Elon Musk’s $400 million midterm spending spree produced almost nothing for Republicans, according to WIRED’s analysis. Candidates backed by his America PAC lost 20 races and won just one, meaning more than 99 cents of every traceable dollar went to a losing effort. The scale of the failure became clear as Democrats flipped both the House and the Senate, surpassing the four-seat Senate gain and three-seat House gain they needed.
A Blue Wave Built on Discontent
The results cut across deep-red territory. Trump-endorsed Darline Graham lost in South Carolina, and longtime Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, once seen as a safe incumbent, was in a race too close to call. Victories stretched from Maine and North Carolina to Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Kansas and Michigan. Political observers described the swing as a reversal of the coalition gains Trump celebrated in 2024, with battleground states moving roughly 10 points back toward Democrats.
Inside the White House, finger-pointing began almost immediately. Trump blamed candidate quality and the fact that he was not on the ballot, and he also criticized Fox News. But the MAGA base largely rejected those explanations. Right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh called Trump an 80-year-old lame duck president and described the outcome as a political catastrophe of historic proportions. Others focused on the unpopular Iran war, which they said drove higher prices and alienated voters.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth emerged as an early scapegoat. According to reporting, his updates on the Iran war were so rosy that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought their own intelligence briefings to get an accurate . That disconnect, sources suggested, may have encouraged Trump to continue a conflict that hurt Republicans at the polls.
Money Without Traction
Musk’s America PAC spent close to half a billion dollars this cycle, effectively operating as a shadow Republican National Committee. His biggest focus was Texas, his home base, where he poured in the most time and resources. It yielded nothing: Ken Paxton lost by a wide margin, and Gina Hinojosa, running on James Talarico’s coattails, also fell in the governor’s race. Even the ground game America PAC financed could not offset the drag of Musk’s own brand, which had become toxic for Republicans after the DOGE era. Candidates who accepted his money risked being tagged as doing the bidding of an unelected billionaire.
Musk’s spending may still buy him influence in 2028, when he could play kingmaker in a presidential primary. But the midterms showed that money alone could not overcome voter anger at Trump, the war and the cost of living.
Data Centers Become a Ballot-Box Issue
Voters sent another clear message on technology. Of 40 ballot measures concerning AI data center projects, 39 restricted them. An NBC exit poll found nearly a quarter of voters said data centers were crucial to their vote. The issue united rural and traditionally Republican communities around concerns about water use, noise, higher electricity bills and job losses during an affordability crisis.
In South Carolina, Darline Graham was dubbed Data Center Darline for taking money from data center PACs. In Montana, a Democratic newcomer, Sam Forstag, saw his opponent branded with the data center label in a historically Republican district. Democrats turned the issue into a party-wide rallying cry, and Jon Ossoff used his Georgia Senate victory speech to call out Silicon Valley titans who build bunkers and warn about AI’s existential risks.
The pro-AI super PAC network Leading the Future, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, spread money across both parties’ primaries. But its impact was limited, and the network appeared to be laying groundwork for 2028 rather than shaping this cycle.
Election Deniers Go Quiet
Perhaps the most striking silence came from election deniers. Hundreds of candidates who had backed Trump’s false claims about 2020 were on ballots, including Andy Biggs in Arizona’s governor race, Mike Rogers in Michigan’s Senate race and Jim Marchant in Nevada’s secretary of state race. Most lost, several by wide margins. In their concession speeches, they made no mention of fraud, vote rigging or noncitizens. Advocacy groups such as Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and funder Patrick Byrne also stayed silent.
The quiet may reflect simple math: the defeats were too large to dispute. Trump himself accepted the results early on election night, and his allies followed his lead. Whether the movement has run out of energy or is simply lying low remains unclear, but some involved have grown tired of the grift, according to comments in Telegram channels.
Looking Toward 2028
The midterms scrambled presidential timelines. JD Vance had been expected to announce soon after the election, with donors lined up, but the Republican wipeout makes an early launch politically difficult. Rubio, long seen as deferring to Vance, now faces a complicated choice about whether and when to run. Trump’s endorsement remains powerful with the MAGA base, but its influence over congressional candidates has weakened; some Republicans, including Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie, have already shown willingness to break with him.
Democrats, meanwhile, face a wide-open field featuring Ossoff, Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. New members of Congress are promising aggressive oversight, though subpoena power will run into a hostile executive branch and a Justice Department unlikely to enforce contempt citations. For now, the midterms delivered a clear verdict: voters rejected Trump, Big Tech and data centers, and no amount of money could change that.
