The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

I have delayed writing anything about the 2026 midterm elections, until now.  I wanted to avoid any impulsive thoughts or reactions until, as they say, “the dust settles.” One thing is certain: They were a repudiation of Donald Trump. But there are other certainties about the election that are now quite clear.

First, the morning after the 2026 midterm elections, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was searingly blunt. For the Republican Party it was “close to an extinction level event.” Its effects will “reverberate for the next decade or more.” “It was a Watergate-level repudiation,” said Ted Cruz, soon to be Texas’ lone Republican senator, on a podcast. Ronna McDaniel, Republican National Committee chairman in the first Trump term, told Fox News on Wednesday the election wasn’t only a Democratic wave, it was “a Republican rebellion.” It wasn’t only the number of Democratic victories; it was their size. It was a night of landslides—James Talarico of Texas by 12, Jon Ossoff of Georgia by 18, Roy Cooper of North Carolina by 20. Jonathan Martin on “Morning Joe” said the old red-blue paradigm has ended. Derek Thompson similarly marveled on his Substack: “Kansas voted like New Hampshire and Mississippi voted like Wisconsin.”

As Peggy Noonan declared, “Mr. Trump was the author of the ruin. He picked the candidates to back, made the decisions on strategy, decided what to say and when to spend the money in his war chest. (Late in the election, according to the New York Times, when the price of ads had been jacked up; he considered it “my money.”) He is fuming and casting blame—it was Fox News’s polls; if he’d been on the ballot it would have been “a landslide”; Greg Abbott is “a RINO.” 

Noonan also highlights another element—corruption:  “A loss this size has many reasons, a river this raging had many sources. It was a pervasive sense of financial insecurity worsened by high prices, which are connected to the war but also driven by tariffs. And it was corruption . . . On Halloween night, [at Mar-a- Lago] three days before the epochal election, the festivities were huge and jungle-themed. Yahoo News called it ‘a camp, spandex-and-glitter-filled affair” with a caviar bar. Some guests dressed “in elaborate or barely-there costumes.’ The Washington Post pool report had people dressed as leopards and snakes and in ‘tiger-print dinner jackets’ . . . This administration’s soul is seen in its social life, and it is the opposite of populism—it is more like a low-class, high-tack oligarchy dominated by patricians who feel no obligation to even fake a little class.”

Second, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal argues that the economy was not the only reason for the massive Republican loss:  “This year, the economy and inflation were once again the top issue. But President Trump’s party paid a far steeper price. Republicans’ vote margin plummeted 14 percentage points, and they were swept from power in both chambers. These divergent outcomes tell us that while the economy was clearly critical, it wasn’t the monolithic driver of the election that some narratives (and Democratic messaging) made it out to be. Much more was at work: Voters appear deeply dismayed about what has happened to their country under Trump, and inflation was a symptom of that.”

• “Exit polls suggest clues as to what, in addition to the economy, was on their minds. The state of democracy was cited as the top issue by 32% of respondents, second only to the economy. Government corruption was crucial or a major factor in how 90% of respondents voted. Immigration raids and conservative civil-rights court rulings might have motivated Hispanic and Black voters. Democracy, corruption, immigration and the cost of living don’t occupy different compartments. They are intertwined in voters’ minds, a pattern that appeared in previous elections in the U.S. and around the world.”
• “Inflation is an incumbent killer, mowing down governing parties on the left and right since 2021. This isn’t because inflation itself is destroying livelihoods, the way it did in Weimar Germany. Rather, combined with corruption, polarization or disorder, inflation can be symptomatic of failing governance.”
• “This time around, it appears the anxiety is coming from the way Trump has governed since taking office, which includes aggressively deploying federal power against his adversaries, the media and immigrants and circumventing the constraints of courts and Congress. Democrats rated democracy as more important than the economy, independents as second only to the economy. Around 90% of Republicans, Democrats and Independents rated corruption as crucial or important to their vote, although the exit poll didn’t specify whose corruption.”

Third, I am a principled conservative, a position that I personally believe dovetails with the values, virtues and ethical standards of Scripture.  Because of what Noonan and Ip have demonstrated, the Republican Party under Trump has lost its way.  It has no clear set of standards by which it abides, other than what Trump advocates.  My prayer is that this election debacle for the Party will cause it to reform itself.  Columnist Gerard Baker argued before the election that Texas candidate Ken Paxton and Ohio candidate Vivek Ramaswamy should lose. “It’s a bold move to urge a vote for candidates whose policies you think are wrong. But sometimes candidates with better policy prescriptions lose the voters’ trust through their own character.”

• “To say that Ken Paxton, Mr. Talarico’s Republican opponent, is ethically challenged would be an understatement on a par with saying Jack Kevorkian wasn’t the kind of doctor you wanted if you were elderly and feeling a little under the weather. The Texas attorney general was once reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by his own staff for alleged corruption and was impeached by the Republican-dominated Texas House. (Prosecutors declined to file charges, and the state Senate acquitted Mr. Paxton.)”
• “In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, in the final days of his campaign for governor, has completed the last stage of his career descent from dynamic capitalist through thoughtful conservative scourge of progressive lunacy to craven Trump sycophant and, finally, to shameless cynic who will do anything to get ahead. A man who enlists to his cause the testimony of a woman who sided with the monster charged with abusing her own child has answered the question of his fitness for office.”

He writes, “The struggle between character and purpose when making political choices is often fierce. Few great statesmen were saints. Both parties have sinners. But these candidates’ demonstrated unfitness for office crystallizes neatly the balance of risks for many conservatives and quite a few independents as we decide how to vote next week. Do we express our disgust with the state of the modern Republican Party and risk lending new life to a Democratic Party filling up with dangerous people, bad ideas and terrible plans? Or do we vote against that malignity and risk letting our choice be an endorsement of a Republican Party that has forfeited just about the last shred of trust we have in it? . . . The Republican Party is in need of radical reformation. It has succumbed eagerly to the whims of an authoritarian leader. It has abdicated its constitutional responsibilities in Congress, failing to check administrative overreach or investigate corruption on an industrial scale. It has been a cheerleader to an administration that took us into a major war without explanation, justification or a plan, and it stood by meekly when it imposed policies that have harmed the livelihoods of ordinary Americans. A thrashing next week would be a disaster for the Republican Party. But it might be the start of the road back for conservatism.”  I could not agree more!

Finally, Jon Meacham, who holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, provides a much-needed historical perspective: “For Ronald Reagan, the shadows were lengthening. In January 1989, as he prepared to pass power to George H.W. Bush and retire to California, the 40th president was thinking about how it had all begun. At a 50th anniversary luncheon in honor of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library on one of his final days as president, Reagan reminisced about a distant Thursday in 1936 when, as a sportscaster for WHO in Des Moines, he had hurried to the radio station’s window to glimpse Roosevelt passing by in a parade—the first president Reagan had ever seen.”

• “FDR knew that the history of the nation’s past is part of its charter for the future,” Reagan, who voted for Roosevelt four times, told the luncheon. “Policies come and go. Leaders will pass from the stage. The enduring sail and compass of our nation is ‘We the people.’ When the American people are strong and confident, when their leaders hear their voices, America, whatever storms it might be weathering, will make it through.”
• “When their leaders hear their voices: Reagan’s insight was given new life . . . when American voters spoke up to protest the president and the party that has unabashedly—even gleefully—attempted to smash up the world embodied by Roosevelt and Reagan. The Trump Republican Party’s monumental midterm losses do not signal a sepia-toned return to a bygone age, but the Democratic victories are evidence that the battered heart of American democracy is still beating. Damaged yet durable, an understanding of the nation not as a blood-soaked battlefield but as a competitive covenant has been revived.”
• “However imperfect, the world of Roosevelt and Reagan had virtues the country rejected in 2016 and in 2024 but which the 2026 results show we are hungry for: decency, love of neighbor and a conviction that wild swings one way or the other are unwise, distracting and depleting.”

Wisely, Meacham observes, “What will happen is unknowable. But we do know this: If we choose to see each other as enemies to be destroyed rather than opponents to be debated, we put the entire American experiment at risk. The genius of the founding was to insulate the new nation from a Hobbesian state of nature. As Alexander Hamilton argued, the Constitution was a test of whether a government could be formed not by force and accident but by reason and deliberation. If we are to sustain the democratic project, we must understand America as a covenant, not as a killing ground . . . ‘Every generation of Americans has faced problems and every generation has overcome them,’ Reagan said in an East Room ceremony marking FDR’s centennial in 1982. ‘Like Franklin Roosevelt we know that for free men hope will always be a stronger force than fear, that we only fail when we allow ourselves to be boxed in by the limitations and errors of the past.’”

In conclusion, virtually everyone agrees that a democratic society must maintain a high degree of trust or the democratic institutions that undergird that society will collapse. For that reason, the belief in conspiracy theories and the subsequent breakdown in trust, so pervasive these last several years, are both sowing deep discord and divisiveness within our culture:  There is strife within every family, within every congregation, and it may take generations to recover. This split has nothing to do with theology or sound doctrine.  It has everything to do with embracing conspiracy theories propagated on social media and select cable news organizations. But, as believers, we begin our pursuit of truth with God’s Word in the context of His Church, where the basis for unity and trust is that Word.  We gather and fellowship around that Word; not social media, nor what the latest cable news guru suggested last evening.

I am reminded of something C. S. Lewis wrote about in “Learning in War-Time.”  In the essay, which was originally a sermon he preached in 1939, Lewis looked back at his experience of World War I: “The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.” Gathering for worship in our local churches, lighting the homemade wreath at Christmas, praying again and again and again for those suffering— should remind us that our God did not ignore the reality of the human condition.  He sent His Son, the Lord Jesus, to rescue us—from our fallenness, from our sin and from our hopelessness.  Jesus, His Word and the hope both bring form the basis for restoring our trust, a virtue that needs to be restored in American civilization.

See Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (27 October 2026); Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (7-8 November 2026); Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal (7-8 November 2026); Jon Meachem in the Wall Street Journal (7-8 November 2026); and David Brooks in The New York Times (14 January 2021).