Vanity Fair Washington correspondent Aidan McLaughlin spent Election Night at a bar that has become a friendly spot for the influx of Republicans into the capital after the 2024 elections. The venue offered themed drink specials — “The Elephant in the Room” and “The Senate Majority Martini” — but what was billed as a watch party quickly took on the air of a wake.

The evening opened in triumph. Young men in the informal Trump uniform — blue suits and red ties — strutted around the bar as glasses clinked and music played. McLaughlin described a kind of intoxicating certainty in the room: the polls were wrong, the crowd insisted, undercounting MAGA voters again just as they had in 2016, and the night would not be as bad as feared.

Then the returns began to arrive. One Senate seat slipped away, then another. House districts that had seemed safely red turned blue. The happy voices quieted and the laughter thinned, and the same young operatives soon stood solemnly around the political corpse of their majority, murmuring their shock to one another as the GOP’s electoral obituary scrolled relentlessly across the chyrons.

McLaughlin reported that one operative, outside on a smoke break with a pint of beer, looked down and saw that “Darline Graham just plummeted on Polymarket.” Prediction markets have been cast as a new form of instantaneous polling, though in practice they reflect what people are willing to spend money to bet on — and the odds shift quickly.

“I hate my f—— life right now. Everything just sucks. Jesus Christ we’re gonna lose it all,” the man said, exhaling smoke.

Another partygoer, a White House staffer wearing a red hat with “45/47” on the side — a reference to Trump serving as both the 45th and 47th president — and “WINNING” on the front, admitted he had been more optimistic earlier. “If we lose Texas, it’s a catastrophe,” he said. Not long afterward, the Decision Desk called the Texas U.S. Senate race for James Talarico — while the music playing was Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas.” The group noted the cruel irony. Such race calls are projections based on partial returns and modeling, with official certification still to come.

“I’m not trying to crash out,” McLaughlin quoted one of the men as saying. He is a Republican organizer for the GOP. “But we nominated HITLER with DOWN SYNDROME. And guess what!? He lost! He lost! And now we lose a Supreme Court Justice. It is a f—— disaster.”

The scale of the swing stood out against recent history. When the Tea Party wave swept the House and Senate in 2010, it shifted six U.S. Senate seats from Democrats to Republicans. As of Wednesday afternoon, Democrats were at seven, and it remained possible they could also win Mississippi and Alaska. Midterm cycles have historically cost the president’s party seats, but Senate control carries stakes beyond the seat count: the chamber’s majority determines which side can advance or block judicial nominees — the very loss the operative was lamenting. With Mississippi and Alaska still undecided, the final size of the swing, and with it the shape of the GOP’s internal reckoning, had yet to be settled.

A source close to Trump texted McLaughlin that their side “got SMOKED. BIGLY,” a reference to a word Trump used frequently during the 2016 campaign. “He’s not the kingmaker he was, or still thinks he is. This is a referendum on him,” the source said. The calls, McLaughlin observed, were now coming from inside the house.

McLaughlin wrote that since Trump’s return to the presidency, Americans have consistently watched nearly every policy proposal curdle into catastrophe: tariffs that taxed the very consumers Trump promised to protect, a trade war with Canada that turned neighbors into adversaries, and a war in Iran that swallowed treasure, weapons, credibility and lives. However much Trump draped each move in the language of strength and the American flag, that flag had become the noose around the necks of the GOP.

Meanwhile, uptown, Democrats were chanting “USA! USA! USA!” McLaughlin watched as “Two burly men embraced.” One of them shouted: “Susan Collins is f—— gone!”

Source: Alternet