At a moment of opportunity for the party, its long-feuding factions are seizing on the midterm results to make their case for tacking to the center or to the left.

The Commerce Department has approved dozens of Chinese companies to handle Nvidia’s H200 chips, some of which have ties to firms under sanctions over national security.

Incoming senators are nearly 15 years younger than departing ones, on average. But the chamber’s overall age isn’t shifting much.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development credited President Trump, while homeless advocacy groups said that so-called Housing First policies of his predecessors played a part.

The president has bulldozed through obstacles as he has sought to remake the face of Washington. But newly empowered Democrats and angry judges are setting up a high-stakes showdown.

A wave of high-ranking women have left the Trump administration in the past year. Many were replaced by men.

Democrats’ wins in the Lone Star state exceeded their wildest dreams.

President Donald Trump's decision to name hard-line loyalist Stephen Miller as his top aide cemented what many Republicans were already privately fearing: There will be no party-wide GOP reckoning with this week's midterm bloodbath.

Instead, with Trump still in office for another two years, most have grown resigned to the reality that the president is going to lean in on a confrontational approach with Congress — and is not willing to change course.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and inside the Trump administration are questioning how and whether they can break with the president now after having green-lit much of his agenda, according to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, senior aides and Trump officials interviewed for this story, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s future.

Trump's decision Friday to elevate Miller, the architect of his unpopular mass deportation policy and an advocate of fierce partisan confrontation, crystallized the frustration.

“There needs to be some self-reflection for Republicans,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said in an interview about the midterm losses Friday morning. “There should be some heads rolling at the White House because we lost badly.”

Hours later, heads did roll. Trump announced Miller would replace Susie Wiles as his new chief of staff.

“Horrible decision,” Stutzman said in response.

One House Republican, when informed that Trump had named Miller his chief of staff, replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”

The immediate aftermath of the election has sharpened the GOP’s core issue for the past decade: They are struggling to navigate the man who they reshaped their entire identity around, and whose record low approval with voters helped to fuel generational losses within the party.

The Iran war is another area where some Republicans are having regrets. Vice President JD Vance identified it as the main reason for the party’s defeat in his election post-mortem.

The problem with Vance’s assessment, one senior Hill Republican said, is, “we’ve been fucking voting for the war since March — because they told us to.”

Republicans and Trump advisers expect the president to wield massive influence in the 2028 GOP primaries, another reason many are staying quiet.

"Everyone is staring at each other and wondering who will speak up and blame Trump first," said one GOP operative who worked on a battleground race Democrats won. They, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly. "But we've been here before. I'm not holding my breath. He still controls the party and its primaries, at least for now." 

The White House responded to POLITICO's request for comment by referring to Trump's praise for Miller on Friday. The RNC declined to comment.

Miller wrote on social media that he is "honored beyond words to serve as [Trump's] White House Chief of Staff" and "the mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our President."

How much lawmakers will distance themselves will be put to the test quickly: House Republicans will have an immediate opportunity to break with Trump and the war next week, when Rep. Thomas Massie said in an interview with POLITICO he will trigger his articles of impeachment against Secretary Pete Hegseth. “There are a lot of questions about Hegseth,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Friday.

Some senior Republicans are privately nudging Trump officials to ditch Hegseth before the vote, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. The White House is sticking by Hegseth so far, however.

House Republicans will also have a chance to elect new leadership next week, including a new chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. But in a sign of what’s to come, none of the candidates — including Reps. Brian Jack (R-Ga.) and Rudy Yakym (R-Ind.) — nor any other GOP leadership candidates have publicly suggested doing more to break with Trump.

A small group of Republicans on Capitol Hill have privately declared, as of Tuesday night, that “MAGA is over,” and it’s time for a “reset,” as one House GOP aide put it — and yet it’s a sentiment no prominent Republican is willing to say publicly.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), one of the longest-serving members of the House, said he wasn’t going to “blame” others for Tuesday’s losses, which left him as the sole GOP incumbent survivor in his home state. Asked if Republicans were dragged down by the president, Smith replied: “I don’t want to answer that.”

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) went a step further. He declined to name Trump, but he said in an interview that he was tired of GOP leaders “ignoring” voters — a remarkable position for a party that Trump transformed into a working-class coalition.

"We had a lot of Republican leaders out there saying ‘everything's fine.’ And you kind of had the boomer generation saying, 'Well, yeah, back in my day, interest rates were 15%, so everything's good,’” said Davidson, a 56-year-old former Army Ranger. “Well, you had a lot of hardworking young people who felt really ignored, and they they went to the polls and said, 'Stop ignoring us.'"

Davidson said Republicans need to start discussing their problems quickly, or suffer the electoral consequences again.

"Bad news doesn't get better with time. So avoiding talking about something doesn't solve the problem," he said. He said Vance “walked a pretty good line” by being “candid” in his election post-mortem Wednesday.

Vance and other potential 2028 presidential contenders like Sen. Ted Cruz don’t have much time to waste if they want to chart a new path away from Trump. Cruz issued his own post-mortem that included a call to focus more on voters’ economic concerns. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “this midterm was a rebuke of the president and Congress.”

French Hill, the powerful Financial Services Committee Chair who narrowly survived a strong Democratic challenge in his own deep-red Arkansas seat Tuesday night, pointed to “President Trump’s unfavorability” which hit “races across the country.” Hill added: “He will be considered a lame duck, and that often has members of both political parties looking out at who will be the standard-bearers in the 2028 presidential election.”

Most others have remained silent in public.

One thing is certain: The utter devastation in deep-red seats is stirring deep anger among many Hill Republicans, who believe something needs to change.

It’s fueling private recriminations at Trump’s political operation that his advisers didn’t take early warnings seriously about the extent of the damage in states like North Carolina. Trump’s now-former chief of staff Susie Wiles will join his political operation, the president announced Friday.

Trump's team has blamed "candidate quality" for the losses, instead of the president himself.

“Candidate quality matters. Unless you’re running for the U.S. Senate. They apparently don’t care if you would lose to a pinecone,” said a House Republican, referring to Trump's hand-picked North Carolina Senate nominee Michael Whatley.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee declined to comment.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who leads the Senate campaign arm and saw Democrats flip a Senate seat in his own state, did not answer reporters’ questions on Thursday. The South Carolina Republican has a policy of not talking to reporters in the halls — and he didn’t start when POLITICO and others asked why Republicans lost so badly.

Back in August, some Republicans in seats Trump won by double digits were already telling the White House to keep the president away from their districts. Others publicly broke from the White House on mass deportations and the Iran war.

NRCC Chair Richard Hudson had largely dismissed those concerns when POLITICO asked him in a hallway interview on Sept. 1.

“Based on our polling, the president's a net positive in every district. And I've been encouraging him to get out and do events and do rallies. I'm going to continue to do that,” Hudson said. “I think the more he talks about his record and incredible achievements he's made over the last Congress, I think the better.”

Then, Hudson lost his own reelection bid. He is the first ever NRCC chair in history to be defeated in a general election.

Mia McCarthy, Andrew Howard and Samuel Benson contributed to this report.

The architect of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign, Mr. Miller has been the public face of many of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.

U.S. intelligence concluded that Alice Huang, a Chinese business executive who developed a close relationship with Nvidia’s leader, was an asset of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has blamed high electricity prices in Democrat-led states on climate policies. Prices do tend to be higher in blue states than red states, but climate policies explain at most a modest portion of the price difference.

Longstanding structural and geographical factors — combined with more recent price increases from wildfires, extreme weather and, in certain areas, anticipated rapid load growth from data centers — have also contributed to high electricity prices in certain states and regions.

Wright’s recent comments have emphasized political differences between states while omitting many of these other factors, at times misleadingly blaming large price rises on climate policies.

“Electricity prices are almost 50% higher in states run by Democrats,” he said Oct. 1 on Fox News. “For 17 years since President Obama came to office, the Democrat position has been to constrict the growth of energy and drive the prices up so Americans could afford less and we would solve climate change.”

In other interviews, the secretary has suggested state-level requirements for adopting renewable energy — called renewable portfolio standards — are to blame for the price differential.

“Subsidizing and forcing wind and solar onto electricity grids around the country has been a disaster,” he said Oct. 28 on the Bloomberg show “Balance of Power.” “You can see it in the states with renewable portfolio standards that have forced wind and solar. They have 50% higher electricity prices than the states that don’t have those. I haven’t met anyone that wants their electrical bill to go up 50%.”

“Half of the states have renewable portfolio [standards], half of them don’t,” Wright also said at a Sept. 23 event hosted by the New York Times. “Forty-five percent more expensive electricity in the states that have them. That’s not coincidence.”

Wright’s math approximately checks out when comparing average retail electricity prices in states with and without current renewable portfolio standards, or states with Republican versus Democratic governors as of fall 2026. But renewable portfolio standards have not on their own made electricity prices rise by 50%, experts told us, nor do all states with these policies have higher-than average prices. 

“The correlation is real, but this does not establish causality,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Fischer J. Espiritu Argosino and Christopher R. Knittel told us in an email. Their 2025 working paper found that renewable portfolio standards aren’t a driver of electricity prices once other differences between states are accounted for. 

Other research has indicated a partial role for renewable portfolio standards in raising electricity rates in certain states, particularly if the standards are very strict. Still, “[m]ost of the electricity price differences between Democratic and Republican states are not attributable to RPS,” Devin Hartman, president of the Lighthouse Energy Institute, a newly founded energy policy nonprofit, told us.

The data also do not indicate a relationship between renewables in general and rising prices, despite Wright’s claim at the New York Times event that everywhere renewable energy has had “meaningful penetration has meaningfully higher electricity prices.”

“That’s just demonstrably false,” Paul Donohoo-Vallett, an independent energy consultant who previously worked for the Department of Energy, told us, pointing to Texas, Iowa, South Dakota and New Mexico as examples of places that added relatively high levels of wind and solar in recent years while maintaining relatively low prices. “There’s no inherent connection between more wind and solar and higher prices,” he said.

“Renewable portfolio standards or net-zero goals lead states to force reliable power sources, such as coal-fired power plants, to close, which drives up prices,” DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told us, in response to questions about the data supporting a link between the renewable portfolio standards and electricity prices.

As for the counterexamples of states with relatively low prices and high renewable energy penetration, they “still have strong reliance on coal, nuclear and/or natural gas power which prevents their electricity prices from being higher,” he said. “In that sense, penetration of wind and solar is not as meaningful there.”

Structural Reasons for Expensive Electricity

The high average electricity prices among blue states is driven largely by a few specific areas of the country: Hawaii, California and a group of states clustered in the Northeast. Electricity prices have been elevated in these areas for many decades. Experts pointed to several major factors that help explain why prices are higher in these states.

For Hawaii, a major underlying cause is geography. The island relies heavily on oil to produce electricity, which puts it at the whims of the global oil market. The state’s electricity prices have soared recently in part due to the war in Iran.

Similarly, isolation from the rest of the country and a large number of unconnected microgrids contribute to high prices in Alaska, a Republican-led state without renewable portfolio standards that nonetheless has high electricity prices.

Geography plays a role in the lower 48 states, too. “Utility-scale wind and solar resources are predominantly located in Republican-led Midwestern and Southwestern states, whereas Democrat-led Northeast states are highly reliant on pipeline-capacity-constrained natural gas,” Michelle Levinson, a senior manager at the nonprofit research organization World Resources Institute, told us.

“A large number of blue states are small geographic states that are all clustered in New England, which just happens to not have any natural gas production,” Donohoo-Vallett said. This leads these states to pay elevated prices for natural gas to be piped in via limited pipelines, he said. 

Price increases may in some cases be related to implicit climate policies, Hartman said. In the case of New England, “policy decisions that suppressed pipeline development” played into high regional natural gas costs, he said.

In California, wildfires have been the “big driver” of increasing costs, Hartman said. Wildfire risk has driven up transmission and distribution costs in the West, while also leading to liability costs, he said. Transmission lines carry electricity over long distances while distribution lines take it the rest of the way to customers.

“California stands out among all states with a massive 64% increase in rates since 2019 (30% after adjusting for inflation), driven by significant and unique wildfire-related expenses accounting for 40% of the rate increase at least through 2024,” an April 2026 report from the research firm the Rhodium Group concluded.

In 2018, Pacific Gas and Electric Company equipment started the deadliest fire in California’s history, the Camp Fire, one of a number of highly destructive fires in recent history in the state to be started by electrical equipment. 

In addition, a “big issue is transmission is old, so replacing that aging infrastructure is expensive, especially in New England,” Hartman said. New England has older transmission infrastructure than some other areas of the country, he said, and it is also relatively expensive there to upgrade infrastructure due to high land values, labor and taxes. California and the Northeast have also had relatively high distribution cost increases, Hartman said.

In some cases, the aging of equipment and wildfires or extreme weather come together to necessitate spending, said Donohoo-Vallett, who was the first author of the Rhodium Group report. Aging infrastructure is “colliding with increasing threats from extreme weather and climate change,” he explained. “That’s just accelerating the need to replace this stuff.”

For example, he said, the Camp Fire occurred after a metal hook holding up a century-old transmission line broke. “The power price had been low for a long time because we just weren’t paying for this stuff,” Donohoo-Vallett said.

Between 2019 and 2025, average residential electricity prices nationwide rose 33%, but only 5.6% above the rate of inflation, according to a July analysis from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to which Donohoo-Vallett contributed. LBNL is a government research center affiliated with the DOE. However, residential prices rose significantly more in California and some New England and mid-Atlantic states.

The LBNL researchers cited recovery and mitigation from wildfires and extreme weather, as well as the need to replace or improve aging distribution and transmission infrastructure, as top drivers of electricity price increases above inflation during this period.

Madalsa Singh, an energy researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology, also pointed out that tying average electricity prices to state-level policies ignores the wide variation within states in prices, which are set by utilities. 

Singh and her colleagues studied electricity prices in California from 2019 through 2023, finding that electricity prices were relatively flat in publicly owned utilities while investor-owned utilities had price increases that made them “some of the most expensive power providers in the United States.”

“Neighboring utilities in states — red or blue — can have different price trajectories,” Singh said.

Renewable Portfolio Standards and Prices

As we said, analyses have come to mixed conclusions on whether renewable portfolio standards have contributed to electricity price increases.

A 2025 working paper by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tried to rigorously answer this question by comparing states to themselves over time between 1998 and 2023. The researchers found that even though having more stringent renewable portfolio standards shows a “clear, positive correlation” with higher electricity prices, the standards are not the cause of this pattern.

In an aerial view, high voltage power lines run through a sub-station along the electrical power grid on Jan. 14 in Miami, Florida. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

After controlling for both longstanding, fixed differences between states and national drivers of price increases during the period of the study, “the escalation of a state’s RPS has no detectable effect on residential electricity prices,” Knittel and Argosino told us.

Instead, they said, “states that already had high electricity prices were more likely to adopt an RPS in the first place … creating the correlation.” Further factors continued to raise electricity prices as more states adopted the standards and strengthened them. But again, this doesn’t mean the standards were the cause. Rather, “the big rate increases over the past two decades line up with waves of capital spending on transmission and distribution, not with renewable mandates,” the researchers said.

Other analyses have found that RPS does increase prices in certain circumstances – although not to the degree that Wright claims. 

Noah Kaufman, an economist and senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told us that “policies that mandate increases in renewables, regardless of costs, do tend to increase electricity prices,” but that such rules “have not been the main driver of increases in electricity prices in recent years.”

As of 2026, 27 states had standards mandating a certain level of renewables, according to LBNL, and most of those states are controlled by Democrats. (A larger number of states has had RPS at some point in the past, including some red states that have gone on to have robust levels of renewable energy outside of any requirements.)

Current policies vary, with states requiring anywhere from 9% to 67% renewable energy in a utility’s energy mix in 2026. States have various ways to allow utilities to comply with the policies, such as requiring them to have a certain number of renewable energy credits, which they can either obtain by acquiring or generating energy from renewables or simply buying the credits themselves.

Standards requiring a limited amount of renewable energy “generally don’t affect prices” because “market-driven renewables have exceeded” these requirements, Hartman said, but policies with very high levels “are becoming infeasible to meet” and can raise prices.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s July analysis of the drivers of electricity price increases between 2019 and 2025 concluded that renewable portfolio standards have “often increased prices” if they require renewable energy adoption beyond what would be driven by the market. However, the researchers found that the majority of wind and solar development during this timeframe — occurring outside of any RPS requirements — does not “appear to have driven price increases.”

The standards raised electricity prices approximately 1 cent per kilowatt hour in a few New England and mid-Atlantic states between 2019 and 2025, according to the LBNL analysis, with much lower impacts on average among states with these standards. For context, the price of electricity in Maine, one of the states with a 1-cent increase from RPS, rose more than 5 cents per kilowatt hour in total during this period.

A version of the LBNL analysis that looked at the drivers of rising rates between 2019 and 2024 concluded that RPS played a “medium” role in pushing up prices above the rate of inflation. For context, the researchers concluded that replacing or improving aging distribution and transmission infrastructure also played a medium role in increasing prices, but over a broader geographic area. Wildfires and extreme weather had a larger effect than renewable portfolio standards, over a similar geographic breadth.

Donohoo-Vallett said that the LBNL and MIT analyses came to different conclusions because they used different methods of estimating the impact of RPS. The LBNL work is based on calculating the costs of complying with renewable portfolio standards. But this does not fully measure what would have happened to prices if there weren’t renewable portfolio standards, he said, whereas the MIT work attempts to account for this counterfactual scenario.

The MIT paper found that utility-scale renewables adoption was associated with lower electricity prices. Investing in renewables can also mitigate costs from spikes in prices of other forms of energy, such as natural gas, Donohoo-Vallett said.

“On the substance, we largely agree,” Knittel and Argosino said of the LBNL analysis. “Neither analysis supports the claim that renewables or RPSs explain a 40 to 50 percent price gap.”

Exception for Some Versions of Rooftop Solar

While renewable energy adoption overall is not associated with rising electricity prices, both the MIT and LBNL analyses concluded that rooftop solar in some cases can increase prices. 

Knittel and Argosino explained that a method of compensating people with rooftop solar for the power they send back to the grid — called net metering — can drive up electricity prices for everyone else.

Under this system people are charged only for the net amount of electricity they pull from the grid — their use minus the amount they produced. But electricity rates are meant to cover the cost of maintaining the grid, not just the cost of the electricity itself. As people with rooftop solar pay for less power, they pay less to maintain the grid, and electricity rates rise. Net metering in effect “shifts the fixed costs of the grid onto households without solar,” the MIT researchers told us

Rooftop solar had a small effect on electricity prices in most states in recent years, the LBNL analysis concluded, and a higher effect in a few others, including Maine and California. 

These states have now made changes to lower how much they compensate people with solar panels to alleviate the problem.

Even in those states, the LBNL researchers found that rooftop solar and renewable portfolio standards were only responsible for a portion of the price increases. For Maine’s primary utility, net energy metering policies for rooftop solar contributed to an increase of 1 to 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour between 2019 and 2024. Winter storm recovery costs played a slightly bigger role in cost increases, at 1.6 cents per kilowatt hour, while distribution-related spending and renewable portfolio standards each contributed about a cent to the increase. 

For California’s largest three utilities, the researchers calculated that net-metered solar policies led electricity prices to increase by around 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour over this period — less of an impact than wildfire costs, at 4.3 cents per kilowatt hour, and inflation in distribution and transmission costs, at 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour. Renewable portfolio standards contributed to less than half a cent per kilowatt hour of the increase.

“California’s prices are high mainly because of wildfire costs, distribution spending, and rate design, not because it has a lot of solar on the grid,” Argosino and Knittel said.

Electricity Price Increases During the Trump Administration

Wright has often spoken about electricity prices in Democrat-led states as a response to questions about affordability or criticisms of electricity prices under Trump. At the Sept. 23 New York Times event, he responded to a question about rising electricity prices by suggesting Democratic policies were to blame for rising prices during the Trump administration.

“Electricity prices in red states that have followed the United States federal policy have not seen a rise in inflation-adjusted electricity prices during the Trump administration,” he said. “Electricity price rises that are well above inflation are all limited to states with aggressive climate policies. California, Massachusetts, New England — those are the places with the fastest rise and the most expensive electricity prices.”

Price rises, however, have not been limited to blue states and are not just due to climate policies. Nor have all blue states seen major increases. California, for example, saw its 2025 electricity prices rise more slowly than inflation.

Between 2024 and 2025, 39 states had electricity price increases above inflation and 26 had increases of 2% or more above inflation, according to data from the Energy Information Administration analyzed by the nonprofit Institute for Progress. The largest increases — between 7.1% and 11.9% above inflation — were in New Jersey, Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois and New York, all states with renewable portfolio standards whose governorships and legislatures were at least partially controlled by Democrats as of fall 2026. 

However, Republican-controlled states without RPS also had some significant price hikes. Indiana, Louisiana and Utah, for example, had increases between 4.2% and 5.7% above inflation.

One driver of the cost increases was a 36% rise in the price of natural gas after hitting a low in 2024, according to the LBNL analysis. The greatest natural gas-related increases affected grid operators in New England and New York, followed by those in the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest. “It’s not really about who’s leading the state,” Levinson said. “It’s about … your exposure to natural gas prices.”

Meanwhile, states in the region of the electric grid operated by PJM Interconnection — the largest grid operator in the country, stretching from the mid-Atlantic to Illinois — began in 2025 to see price increases due to the rapid growth of data centers. (To learn more, read “Data Centers and Electricity Prices: It’s Not as Simple as Voters May Think.”)

“PJM spans 13 states and DC, many of them red or purple states,” Singh said.

The LBNL report listed clean energy policy and wildfire costs as lesser contributors to price increases in 2025.

There has been more limited analysis on electricity prices in 2026 so far, but the available data continue to show price increases in both blue and red states.

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The post Wright’s Misleading Claims About Electricity Prices in Red vs. Blue States appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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