With votes still being tallied — and some races still too close to call — California Republicans say it’s still too early for their 2026 midterm post-mortem.
“We’re in that period where people have died, and we haven’t buried them yet,” said Jon Fleischman, a longtime political strategist and former California Republican Party chair.
In other words: Republicans need some time to reflect on the election — and that won’t really happen until vote counting has finished and the election dust has fully settled.
By the time polls closed in California on Tuesday night, it was already fairly evident that Democrats were poised to dominate the midterms across the country. By the end of the week, Democrats had secured control of the U.S. House and Senate next year, picking up seats in relatively conservative states, such as Texas, Missouri and South Carolina.
Back in already deep-blue California, Democrats’ midterm momentum was evident as well.
Last year’s partisan redistricting plan — the voter-approved effort to make certain House seats more easily winnable for Democrats — worked as Gov. Gavin Newsom and party leaders had planned. And several legislative races across the state that were either held by Republican incumbents or were historically red saw the GOP candidates either struggling to maintain leads or outright losing.
But votes are still being counted.
So it’s those undetermined legislative races, in Southern California in particular, that have Republican leaders and strategists pumping the brakes on any in-depth election assessment quite yet.
“It’s still too soon for an assessment,” said Fleischman, pointing to four legislative races in Orange County that are still close contests. “It remains to be seen if the blue wave lapped at the shores of Orange County, but didn’t land.”
“That story can’t be told yet,” he said.
Will O’Neill, who chairs the Orange County Republican Party, had similar sentiments.
Right now, the former Newport Beach mayor said, the focus is on making sure ballots are counted, and those with issues are fixed so they can be tallied.
“There are a ton of lessons to be learned,” O’Neill said. “You can’t lose like this at the national level, at the state level, and not have some grit and resolve to keep moving forward.”
Even still, O’Neill does see a silver lining for California Republicans: wins at the local level.
Knowing that midterm elections, historically, don’t favor the party in control of the White House, O’Neill said the Orange County GOP last year planned to localize its efforts — something he said became more important after voters approved redistricting.
The party, he said, didn’t anticipate oodles of money coming in to help candidates for congressional races in the post-Proposition 50 world, so Republicans took a “bottom-up approach” to the midterms in Orange County.
“We spent a lot of time recruiting candidates at the local level, training first-time candidates on getting out and running, and spending a lot of time getting out and talking to candidates about coordinating and getting out the vote for each other,” O’Neill said.
“That worked,” he said.
The party saw successes in several city council contests, and most mayoral candidates endorsed by the OCGOP were winning their respective races by Friday afternoon, including incumbent Stephanie Klopfenstein in Garden Grove and Victor Cabral in San Clemente.
In Costa Mesa, the GOP-endorsed Mike Buley was leading the mayoral race, considered a flip for the Republican Party.
“I would love to have some other seats, don’t get me wrong, but the bench is getting pretty strong for us,” O’Neill said. “And in a blue wave cycle, retaining and flipping some key races is pretty good.”
Orange County should be an example for Republicans across the state, said former GOP Rep. Mimi Walters, who served four years in the House before being ousted in the 2018 midterms by progressive Katie Porter.
“We have to get back to the basics and get back to the grassroots level, and we have to be patient,” said Walters.
Who’s to blame? Trump, the media or the GOP?
While Fleischman cautioned that it’s still too early for a consensus on the midterms, he said he’s “clear-eyed enough” to consider the Republican rout a referendum on President Donald Trump.
“People are unhappy with affordability, which is the major issue that drove voters,” Fleischman said. “And the president made a lot of commitments and didn’t perform on those commitments.”
“There’s nothing very normal about Donald Trump, and he’s very hyperbolic and aggressive,” he added. “To the extent he wants to talk about a reflecting pool instead of people’s grocery prices, you inflame that and get more of a pushback than would be normal for a president in the midterms of his second term.”
Representatives for the California Republican Party declined to comment for this story.
But Corrin Rankin, the state party’s chair, said in an Instagram post that the GOP will “fight the radical socialist agenda of the Democratic Party every step of the way.”
“Democrats, the media, left-leaning pollsters, and naysayers in our own party have spent years telling our donors, volunteers, and voters that we don’t have a chance in California, depressing our engagement, and making this a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Rankin said in the post.
Walters, meanwhile, said the midterms are a clear sign that the California GOP needs to rebuild.
“We have to get back to the basics,” Walters said. “There was a dissatisfaction with the direction of the party itself.
“My hope is that this election has sent a message to leaders in the Republican Party that we need to have a reset of what we stand for.”
“Every time there is an election, it always comes down to the cost of living and whether people feel like they are better off today than even a couple of years ago,” she added. “It’s those kitchen table issues, if you will, that people care most about.”
“Clearly, people don’t feel as if they’re better off than two years ago,” Walters said.