Republicans lost the House and the Senate on Tuesday. By Thursday morning, they were on Newsmax explaining why, and the word of the week was "messaging."

"I don't think that we were as good as we should have been in terms of messaging," Harriet Hageman said. She won her Wyoming Senate race by 30 points. "We've actually accomplished a lot, especially in the 119th Congress, but I just don't think that we were all talking out of the same playbook."

"I think what happened is the American people decided that we didn't care about them. I don't think that's true," Randy Fine said. "We did pass some good things, but I think we also had a massive messaging issue."

That's the theory. Voters understood it wrong. If Republicans had only explained themselves better, people would have seen how much they cared.

There's a simpler explanation, and it's on the record.

What they actually did

On July 3, 2025, the House passed Trump's budget bill by 218 to 214. Hageman voted yes. So did Fine. So did the three other Republicans in this story: Glenn Grothman, Andy Harris and Mike Lawler.

That law is not a message. It's a set of rules that hit people's lives. The Congressional Budget Office predicts about 7.5 million people will lose their healthcare coverage by 2034 under its new Medicaid eligibility rules. At least 2.6 million of them would lose it even though they're still eligible.

Then the extra help that millions of families used to afford their health plans expired at the end of 2025. What enrollees pay in premiums rose an average of 58% in 2026.

Add the war. Trump launched it in February without Congress voting to authorize it, and as we reported the day after the election, it was still going when the polls closed. By October, the government's numbers showed fuel oil, which includes diesel, up 72% for the year and gas up 34%.

People didn't need a playbook to notice any of that. They could see it on a premium notice and at the pump.

Everyone but themselves

Here is how each of the five explained the loss.

Harriet Hageman said Republicans should have hammered Democrats on energy. "The Democrat Party is not the party of affordability," she said, while acknowledging "$6 a gallon diesel" and saying she comes from a ranching family that feels it. Republicans held the White House, the House and the Senate when that diesel price arrived. Her answer was to blame the party that didn't.

Randy Fine said Republicans "needed to make people understand that these problems were created over a very long time." He then said the party's job in the minority will "largely be messaging." To his credit, he also said that "when you fail, you have to accept responsibility for it," and that continuing what Republicans have done "is simply not going to work." In that interview, he didn't name anything he'd vote differently on.

Glenn Grothman told Newsmax that Republicans didn't come up "with anything new or different." He criticized candidates for repeatedly promoting Trump's budget bill, which he voted for, because it passed more than a year ago, and said they needed new initiatives. His complaint about the law was that it was old. He also said Republicans "did a poor job of explaining why we even have immigration laws," and that Trump's boasting may have cost the party 3 or 4 points.

Andy Harris went back to Joe Biden. "Well, look, the bottom line is we're still recovering from the Biden inflation blitz," he said on Newsmax. "It's going to take years to get over that." The Daily Beast reports that inflation had cooled to 3 percent when Biden left office in January 2025, and stood at 3.7 percent when voters went to the polls. An Associated Press exit poll it cited found six in 10 voters said unusually high costs were more because of Trump's policies. Harris did admit the Iran war and fuel prices played a part: "People felt it, and they responded at the ballot box." He also said Republicans have to pass spending bills before they lose power, so Democrats can't add "hundreds of billions of dollars." Weeks earlier, he'd told a debate crowd that Democrats' environmental rules were to blame for fuel prices, and they laughed.

Mike Lawler, who lost his New York seat, offered the most memorable version. CNN's Manu Raju said Lawler told him he "ran as good a campaign as he possibly could" and that "the bottom fell out." When Raju asked more, Lawler said: "Jesus Christ could have run and would have lost."

Why this matters now

This isn't only about hurt feelings on cable news. A party that decides it lost on messaging has decided it doesn't need to change what it votes for.

Hageman moves to the Senate in January. Fine, Grothman and Harris all return to the House. The Medicaid work rules in the budget bill start in January too in states like Arkansas, so much of the law's damage is still ahead of the people it will hit.

Adding it up

Harriet Hageman, Randy Fine, Glenn Grothman, Andy Harris and Mike Lawler all voted yes on Trump's budget bill on July 3, 2025. The Congressional Budget Office predicts its Medicaid rules will cost about 7.5 million people their coverage by 2034. After Republicans lost both chambers, these five blamed messaging, a lack of new ideas, Trump's tone, Joe Biden, and conditions so bad that "Jesus Christ could have run and would have lost." None of the statements we read named that vote as a mistake.

Source

Sen.-Elect Hageman to Newsmax: GOP Failed on Messaging — Newsmax, via Yahoo