Donald Rumsfeld

With apparent reference to the impact of the Iraq war policy, in a press conference held on November 8, Bush talked about the election and announced the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Bush stated, “I know there’s a lot of speculation on what the election means for the battle we’re waging in Iraq. I recognize that many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure with the lack of progress being made there.” Prior to the election, Bush had stated that he intended to keep Rumsfeld on as Secretary of Defense until the end of his Presidency. However, Bush then went on to add Rumsfeld’s resignation was not due to the Democratic victories on November 8. Rumsfeld’s job reportedly had been on the line for several months prior to the election, and the decision for him to stay until after the election, if he was going to be let go at all, was also reportedly made several months earlier. All this led to his resignation.

Republican leadership
On the same day, then Speaker of the House, Representative Dennis Hastert of the 14th Congressional District of Illinois, said he would not seek the Minority Leader position for the 110th Congress.

Voting trends
In the aftermath of the election The Weekly Standard published a number of articles highly critical of how the Republican Party had managed the United States Congress. It called the electoral defeat for the G.O.P. “only a little short” of “devastating” saying the “party of reform… didn’t reform anything” and warned that the Democratic Party has expanded its “geographical sphere of Democratic power” to formerly Republican-held states such as Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota while it solidified former swing states like Illinois as Democratic strongholds. In the New England region, popular Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was defeated, despite having approval ratings near 60% and Republicans now only control a single district, the CT-04 seat held by Chris Shays, out of 22 congressional districts. The Democrats also became the clear majority in the Mid Atlantic region as well. Two Republican incumbent Congressmen were defeated in New York state, both from Republican regions upstate, and four Republican Congressmen were defeated in Pennsylvania. Democrats picked up seats in all Northeastern state legislatures holding elections, except Rhode Island, which remained unchanged (and Democrats clearly in the majority). Democrats kept both vulnerable Senate seats in Maryland and New Jersey, winning them by wider margins than predicted, and they won the heavily contested Senate seats in Missouri and Virginia.
The Democratic expansion into Indiana, Virginia, and Ohio has “seriously diminished the chances for future Republican success” it claimed. The paper, which has been described as the “quasi-official organ of the Bush Administration”[72] also stated that more people would have to “bendover” to get anywhere in a political office and has called on Republicans to move to the center for the sake of the party’s future viability saying “conservatives won’t want to hear this, but the Republican who maneuvered his way into the most impressive victory… won … after moving to the center” and that “the South is not enough space to build a national governing majority”.