PICKING UP THE PIECES AFTER TRUMP'S GREAT FALL: BLUE WAVE SOAKS GOP

President Trump at a campaign rally in Kalispell, Mont., last month. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Shane Goldmacher, Johnathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman

New York Times

Six days before the election, more than two dozen of President Trump’s top strategists logged onto a private video call.

The mood was grim. The discussion began with talk of cyanide.

“Do you want the white pill first, or the black pill first?” asked Tony Fabrizio, the president’s chief pollster.

Tim Saler, one of the Republican Party’s top data consultants, laid out two scenarios. In the first, the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC was reaching the voters that it had wanted and expected to vote. “That’s the optimistic scenario,” he said.

The other was a wipeout.

“I’m getting my affairs in order,” James Blair, who left the White House to oversee the president’s midterm strategy, said to laughter, according to four people on the call. “I suggest everybody else do the same.”

For roughly 30 minutes, the call ran on gallows humor: funeral arrangements, prison food, presidential pardons, even a brief riff on fleeing the country.

“At least Bibi won. He’ll protect us,” Mr. Blair said sarcastically of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country had voted the day before. (Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc fell short of a majority, and his party soon claimed the election had been stolen.)

“Maybe we could get asylum in Israel,” Mr. Fabrizio said.
Collapse at the Polls

The scope of the Republican wreckage would become clear a week later.

Democrats stormed to a huge House majority and won control of the Senate, a remarkable feat powered by victories in Republican strongholds — Kansas, South Carolina, Texas — that few could have imagined a year ago.

This account of the Republican Party’s collapse is based on interviews with more than 70 people — among them lawmakers, political strategists, party leaders, pollsters, White House officials and congressional aides — who were directly involved in the midterm elections, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe private conversations and decisions.

People watched the results come in at Ken Paxton’s election night watch party in Dallas on Tuesday. Mr. Paxton lost by 12 points. Credit: Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

The scale of the defeat was far from inevitable.

Republicans had record fund-raising, the world's richest man, a favorable Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance and a demoralized, unpopular opposition.

In the Senate, they had a map that required Democrats to compete in states they hadn’t won in decades.

And in the House, the Trump team demolished the tradition of redrawing congressional lines only once a decade in order to carve up new districts to help the G.O.P. bolster its narrow majority.

What Republicans could not overcome was a president who lost the public’s trust on the economy and so much more. And what they had not counted on was an unpopular war in the Middle East — one that would close the Strait of Hormuz and push gas prices past $4 a gallon — that would rage all the way through the election.