Donald Trump and his maga cult are dealing with the reality of their failed leadership after the November 3 mid-term elections

The writing is on the wall: Trump’s GOP is dead.

Echo opinion published in The Boston Globe by Abdallah Fayyad

If you wanted to test anti-Trump voter sentiment in a vacuum, look at Maine and New Hampshire’s Senate races.

One of the biggest headlines after the mid-term 2026 election is that Susan Collins, the five-term Republican senator from Maine, will be packing up her Washington office.

For years, Democrats tried to unseat her. And in Collins’s last election in 2020, every single poll had her down going into Election Day, and yet she still managed to claw her way back to victory — making her one of the few New England Republicans that Democrats feared. After that election, it seemed like she could stay in her seat as long as she pleased. 

But on November 3, Democrat Troy Jackson, the former president of the Maine Senate, managed to eke out a win, helping Democrats secure a comfortable Senate majority.

Up until these midterms, Collins had managed to successfully walk a tightrope throughout the Trump era in a state that rejected the president three times. She presented herself as a moderate Republican, willing to work with Donald Trump when it was in the interest of the people of Maine and to stand up against him when he went too far. (She voted to convict him, for example, in his second impeachment trial.) She often pitched herself as a moderating force, someone who could protect Mainers from Trump’s worst impulses.

But this time, her message failed to convince. Voters told me that her vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who helped upend abortion rights — was one turning point. And Trump’s unabated and cruel immigration crackdowns were another. 

On July 13, shortly after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a man in Biddeford (Mr. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero), protests erupted outside of her office there, where people repeatedly shouted, “Vote her out❗”

The end of Collins’s political career shows just how toxic Trump’s presence is for the GOP. While she did better than some of her Republican counterparts in other states — likely because she’s not a Trump loyalist — the mere association with the current Republican Party was enough to sink one of the most powerful US senators. And Collins’s loss makes one thing clear: It’s going to take a lot to rehabilitate the GOP’s image.

But Maine is just the tip of a blue iceberg.

Not too long ago, Democrats in New Hampshire were panicking over potentially losing their Senate seat to a Republican. But nothing lasts in politics, and Chris Pappas, the Democratic candidate, handily defeated Republican former senator John E. Sununu on Tuesday night's election. Pappas’s comfortable victory was one of the first signs that the polls did not underestimate the GOP’s strength this cycle, as many Democrats had feared.

What’s most interesting about the result in New Hampshire is that both Pappas and Sununu ran safe, boring campaigns. There weren’t any flashy policies or slogans, nor were there any big personalities. Just two conventional politicians operating run-of-the-mill campaigns. And as a result, it’s hard to argue that the election boiled down to anything other than being a referendum on Donald Trump’s second term. Indeed, when I spoke to voters there last month, Pappas’s supporters told me less about why they liked their candidate and more about how they wanted a check on Trump’s power.

If there was a race, in other words, that provided a measure of anti-Trump sentiment among voters in his final term, it was this one, especially given that there were few variables in the race other than Trump.

After all, Pappas seemed happy to blend into the background and avoided touching anything controversial. The list of priorities on his campaign website were mostly issues that have broad appeal — cracking down on corruption, taking dark money out of politics, and various tax cuts. (On more hot-button topics like immigration, Pappas took a more muted stance than some of his Democratic counterparts in other states, vowing to reform ICE not to abolish it.) Meanwhile, Sununu’s priorities included policy proposals like congressional term limits and suspending pay for members of Congress during government shutdowns.

Contrast this with other Senate races. In Texas, for example, there are factors other than Trump that contributed to Democrats’ victory. The Republican candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, had plenty of baggage that bogged down his campaign. He was impeached by members of his own party over charges of corruption. In a separate matter, he was indicted by a grand jury for securities fraud. (He avoided a trial by agreeing to community service hours and paying restitution.)

He was also an uncharismatic candidate, so much so that Trump couldn’t help but say so at rallies endorsing him. “[Paxton] may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” Trump said, before praising him as the “greatest” attorney general Texas has ever had. So while Trump’s unpopularity may have boosted the chances of the winner, Democrat James Talarico, it’s hard not to wonder if another, more polished Republican might have avoided defeat.

New Hampshire, on the other hand, basically had one major animating factor: Trump. So if you wanted to test anti-Trump voter sentiment in a vacuum, this race was as close as you could get. For Republicans focusing on 2028, the writing is on the wall: It’s time to jump ship. The Trump era is finally coming to an end.