原本预计将是民主党大获全胜的选举，结果却演变成了我们所熟知的共和党的彻底溃败。民主党在众议院和参议院均取得巨大胜利。这是共和党许久未见的毁灭性后果，绝非单一选举周期所能扭转。
What was expected to be a strong showing for the Democrats turned out to be a total wipeout of the Republican Party as we know it. The Democrats made massive gains in the House and the Senate. It was the kind of devastating outcome for Republicans that we haven’t seen in a while, the likes of which it doesn’t just take a single election cycle to reverse.
2024年几乎所有向共和党倾斜的群体，在2026年都回流了。究竟发生了什么？
Nearly every group that shifted toward Republicans in 2024 shifted back in 2026. So what happened?
原因很简单：这是一场生活成本选举。民主党全力聚焦于承诺解决生活成本危机，而特朗普总统全力聚焦于……他的舞厅。他与科技寡头共进晚餐。他吹嘘股市和石油利润——换言之，吹嘘除你之外的顶层人士正变得多么富有。
It’s very simple: It was a cost-of-living election. Democrats were laser-focused on promising to address the cost of living crisis, whereas President Trump was laser-focused on … his ballroom. He was taking dinners with tech oligarchs. He was bragging about the stock market and oil profits — in other words, about how rich everyone except you is getting at the top.
出口民调显示，飙升的生活成本和政府腐败是选民最关心的问题。由于住房、医疗、教育、保险、公用事业费用，当然还有食品杂货和汽油价格的爆炸性上涨，他们的生活已变得负担不起。
Exit polls showed that the skyrocketing cost of living and government corruption were the top concerns of voters. Their lives have become unaffordable due to the exploding cost of housing, health care, education, insurance, utilities, and of course, groceries and gas.
许多人在2024年投票给特朗普，是因为他们怀念2019年的经济——那时他们月底口袋里还能剩下多一点钱。
Many voted for Trump in 2024 because they remembered the 2019 economy — when they had a little bit more money in their pockets at the end of the month.
那已不复存在。今年大半时间里，通胀增速一直超过工资增速。因此，当特朗普在一次又一次竞技集会上吹捧“美国的黄金时代”时，这并非向蓬勃经济的赢家发出的号召——而是向一个以科技投机和扼杀消费者的高油价为活力来源的经济中的输家竖起的中指。
That’s no longer so. Inflation has been outpacing wage growth for much of this year. So when Trump touted the “Golden Age of America” in rally after campaign rally, it wasn’t a rallying cry to the winners of a blazing hot economy — it was a finger in the eye of the losers in an economy whose vitality is based on tech speculation and the high gas prices that are killing consumers.
关于特朗普政府最高层极度腐败的持续报道，只会雪上加霜。前白宫预算主管兼特朗普幕僚长米克·马尔瓦尼几周前出现在我的NewsNation节目中。针对一项显示腐败是88%选民首要关切问题的民调，他评论道：“选民在对总统说：‘听着，我们受够你们发财、我们变穷了。’”民主党对周二晚选举大捷的分析切中肯綮：特朗普让选民像他本人在选票上一样投票，选民照做了。
The constant reporting about extreme corruption at the highest levels of the Trump administration only added insult to injury. Former White House budget director and Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney appeared on my NewsNation show a few weeks ago. Reflecting on a poll that showed corruption as the top issue for 88 percent of voters, he remarked, “What people are telling the president is, ‘Look, we’re tired of you getting rich and us getting poor.'”The Democrats’ analysis of their good fortune Tuesday night is spot on: Trump told people to vote like he was on the ballot, and they did.
但在右翼，另一个单一解释浮出水面，试图解释我们所目睹的这场灾难：伊朗战争，这是出口民调中选民解释其投票理由的第三大重要因素。
But on the right, another singular explanation has emerged to explain the disaster we all witnessed unfold: the war in Iran, which was the third most important factor voters gave in exit polls explaining their vote.
当然，袭击发生后油价飙升，至今仍居高不下。但正如出口民调所示，伊朗战争只是选民不满的众多原因之一。让他们对伊朗战争感到不满的，不是袭击本身——根据3月甚至4月的多项民调，袭击最初在共和党选民中颇受欢迎。而是战争持续不断，毫无结束迹象，成为让他们生活更艰难、更负担不起的又一因素。
Certainly, gas prices surged after the attack and still remain high. But as the exit polls show, the war in Iran was one of many things voters were upset about. And the thing that upset them about the war in Iran was not the attack itself, which was at least initially popular with Republican voters in many polls throughout March and even April. It was the fact that the war just kept going without any signs of a conclusion, becoming one more thing making their lives harder and more unaffordable.
特朗普支持率的时间线清楚地显示，虽然伊朗战争导致支持率大幅下跌，但他的支持率真正开始下滑要早得多——在2025年4月“解放日”关税之后。从那时起，他的支持率从未恢复。
A timeline of Trump’s approval ratings makes clear that although the war in Iran resulted in a steep dropoff, his approval really started to slip long before that — after the Liberation Day tariffs of April 2025. His approval rating has never recovered from that.
我认为，特朗普及其政党或许能挺过其中任何一个问题，但无法同时应对这三个问题。如果住房、医疗和食品杂货成本在下降，每加仑汽油多花一美元会更容易被接受。如果特朗普没有花那么多时间吹捧舞厅和其他昂贵的面子工程，选民可能对关税会更有耐心。
I believe that Trump and his party could have survived any one of these problems, but not all three. If the cost of housing and health care and groceries were coming down, a dollar more per gallon at the pump would have been more tolerable. If Trump had not spent so much time talking up the ballroom and other expensive vanity projects, voters might have had more patience with the tariffs.
如果选民觉得自己在赚钱，他们或许不会那么介意总统身边的每个人似乎都在利用总统职位赚取数十亿美元，其中一些人还是通过可疑的加密货币骗局。
If voters felt like they were making money, they might have minded less that everyone in the president’s orbit seems to be making billions off the presidency, some of them through dodgy cryptocurrency schemes.
正是这一切加在一起，暴露了一个根本无法专注于其2024年竞选核心承诺的总统任期。这些承诺共有四项：大幅减少移民；降低成本，让钱回到美国劳动者的口袋里；清理沼泽；以及不发动新战争。他仅在一项上成功，而在其他所有方面都以一种颇为招摇的方式失败了。
It was everything together that revealed a presidency simply unable to focus on the main promises of his campaign in 2024. Those promises were fourfold: Radically reduce immigration; bring costs down and get money back in the pockets of working Americans; drain the swamp; and no new wars. He succeeded at only one, failing rather ostentatiously at all the others.
巴特亚·翁加尔-萨尔贡是“巴特亚！”节目的主持人，该节目美国东部时间周六晚7点在NewsNation播出，NewsNation是美国增长最快的有线新闻网络，也是《国会山报》的姊妹公司。
Batya Ungar Sargon is the host of “Batya!” which airs Saturday nights at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on NewsNation, the nation’s fastest-growing cable news network and a sister company of The Hill.