A Republican senator just said out loud what the establishment crowd has been whispering behind closed doors.
He didn’t mince words. And the audience he aimed them at isn’t going to forget it.
Now the full picture of what US Senator Steve Daines told a room full of insiders is out, and it tells you everything about where the Republican establishment’s head is at heading into November.
What Daines Said at the Nixon Foundation Summit
US Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) spoke recently at the Grand Strategy Summit held by the Richard Nixon Foundation, and he came loaded with anxiety about what the 2026 midterms look like from where he’s sitting.
“It’s a tough environment,” Daines said at the event. He went further, drawing a direct line to one of the worst Republican losses of the modern era. “There arguably could be some similarities between the ’06 cycle and the 2026 cycle.
Think about the condition of the country back in ’06. An unpopular war. Six in ten Americans opposed the Iraq war at that point. Gas prices had doubled. And we ended up losing six seats.”
Then came the line that set off alarm bells: “And so there’s an argument, if you look at history, that 2026 feels a lot like 2006.”
That’s a sitting Republican senator, one who chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2024 and who is now retiring at the end of his term, publicly comparing the current political environment to a year when Democrats swept through both chambers and handed Republicans a crushing defeat.
In 2006, Republicans lost six Senate seats and ceded control of the chamber entirely.
Worth pausing on that. Daines ran the NRSC. He flipped four Senate seats in 2024. He knows the landscape better than almost anyone in the caucus.
And he’s telling a room full of Republican insiders that the party is staring down a wave that rhymes with one of its worst modern losses.
Telling Republican Voters to “Get Over It” Was the Wrong Play
But the 2006 comparison wasn’t even the most telling part of what Daines said.
According to reporting on the event, Daines urged Republican voters to “get over” their frustration, framing dissatisfaction with certain candidates as a luxury the party simply cannot afford when Supreme Court seats could be at stake.
Daines flagged the Texas Senate race specifically. He called US Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) “a dear friend” and confirmed he backed Cornyn against Ken Paxton in the Republican primary. “I supported John Cornyn in the, in the Texas primary,” he said.
Paxton beat Cornyn with President Donald Trump’s endorsement. Now Daines and others in the establishment lane are pointing to “disgruntled Republicans” who backed Cornyn as a source of electoral drag heading into fall. But consider what that argument actually requires.
Daines is telling the voters who chose the Trump-backed candidate to calm down and fall in line — while simultaneously lamenting that MAGA-aligned nominees are creating problems for the party. That’s a remarkable thing to say publicly, and it lays bare the real tension sitting inside the Republican Senate caucus right now.
Cornyn supported amnesty measures and championed Joe Biden’s gun control legislation during his time in the Senate. Republican voters in Texas looked at that record and chose Ken Paxton. The establishment is now calling those voters “disgruntled” and telling them to get over it.
And Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s NRSC has withheld the kind of television spending a competitive Senate race typically demands, a posture that looks a lot like an establishment more comfortable watching a seat go blue than fully investing behind a nominee it didn’t want in the first place.
That’s not a coalition-building message. That’s a party signaling to its own voters that their choices were the problem.
The contrast with how the Democrat Party handles its own primary upsets is worth spelling out. When Abdul El-Sayed defeated the establishment-backed Representative Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary, Chuck Schumer and senior Democrats moved to accommodate the winner rather than hold public grievance sessions about why their preferred candidate lost.
Democrats close ranks. Republicans hold summits where retiring senators explain why the voters made the wrong call.
The Bigger Question the Establishment Keeps Avoiding
Daines is retiring. He doesn’t face voters again. Speaking at a Nixon Foundation summit, he’s talking to exactly the kind of institutional Republicans who have spent years trying to manage the Trump era rather than embrace it.
And the 2006 comparison deserves scrutiny on its own terms. In 2006, Republicans lost because of an unpopular Middle Eastern war, rising gas prices, and a string of high-profile congressional scandals. The party had held power long enough to accumulate real grievances from a public that felt genuinely let down.
The dynamic Daines is describing for 2026 is real — midterm headwinds against the party holding the White House are historical fact, not speculation — but the analogy puts the blame in a complicated place. Is the problem the political environment? The specific candidates voters chose in primaries? Or the establishment’s sustained reluctance to get fully behind the voters’ choices once primaries conclude?
Daines didn’t answer that question. But the fact that he reached for the 2006 specter in a room full of institutional Republicans reveals how the establishment crowd reads what’s coming — and who they think deserves the blame for it.
Republicans who believe the path forward runs through lecturing the base about Supreme Court stakes, rather than through genuine enthusiasm for the candidates voters actually chose, may be diagnosing the wrong disease.
The base doesn’t need to be told to get over it. The party leadership might want to ask why the base feels the way it does in the first place — and whether the establishment’s own post-primary behavior has anything to do with the temperature inside the tent.
Daines spent 2024 building a Senate majority. He knows what it takes to win.
But the lessons he appears to be drawing from 2026 seem to run in a familiar direction: the voters who chose wrong need to adjust, and the institutional preferences that lost the primary deserve rehabilitation.
That’s a posture that establishment Republicans have repeated for a decade. It’s also the posture that voters rejected when they returned President Trump to the White House in a landslide in 2024. The base has heard the “get over it” message before. November will show whether they followed the instructions this time.
Source: Mediaite, “Republican Senator Warns GOP Is in for a Midterm Drubbing: ‘Feels a Lot Like 2006′”
