About a week ago, The New York Times’ Nate Cohn, the newspaper’s top elections data analyst, reviewed four possible scenarios for the midterm elections. The fourth was easily the worst-case scenario for the Republican Party.

In this scenario, Cohn wrote, Democrats would win a large majority in the House, “maybe 250 seats,” and 53 or more Senate seats, marking “the beginning of a new chapter of American politics.”

“In today’s polarized era,” the analysis added, “it can be hard to believe that any party could win in this kind of tsunami.”As the dust settles on Election Day 2026, according to MS NOW’s projections, Democrats are on track to hold at least 250 House seats and at least 54 Senate seats. The outcome that seemed “hard to believe” has actually happened.

The magnitude of the Democratic victories is so stunning that the political world is struggling to settle on the best disaster metaphor. “Wave” is common but insufficient. “Tsunami” works, and I’ve seen a lot of “earthquake” headlines. The National Review, a prominent conservative magazine, went with “Armageddon,” which certainly brought a dramatic flair, and Punchbowl News embraced a related theme, describing the results as “an extinction-level event for President Donald Trump’s party on Capitol Hill.”In the coming hours, days, weeks and months, Republicans will try to absorb their historic smackdown, fixating on counterfactual “what if” questions.

What if Trump had spent his first two years working on border security and his golf game, while letting the strong Biden-era economy continue to hum along?

What if “Liberation Day” hadn’t happened, there had been no White House trade tariffs and the economy had been able to grow normally in 2025 without Republican-imposed inflation?

What if, just as the economy had started to show signs of life earlier this year, the president had launched a wildly unnecessary, deadly, destructive, costly and unpopular war that had adverse ripple effects, including higher prices?

Or what if Trump had crafted a coherent plan to end the war relatively quickly, rather than let it drag on past Election Day?

What if the Republican-led Congress had at least pretended to act like a coequal branch of government at any point over the past 22 months?

What if Republicans on Capitol Hill hadn’t shrugged with indifference as corruption allegations became one of the year’s most important campaign issues?

What if the White House had pursued a deportation agenda focused only on violent felons instead of law-abiding taxpayers? What if the administration hadn’t terrorized communities with masked federal immigration agents?

What if, as the 2026 election cycle got underway in earnest after Labor Day, Republicans hadn’t deliberately decided to make the race a referendum on a historically unpopular president, complete with a pointless midterm convention that featured a genuinely cultish “God gave us Trump” video and a pledge of allegiance to the president?

What if the administration hadn’t launched a trade war with Canada, hurting GOP incumbents and candidates in several Northern states?

What if Trump hadn’t intervened in several Republican primaries, elevating awful candidates who lost?

What if Republicans had come up with some kind of policy agenda or credible ideas to share with voters?

What if Trump had focused more on his actual job than on assorted vanity projects at the White House and around Washington, D.C.? What if Trump’s closing argument had been coherent?

What if Trump hadn’t shredded generations-old alliances while echoing Kremlin talking points for reasons that went entirely unexamined by GOP lawmakers?

We’ll never know the answers to these questions, of course, but that won’t stop many Republicans from obsessing over them as Democrats seize the reins from the GOP.