Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed a question from reporters ahead of the midterm elections about whether President Trump’s foreign policies would be changing if Republicans lost one or both chambers of Congress.
“Congress plays a role- there’s no doubt about it–but the central role belongs to the executive branch,” Rubio, who was a serving U.S. senator from Florida when he took the country’s top diplomatic post, told reporters Saturday.
A reporter had asked Rubio if he thought his job would be harder if Democrats controlled one or both chambers of Congress.
“It won’t influence or change the president’s directives in terms of what he was elected to do,” said Rubio, who was in Atlanta to host the two-day G20 foreign ministers’ meeting.
By gaining control of one or both chambers, Democrats could use appropriations and policy bills to limit some of Trump’s initiatives and delay his nominees.
“The previous president, Biden, had a Republican Senate to deal with at one point. President Obama had to deal with a Republican majority at some point,” Rubio said, per the Wall Street Journal.
“So it’s not unique to have divided power in our system.”
Democrats routed Republicans in the midterms and, come January, will control the House and the Senate, though by what margins has yet to be determined.
Democrats have already picked up more than 25 House seats, and their majority in the Senate thus far is 54-44.
According to Vice President JD Vance, foreign policy — specifically, the Iran war — likely cost Republicans their majorities.
Vance blamed the party’s staggering defeat on the Iran war in a lengthy X post on Wednesday, an assessment Trump later agreed with publicly.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was “composition”—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we’re going to shock the world? “No,” he told me. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1. End the war
2. Focus on cost of living/inflation
3. Put America First
4. Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
He added: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.”
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
