Well… that happened!
What had been expected to be a strong showing for the Democrats this midterm cycle turned out to be a total wipeout of the Republican Party as we know it, the kind of devastating outcome the likes of which it doesn’t just take a single election cycle to reverse.
Every group that shifted towards the GOP in 2024 shifted back in 2026—big time.
So what happened?
It’s very simple: It was a cost of living election, and the Democrats were laser-focused on the cost of living.
Meanwhile, the President was laser-focused on… his ballroom. Dinners with tech oligarchs. Bragging about the stock market and oil profits—in other words, how rich everyone but you is getting.
Exit polls showed that the cost of living and corruption were the top concerns of voters.
As I’ve been pointing out for months, many working-class Americans voted for Trump in 2024 because they remembered Trump 1.0—specifically, the 2019 economy—when they had a little more money in their pockets at the end of the month, a little more security, a little more freedom.
That’s just not been the case in Trump 2.0. Inflation has been outpacing wages for most of this year. And since 2019, the cost of housing, health care, insurance, utilities, and of course, groceries and gas, has skyrocketed.
So when the President touted the “Golden Age of America” in campaign rally after campaign rally, this wasn’t a galvanizing call to rally the winners of a blazing hot economy. It was a finger in the eye of the losers in an economy whose vitality is based entirely on tech speculation and oil profits.
The Democrats’ analysis of their good fortune Tuesday night is spot on: Trump told people to vote like he was on the ballot, and they did.
But on the right, another singular explanation has emerged to explain the Republican wipeout—including by the Vice President: the war in Iran, which, after corruption, inflation, and immigration, was listed by voters as a crucial reason for how they voted.
Certainly, gas prices surged after the attack on Iran, and they never recovered. But as the exit polls show, the war in Iran was one of many things voters were upset about. And the thing that upset them about the war in Iran was not the attack itself, which was at least initially very popular with Republican voters. It was the fact that it never ended, becoming just one more thing making their lives harder and more unaffordable.
In other words, they didn’t turn on Trump and his party because he started another Iraq style forever war in the Middle East, but because the President’s war on Iran, like the corruption plaguing his administration, like his failure to tame inflation, contributed to how broke they are—and provided further evidence that Trump broke his campaign promise to alleviate that pain.
You can see how his approval rating started to slip after the Liberation Day tariffs, and never recovered.
And that is the real message of the midterm wipeout, in my view: Trump and his party could have survived any one of these problems. The problem is all of the crises together, resulting in real anger at a president voters see as having betrayed them and broken his promises.
If the cost of housing and health care and groceries were coming down, a dollar more a gallon at the pump would have been more tolerable. If the President hadn’t spent so much time talking up the ballroom and other vanity projects that were costing taxpayers, they might have had more patience with the tariff agenda. If people felt like they were making money and their lives and the lives of their children were improving, they wouldn’t have minded so much that everyone in the President’s orbit seems to be making billions of dollars off his presidency.
It all comes back to the fact that working and middle class Americans are broke—and they are right to be very angry about it.
If I had to sum up what happened this Tuesday in one sentence, it would be what former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told me two weeks ago: People are tired of the President and his family getting rich and them and their families getting poor.
Coming out of his historic 2024 victory, President Trump’s mandate was fourfold: Radically reduce immigration; bring costs down and get money back in the pockets of working Americans; drain the swamp; and no new wars.
He succeeded at only one of these, failing pretty ostentatiously at the others.
That’s what we saw last Tuesday.
Batya, The bad guys won a battle the other night. A big one. There’s no question about that, and yes, if you care about your country, it hurt – and the country is going to bleed a while because of it. A lot of bad people are moving into positions of power. These people don’t mean our nation or us well, and given how they think, it probably won’t take long to see their true colors. We already know the Democrats will side with the enemies of Israel and of freedom. However, we’re also going to rise, fight again, and make sure that the greatest nation that has ever existed in human history isn’t run into the gutter because of it. We lost one election, but the cause of freedom and democracy goes on.
Well, slow clap for the voters who cared so much about cost of living. Could they not have taken a few seconds to think through whether those they were voting for would actually IMPROVE the situation? Judging by the bad results on Wall Street two days after the election., we’re all in for a bumpy ride. What are the odds these psycho leftists will backpedal their plans to hobble AI?