Credit: iStock / Alan Mazzocco

Fox News hosts alternated between anger and denial, then anger again on Tuesday night as they watched the GOP lose in races big and small, in every part of the country. 

States that had been red for generations—Kansas, Texas, South Carolina—all went blue. And it wasn’t just a blue wave, to the outlet’s horror. 

It was a rout. 

Republicans lost governorships and state houses. They lost both houses of Congress and attorneys general. They even lost redistricting and anti-abortion measures in Missouri.

And according to exit polling by NBC News, they lost with Black people, Latinos, Asians and college-educated people of all backgrounds. They lost young people and women. In fact, the only groups that were still solidly pro-Republican were white men (53%) and white people with only a high school diploma (54%). 

And by the time all is done, Republicans might even lose a U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi with the rise of Democrat Scott Colom. And this is a state that hasn’t elected a Black man to the Senate since Reconstruction. 

What it takes to win

It’s almost as if you can’t solely rely on the white vote in a diverse country where people of color make up almost 40 percent of the population. In fact, the “blue tsunami” underscores something that has been apparent since at least the George W. Bush Administration—you can’t win with just the white vote anymore.

The GOP won white men and lost the election. And as long as about 30-to-40 percent of white voters vote Democratic beside a plurality of people of color, the Republican Party will court its own extinction. Unless they ditch the white nationalists, racist tactics and rhetoric, they’ll face oblivion.

You can’t win in America without a diverse coalition

Even with racist redistricting, fewer polling places, the president muddying the waters around mail-in ballots, Black people having to walk miles to polling places, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, the GOP lost. Targeting Latinos and other immigrants turned what few pro-Trump voters existed in that community to Democrats, and trashing the economy with a pointless war against Iran and punitive tariffs didn’t win over voters, regardless of race.

Some on the right recognized this and tried to grapple with it.

“There’s a very real economic disconnect,” wrote the remaining GOP U.S. Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. “Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide. Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families. Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.

“Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain,” he wrote.

‘Missing the plot’

But for some others, the denial only got deeper as they blamed the voters for being duped into supporting “socialism and Islamists,” leading to the likes of former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio telling a Fox News host that she was “missing the plot.”

“I’ve been on many Fox programs. I respect this network, but I’ve gotta tell you guys — you’re missing the plot,” said de Blasio. “The American people are looking at a war they do not believe in, and they did not authorize. They’re looking at prices that are making it impossible for middle-class people, let alone working-class people, to live.”

And while President Donald Trump has projected some uncharacteristic aloofness over the loss, he’s not taking any blame, instead pointing the finger back at the right-wing media that has buoyed his entire political career.

“Fox News bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. 

The president also wrote that the problem with the GOP candidates this midterm, many of whom he hand-picked, was that they weren’t MAGA enough. 

And as the president is unlikely to take any responsibility for… well, anything, other heads will have to roll as the blame game begins on the right. 

Which Republicans will defect to save themselves upon realizing that MAGA is collapsing? Which ones will double down and go even deeper into Trump void? Who will resign, and who will go down with the ship? Who will course-correct, and who will keep fighting a losing culture war?

The next few days to weeks will be very instructive.

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