A new “golden age of America” is under way, Donald Trump repeatedly declared in his final pitch to voters before the US midterm elections.

The war in Iran was not really a war, because “we’ve done very little fighting”, the US president stressed. The stock market had hit 88 all-time highs. “They’re saying,” he said, that on his watch the US has become “the hottest country anywhere in the world”.

“We’ve achieved more in less than two years than any administration in American history, and I’ve kept every single promise I made – except far more,” he claimed in an extraordinary speech at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on the last day of the campaign. “I’ve actually kept far more promises than I made. We’ve done much more than I promised.”

As Americans prepared to cast their vote in hundreds of congressional races across the country, Trump implored them to “pretend I’m on the ballot”, and vote on the policies he had enacted.

This “mirror world” – Trump’s constructed reality, casting his enemies as democracy-stealing villains and himself as the savior – was a central pillar of his victorious bid to reclaim the White House two years ago. As votes were counted on Tuesday night, though, it became clear the mirror had shattered.

Americans, including those who went for Trump in the past, weren’t buying his narrative. They didn’t approve of the Iran war, and weren’t experiencing a “golden age” as they filled up their cars and paid for groceries.

Across the US, however, the Guardian spoke to voters who made clear they accepted one element of Trump’s alternate reality as they entered polling places: they did consider his administration, and agenda, to be on the ballot – much to the devastation of Republicans running for office up and down the ballot.

“One by one,” said Tom Galvin, a Republican on the Maricopa county board of supervisors in Arizona, “everything that was important” to the coalition of voters that carried him back to power in 2024 fell by the wayside.

“For example, if you wanted the Epstein files, that didn’t happen,” said Galvin. “If you wanted to address inflation because Biden had runaway inflation, well, that didn’t happen. If you wanted to see a relief in gas prices, that didn’t happen. If you didn’t want us to get into‘foreign wars or senseless wars’, that didn’t happen.”

Later in the week, Trump remained defiant about his role in his party’s collapse. He elevated Stephen Miller, one of the most controversial figures in his administration, to chief of staff.

“I JUST WASN’T ON THE BALLOT,” he wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “IF I WERE, WE WOULD HAVE WON IN A LANDSLIDE!”

The reflecting pool election?

Voters in Tuesday’s election explained the economy – particularly their inability to afford their lives – was central to their decisions. But corruption under Trump, the Iran war, tariffs, datacenters, healthcare costs and the administration’s aggressive deportation scheme weighed into their votes.

“There’s a war that nobody wants right now,” Jim Conrad, a voter in Ohio, told the Guardian. Ron Miller, in Kansas, said he was for Trump, but acknowledged that the president “hasn’t done anything” to lower the cost of living. Todd Cox, in Maine, cited “the disregard for the rule of law”, while Linda Olson, in Kansas, a previous Trump voter, said the president was now working to “make himself richer instead of really helping the people”.

Voters who usually split their tickets between the two parties’ candidates said they wanted to send a message. As Stacey, a voter in Iowa, told the Guardian: “I wanted to vote for no Republicans.”

Rather than acknowledge voters’ woes, Trump tried for months to explain, or dismiss, them. Affordability, he said last year, was a “con job” perpetrated by Democrats. Fuel prices may be high for consumers, but “the United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars”, he said in October. People who don’t want datacenters in their communities will end up “backwards and poor”, he said this summer. He was “willing to do tariffs” and they have helped US companies, he said in Kansas just before the election.

“You don’t see the stock market on the side of the road. But you drive down a street, you see the gas prices,” said Paul Bentz, an independent pollster and strategist at HighGround, an Arizona public affairs firm. “The tone-deaf nature of his approach on things, talking about issues that other folks don’t care about, ignoring and pretending like there aren’t struggles going on, just was not the right strategy.”

Bentz’s colleague described it as the reflecting pool election. Trump delivered his final speech before an algae-beset pool of water he spent 14m renovating that showed him his own reflection: “Narcissism 101”, a metaphor for the midterms.

Trump was on the ballot

Jim Abeler, a Republican state senator in Minnesota who lost his reelection bid this month, knocked on the doors of about 80% of the homes in his district. He encountered a lot of “outright hostility” toward Trump over gas prices and the Iran war, and some voters refused to talk to him because of it.

He didn’t hear voters saying that Trump’s rhetoric or his attempts to explain away economic concerns were the problem; it was the economics themselves. Half of the people he talked to were “unforgiving”, he said.

One woman who said she usually voted for Democrats but also had voted for Abeler in previous elections said she couldn’t do it this year. “She said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s just a bad year to be you,’” he recalled.

Chris Madel, a Minneapolis attorney who was running in the Republican primary for Minnesota governor until he dropped out and criticized his party over the deportation onslaught into the state, said he knew in January – amid the Operation Metro Surge crackdown – that this would end poorly for Republicans.

“The people that were showing that fealty towards him and towards this one person,” Madel said. “The tone deafness was really without equal.”

Madel said he asked his Trump-supporting family members whether they “think it’s OK” for the US president to accept “a 747 for free” from Qatar, for example. The attorney never thought the US would look like “a banana republic with respect to corruption”, he added.

Democratic candidates said for months that voters, including those in red-leaning areas, just wanted to feel heard. They centered their campaigns around in-person town halls, went to county fairs, and returned to retail politics.

People “don’t feel that the federal government really gives a damn about them”, Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat running for a Republican-held congressional district in western Wisconsin, said just before the election. She won.

Erin Klaus, who owns a small business in Cooke’s district that will close at the end of this year after weathering economic pains the last two years, said it has felt like the message from the government was that her problems weren’t really happening.

“The federal government can say that the prices are going down, and inflation is going down. But, I mean, that’s just not true in our daily lives,” she told the Guardian in October. “I think it’s really hard to continue to be told these things that we know aren’t true and feel almost like we’re getting mocked for the hardships that we’re enduring – both as business owners and as just regular folks, trying to live their lives.”

Bob Brooks, a Democrat who flipped Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, said voters were “frustrated with a guy who was promising them one thing” but gave them “something completely different”.

In short, “they felt lied to by the Trump organization, anybody that supported him, and they’re looking for change”, he added. “The status quo is not OK.”

No daylight between Trump and his party

After epic losses, Republican party leaders are searching for what comes next – and considering how tied their futures are to Trump.

Galvin, the Maricopa county supervisor, said the people in his party who either stayed home, or voted the other way, were trying to send a message: stop excusing corruption and trafficking in election lies, and get to work on real issues that matter to voters.

Republicans didn’t seriously attempt to distance themselves from Trump. Breaking with him would have been a major political risk in the Republican primaries, where the party faithful remained supportive of Trump. But by the time polls closed on 3 November, Arizona Republicans lost handily up and down the ballot – both chambers of the state legislature flipped, and the Democratic governor won her reelection bid by nearly 13 points – a stomping victory in a battleground state.

But “there is a lane to do the right thing” in the Republican party, according to Galvin. He had argued that tariffs were wrong. He heard from voters concerned about corruption in Washington after seeing what looked like pay-to-play pardon schemes. “I didn’t see any federal officials in Arizona, or federal candidates in Arizona on our side, say anything about that,” he said.

“Federal candidates in Arizona did not fully convey that they appreciate people’s pain,” he said. “I think they they whistled past the graveyard.”

Joe Pitts, a Republican who leads Arizona think tank 1912 Institute, said he’s not ready to count out Trump, or his influence in the party. A lot of the quick conclusions offered this week will look wrong in a few months, he suggested. “So long as Trump is president and frankly, so long as Trump is alive, he will exercise significant influence over the Republican Party.”

Pitts also warned that the significant shifts do not signal broad approval for Democrats, but that these demographics are all up for grabs and willing to change their minds. The massive losses could, in time, mean there opportunities for Republicans, he said.

Abeler, the Minnesota state senator who lost his race, predicted that the presidential election could go better for Republicans because people got protest votes off their chests.

Democrats, too, have been careful not to interpret the results as a broad endorsement of their party, but a sign that people are sick of politics as usual – including the way the president talks about the issues that affect them directly.

“People are just tired of nonsense. They’re tired of people performing in front of them,” said Brooks, the Pennsylvania Democrat. “People are tired of the show. I don’t want to be a show. I just want to help people.”

Christine Hunschofsky, a Florida state representative and the incoming House Democratic leader in the state, said in a media call this week that elected officials in both parties should see the election results as a call to listen to voters and address their concerns, or they will be voted out, no matter how safe a seat seems for either party.

People no longer trust that their government will respond to their needs because they keep hearing from candidates who say they care and then not seeing any action when those candidates take office, she said,

“Every elected official has such a responsibility right now to restore that trust,” Hunschofsky said. “Because once that trust is gone, I have even bigger concerns for our country.”