Republicans lost their majorities in both chambers of Congress in the US midterm elections held on November 3, and the scale of the defeat has left the party searching for a way forward under a diminished President Donald Trump.
The result carries weight for Tokyo, whose security policy rests on close coordination with Washington. A president who has lost Congress in his second term enters his final two years with less room to hold his party together, let alone to make the long-term commitments allies count on.
In Michigan, a Senate race widely expected to be close ended with the Republican candidate about 7 percentage points behind a progressive left Democrat, Vance Patrick, a local Republican official in the Midwestern state, told the Mainichi Shimbun. "Honestly, I thought it would be much closer," Patrick said on November 4.
Just before the vote, a Democratic House member who had lost a primary to the progressive candidate endorsed the Republican, and some saw that as an advantage. Patrick said the campaign had also done substantial door-to-door work on top of the endorsement. "But this time the war with Iran and soaring gasoline prices blew all of it away," he said.
A 'near-extinction' defeat
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told a news conference on November 4 that in many places the result was close to an "extinction-level blow." "Not many people thought it would be this bad," he said.
DeSantis, a leading party figure who ran for the Republican presidential nomination and is not contesting the governor's race this time because of term limits, said the political situation over the next two years will work against Trump. He added that the effect would not stop at those two years, which run to the next presidential election.
The party that formed around Trump's dominance is now showing cracks, and the contest to succeed him has grown less clear. The Mainichi Shimbun reported that Trump himself has blamed Iran for the defeat, and that finger-pointing over responsibility is spreading inside his administration. A separate Mainichi report said he has acknowledged the loss.
The Mainichi Shimbun also reported that Democrats took back both chambers for the first time in four years, a wider win than pre-election forecasts had suggested.