
Ohio was supposed to be the soft landing. Ramaswamy was smart, well-funded, and running in a state Trump carried by double digits. Yet the polling increasingly showed Acton competitive or ahead, and prediction markets ultimately favored her.
The markets were right.
It was not simply a matter of Acton’s campaign or Ramaswamy’s shortcomings. Republicans had nominated a nationally recognizable candidate in a year when the national Republican brand had become a liability.
Then there is the part of the map where nobody was supposed to need an explanation.
Georgia was a proxy war between Trump and Kemp, and Collins won it. The party spent its summer choosing the more combative Senate nominee over the candidate preferred by its sitting governor, only to send him against an incumbent who had been raising money and preparing for reelection for years. Osoff’s re-election campaign was a master class.
The governor’s race offered a different version of the same lesson. Trump’s preferred candidate lost the Republican runoff to a billionaire who bought his way into contention, claimed the outsider mantle, and then lost to Bottoms.
Two nominees who were very good at the primary.
Michigan was the same shortcut. Rogers lost by a hair in 2024, which in Republican politics is apparently treated as a down payment. National Republicans invested in him on the theory that the opportunity was the candidate.
It was not, and Michigan sent the first Muslim senator in American history to Washington to prove it.
South Carolina was the most surreal of all. The party lost its longtime senator, then rallied behind his sister with Trump’s encouragement, only to lose the seat to a Democrat anyway.
Kansas might be the most damning result of the entire election, because it cannot be explained away as another Republican primary electorate nominating a fringe candidate. Roger Marshall was an incumbent senator in a state that had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Ninety-four years. Not during Watergate, not during the Clinton years, and not even during the Democratic wave of 2006. Then Adam Hamilton, a Methodist pastor and former Republican who campaigned on affordability and bridging partisan divides, beat him. Marshall was not Dan Cox or Ken Paxton. He was an incumbent Republican in one of the most reliably Republican states in the country, and even that was not enough. Kansas was proof that the Republican problem extended beyond candidate quality. The national environment was so toxic that even conventional Republican nominees were vulnerable. Which makes the decision to nominate candidates with additional political baggage elsewhere all the more inexplicable.
That is what makes the Mississippi result so revealing, even without a declared winner. Cindy Hyde-Smith should never have been fighting for her political life in a state as reliably Republican as Mississippi.
When the safe seats become competitive, the national brand has stopped being a floor and started being a ceiling.
Maryland was the cleanest version of the candidate-quality argument.
Moore ran ads on Fox News during the Republican primary calling Cox too conservative for Maryland, which no one with a pulse took as an attack. Ed Hale cried foul. He was right.
It also did not change the underlying problem. Moore’s campaign recognized that Cox was a weaker general-election opponent, and Republican primary voters handed him the nomination anyway, despite the same arguments being made in 2022.1
None of this means Democrats earned everything.
Moore’s approval had slipped after the 2025 tax increases, and in a different year, against a different opponent, that might have mattered. In 2026, it did not, because the other side kept showing up with the same product.
Nor does every Republican defeat prove that the nominee was uniquely terrible. Some Republicans lost because voters were angry about the economy, the war, the administration, or the direction of the country. Some lost because their own political baggage made an already difficult election harder. Others lost despite possessing the conventional advantages that should have made them competitive. A lot of Republicans lost last night due to circumstances more than their own problems.
But that distinction makes the Republican primary electorate’s choices more indefensible, not less.
When the national environment is hostile, candidate quality matters more. When your president is unpopular, you need nominees who can persuade voters who do not already support him. When your party is struggling with independents, nominating candidates whose principal qualification is their loyalty to the president is not a strategy for recovery.
It is a strategy for surrender.
There is another side to this that Republicans would be foolish to ignore: Democrats actually nominated candidates who could win. Adam Hamilton in Kansas, James Talarico in Texas, Annie Andrews in South Carolina, Josh Turek in Iowa, and Roy Cooper in North Carolina were not interchangeable Democrats running interchangeable campaigns. They came from different backgrounds, emphasized different issues, and found different ways to reach voters beyond the Democratic base. That does not mean every one of them was a moderate, or that the national environment did not do much of the heavy lifting. It did. But Democrats recognized opportunities in states that had rejected their Senate candidates for decades and nominated people capable of exploiting them. Republicans, meanwhile, continued treating the ability to win a Republican primary as proof of the ability to win a general election. Democrats were trying to win November. Republicans were still trying to win the Republican primary.
The establishment Republicans who warned about risky nominees were not always right about everything. They were not even right about every candidate. But the fundamental warning was correct: a Republican primary is not a general election, and winning the former does not make someone capable of winning the latter.
Tuesday night was where those two electorates met.
The result was a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, Democratic governors in states Republicans expected to hold, and Republican Senate defeats in places that had not elected Democrats in decades. It was a generational shellacking that also damaged the Republican bench for 2028 and 2030.
Nobody forced this on the party.
Republican primary voters in Maryland, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, and across the country made their choices. Trump’s endorsements helped determine many of those choices. And when the consequences arrived, the same people who had dismissed electability as an establishment obsession were left wondering how it all went wrong.
The voters in November did not create this problem. They simply delivered the verdict.
The responsibility belongs to the people who spent the spring and summer choosing nominees, ignoring warnings, and convincing themselves that loyalty to Donald Trump was a substitute for the ability to win an election.
They got the candidates they wanted.
They got the election they deserved.
What did you expect?
Democrats boosting unelectable Republican primary candidates is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It keeps working because the party being targeted has never learned to stop falling for it.