Republicans suffered a historic wipeout in last week's midterms, and one prominent New York Times columnist argues there was evidence a full year in advance that such a brutal swing against President Donald Trump was coming.

As results continue to trickle in — final seat totals can shift modestly in the days after Election Night as remaining ballots are tallied — Democrats are expected to end the midterms with a staggering 56 Senate seats and around 260 House seats, having handily won majorities in both chambers before Election Night wrapped up. The blue wave — widely described as a "blue tsunami" — now stands as the worst midterm performance for the GOP since 1974, the first election cycle after the Watergate scandal. Midterm elections, held halfway through a president's term, have historically functioned as referendums on the party holding the White House, which makes the size of this gap a direct measure of where Trump stood with voters heading into Election Day.

In the latest of his series of videos interpreting last week's results, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie set out a timeline for how the public soured on Trump after he returned to the White House with a popular-vote win and an approval rating above water. The turn, he argued, did not begin with the high-profile scandals at the start of 2026, as many pundits have claimed, but back in 2025. He pointed to a "steady deterioration" in Trump's approval ratings from the very start of his second term.

"Although people do not express it in these terms, I think what that represents is a reaction to the president's authoritarian designs," Bouie said. "One of the first big pivot points in public opinion was the attempt to rendition Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT in El Salvador, that weird gulag prison place. The administration touted their renditions of immigrants to CECOT. It was a big part of their public-facing message."

"And the public did not like it," he continued. "Did not like it so much that the Supreme Court, full of people happy to grant discretion to the president when it comes to the use of immigration authority, refused to let the administration ship people to that prison. What you see throughout, with every single gambit, with every single attempt to consolidate some kind of authoritarian regime in this country, is the public recoiling. They recoiled at the National Guard deployments. They recoiled at the aggressive use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection. They recoiled at the attacks on universities. They recoiled at the ugliness of the assault on civil society. They recoiled at Elon Musk and DOGE in that effort to destroy the federal bureaucracy."

Confronted with that unrelenting tide, voters went to the polls in the 2025 off-year elections and handed Republicans decisive defeats in places like New Jersey, Virginia and New York City. Those statewide races, held the year after each presidential election, have long been watched as the first broad readings of the political climate between presidential cycles. As Bouie noted, the margins of those Democratic victories align closely with the popular vote margin Democrats just posted in the midterms — a signal, he argued, that Trump's fate was already sealed last November.

"It's one thing after another, one thing piling up after another that is driving the president's decline," Bouie continued. "Such that by last November in the Virginia and New Jersey statewide races, you saw 12, 13, 14-point swings toward the Democrats. Swings that replicated themselves all across the country in other places where there were special elections. At the time, I thought those swings were indicative of something happening below the surface, of a public that had grown truly tired of the president. Others were skeptical. But what's clear is that I was right. What's clear is that that was the case, that those swings were harbingers of things to come."

Many people, including Vice President JD Vance, have argued that the Iran war was the single overriding issue behind the GOP's defeat on Tuesday. Bouie countered that the war instead made it impossible for Trump to turn things around with voters to any meaningful degree. With House and state special elections continuing to fill vacancies in the months ahead, further data points will show whether the 2025 swing pattern held steady through 2026.