2016年5月3日——唐纳德·特朗普实际上首次锁定共和党总统提名的那个夜晚——时任参议员林赛·格雷厄姆发推文称：“如果我们提名特朗普，我们将被彻底击溃……而且我们罪有应得。”格雷厄姆远非唯一表达此类观点的人。德克萨斯州参议员泰德·克鲁兹、前州长杰布·布什以及大多数政治分析人士也说了类似的话。毕竟，提名一位不受欢迎、粗俗且专制的真人秀明星——他更擅长拖欠承包商款项而非制定政策——怎么可能让一个主要政党走向毁灭以外的结局呢？
On May 3, 2016 — the night Donald Trump effectively clinched the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for the first time — then-Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.”Graham was scarcely alone in voicing such sentiments. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Gov. Jeb Bush, and most political analysts said much the same thing.
周二晚上，格雷厄姆曾预言的清算终于到来，只是比预期晚了整整十年。
After all, how could nominating an unpopular, profane, and authoritarian reality star — with more expertise in stiffing contractors than formulating policies — lead a major political party to anything but ruin?
截至发稿时，民主党几乎可以肯定赢得本轮选举前十名参议院摇摆州中的九个，包括堪萨斯州、德克萨斯州和南卡罗来纳州等共和党的传统堡垒。民主党还被看好能赢得第10个摇摆州（阿拉斯加），并至少赢得255个众议院席位。此外，还有一个几乎无人预见的第11场竞选（密西西比州）正进入白热化阶段。该党在全国国会选举中的得票比例尚不完全清楚。但许多分析人士预计，这将是两党自20世纪70年代以来取得的最大份额。
On Tuesday night, the reckoning that Graham had prophesied finally arrived, just a decade behind schedule. As of this writing, the Democratic Party appears all but certain to win nine of the cycle’s top 10 Senate battleground states, including perennial bastions of Republicanism like Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina. And Democrats are favored to prevail in the 10th battleground (Alaska), while winning at least 255 House seats. Then there’s an 11th race almost no one saw coming (Mississippi) that is heading down to the wire. The party’s share of the national congressional vote isn’t entirely clear.
在这场“蓝色海啸”击倒的众多共和党人中，就有格雷厄姆的妹妹达琳。特朗普亲自指定她为南卡罗来纳州的共和党候选人，此前林赛今年早些时候去世。
But many analysts expect it to be the largest that either party has won since the 1970s. Among the many Republicans felled by this “blue tsunami” was Graham’s own sister, Darline, whom Trump handpicked as the GOP’s nominee in South Carolina, after Lindsey died earlier this year.
从一个角度看，这些结果令人震惊。半个世纪以来，我们从未见过如此大的选举浪潮。而且，2016年之后的每一次选举都曾让人怀疑，如此规模的民主党溃败是否甚至可能。毕竟，民主党在2018年中期选举中赢得全国性大胜，但仍未能夺得参议院控制权，因为红州选民大多仍不愿支持民主党候选人。
From one angle, these results are astonishing. We have not seen a wave this large in half a century. And every previous post-2016 election cast doubt on whether such a Democratic rout was even possible. After all, Democrats won a national landslide in the 2018 midterms, but nevertheless failed to gain Senate control, as red-state electorates still proved largely unwilling to back Democratic candidates.
传统观点认为，选举的全国化和选民的两极分化，终结了那些独特的民主党候选人能够在压倒性共和党州竞争的时代。
Conventional wisdom held that the nationalization of elections — and polarization of voters — had brought an end to the era when idiosyncratic Democratic candidates could compete in overwhelmingly Republican states.
不再如此。周二的结果看起来正是许多人在2016年初所预期的，那时特朗普还未证明自己比大多数批评者想象的更具政治号召力。
No longer. Tuesday’s results look like precisely what many expected in early 2016, before Trump proved himself more politically formidable than most of his critics had imagined.
这一切引发了一个问题：为什么是现在？为什么特朗普在2026年成功引发美国选民的一次划时代的否决，而在之前的选举中却没有？部分原因是“经济，傻瓜”最合理的答案是，引用传奇民主党顾问詹姆斯·卡维尔的话，“经济，傻瓜。”正如2016年所表明的，美国选民并不认为特朗普的非自由主义或缺乏经验，像主流精英那样是否决他的理由。有些人相信，这位商业高管适合管理经济，或者至少能带来一些受欢迎的经济变化。
All of which raises the question: Why now? Why did Trump manage to provoke an epochal rebuke from American voters in 2026, but not in preceding elections? It’s partly “the economy, stupid”The most plausible answer is, to quote the legendary Democratic consultant James Carville, “the economy, stupid.”As 2016 made clear, the American electorate didn’t consider Trump’s illiberalism or inexperience as disqualifying as mainstream elites did.
在特朗普第一个任期的大部分时间里，他似乎证实了这一印象，主持了低通胀和充分就业。2019年12月，CNN的一项民调发现，选民对美国经济的满意度达到了近二十年来的最高水平。（当然，2020年将带来经济动荡，但许多美国人并不认为特朗普对大流行病负有责任。）特朗普表面上的经济效能为他的支持率和共和党在第一个任期的选举表现奠定了底线。这也使他在2024年成为一个相对更可信的反通胀候选人。
And some believed that the business executive would be well-suited to manage the economy, or at least, bring about a measure of welcome economic change. For much of his first term, Trump appeared to validate this impression, presiding over low inflation and full employment. In December 2019, a CNN poll found voters more satisfied with the US economy than they’d been in nearly two decades. (Of course, 2020 would bring economic upheaval, but many Americans didn’t consider Trump culpable for the pandemic.) Trump’s apparent economic efficacy put a floor beneath his approval and the GOP’s electoral performances during term one. And it made him a somewhat more credible anti-inflation candidate in 2024.
然而，连任后，特朗普对控制生活成本表现出了不感兴趣。相反，他通过对大多数进口商品征收高额关税，并因与伊朗的战争引发全球能源危机，积极推高了物价。
Upon reelection, however, Trump showed less than zero interest in containing the cost of living. Rather, he actively pushed up prices by imposing large tariffs on most imported goods and triggering a global energy crisis with his war in Iran.
后者尤其具有深远影响。从2月（战争开始时）到选举日，美国人的能源成本与民主党的民调优势一起飙升。
The latter proved particularly consequential. Between February (when the war began) and Election Day, Americans’ energy costs skyrocketed along with the Democrats’ polling advantage.
“专制噩梦”这一说法同样至关重要。尽管经济背景很可能是共和党迟来反思的最大单一驱动因素，但仅此不足以解释这一现象。2026年的经济状况并不理想，但也远未达到彻底崩溃的程度。美国的通胀率略低于4%；而在2022年11月，乔·拜登遭遇的中期选举反弹要小得多，当时的通胀率超过7%。与此同时，美国失业率为4.2%；而在2010年11月，失业率接近10%，然而共和党在当晚获得的全国选票份额，似乎仍不及民主党周二晚间的表现。要解释共和党当时惨败的规模，我们不能仅依赖物质因素。
The whole “authoritarian nightmare” thing also mattered Although the economic context is likely the biggest single driver of the GOP’s belated reckoning, it is not sufficient to explain it. The 2026 economy isn’t great. But it also isn’t a total disaster. America’s inflation rate is a bit under 4 percent; in November 2022, when Joe Biden suffered a much smaller midterm rebuke, it was over 7 percent. Our nation’s unemployment rate, meanwhile, sits at 4.2 percent; in November 2010, it was nearly 10 percent, yet the GOP won a smaller share of the national vote than Democrats apparently did Tuesday night. To explain the scale of the GOP’s drubbing then, we can’t rely on material factors alone.
确实，特朗普从2015年宣布参选之初就是一位不自由主义的煽动者。当然，他在2021年煽动了国会山的叛乱骚乱，却并未因此丧失政治可行性。
It is true that Trump has been an illiberal demagogue from the moment he launched his candidacy in 2015. And of course, he incited an insurrectionary riot on Capitol Hill in 2021 without squandering his political viability.
尽管如此，特朗普政治计划中残酷和专制的性质，在过去两年比以往任何时候都更加赤裸裸。第一届特朗普政府并未定期从联邦机构账户发布白人民族主义口号。更重要的是，它并未像第二届特朗普白宫那样大幅加强境内移民执法。
Nevertheless, the cruel and authoritarian character of Trump’s political project was more naked over the past two years than ever before. The first Trump administration did not tweet out white nationalist slogans from federal agency accounts on a regular basis. More critically, it did not ramp up interior immigration enforcement to the degree that the second Trump White House has.
过去两年美国移民与海关执法局（ICE）执法的不加区分性质，疏远了许多拉丁裔选民，这些选民在2024年曾对特朗普有所好感。最近一项NBC新闻/Telemundo民调发现，65%的拉丁裔选民不赞成ICE，而近四分之一的人表示，过去两年内他们个人认识有人被拘留或驱逐出境。周二晚间，拉丁裔县大幅转向反对共和党。
The indiscriminate nature of ICE enforcement over the past two years alienated many Latino voters, who had warmed to Trump in 2024. A recent NBC News/Telemundo poll found that 65 percent of Latino voters disapproved of ICE, while nearly a quarter said they personally knew someone who was detained or deported over the past two years. On Tuesday night, Latino counties swung massively against Republicans.
与此同时，特朗普对ICE特工杀害两名美国公民的纵容——加上他对公民自由和政府廉洁的更广泛攻击——可能在前所未有的程度上激发了反对者的热情。
Meanwhile, Trump’s willingness to condone ICE agents’ killing of two US citizens — combined with his broader assaults on civil liberties and government integrity — may have energized his opposition to an unprecedented extent.
特朗普主义的代价可能持续存在 共和党是否会为其与特朗普达成的浮士德式交易付出持久代价，目前仍不清楚。2016年初——在他本人成为特朗普的追随者之前——林赛·格雷厄姆预测，特朗普获得提名不仅会让共和党输掉2016年大选，还会“让该党在未来几十年里毁于一旦”。共和党在一代人时间里变得政治上无关紧要的可能性微乎其微。
The costs of Trumpism could linger It is still unclear whether the GOP will pay a lasting price for its Faustian bargain with Trump. In early 2016 — before he himself became a Trump toady — Lindsey Graham predicted that a Trump nomination would not only cost the Republicans the 2016 election but “destroy the party for decades to come.”There is little chance that the GOP will be politically irrelevant for a generation.
但该党究竟将如何摆脱特朗普将其引入的困境，仍有待观察。该党显然需要将其品牌与总统区分开来。然而，其余下的当选官员绝大多数来自深度支持特朗普的选区。而且，与2008年后的乔治·W·布什不同，特朗普不太可能默默容忍其党抛弃他。
But precisely how it will wriggle out of the corner that Trump has led it into remains to be seen. The party plainly needs to distinguish its brand from the president’s. Yet its remaining elected officials are overwhelmingly from deeply pro-Trump jurisdictions. And unlike George W. Bush after 2008, Trump is unlikely to quietly abide his party disowning him.
无论未来如何，共和党人都不会很快忘记这次规模的损失。周二的选举结果不太可能治愈共和党对非自由主义煽动的嗜好。但下一位共和党领导人在发动新的贸易（或实际）战争、对新纳粹睁一只眼闭一只眼，或让联邦特工处决美国公民之前，可能会三思而后行。
Whatever the future brings, Republicans will not soon forget a loss of this magnitude. Tuesday’s results are unlikely to cure the GOP of its taste for illiberal demagogy. But the next GOP leader may hesitate before launching new trade (or actual) wars, winking at neo-Nazis, or letting federal agents execute American citizens.
事实上，特朗普主义的政治代价异常高昂。只是账单花了10年才到期。
The political costs of Trumpism were, in fact, exceptionally high. It just took 10 years for the bill to come due.