Populism Proves Massively Unpopular

M ore than a decade ago, populist activists described the conservative movement they sought to displace as ideologically moribund and the American right’s primary electoral vehicle, the Republican Party, as politically inept. The GOP establishment, they argued at the time, seemed content to be the Washington Generals to the left’s Harlem Globetrotters, perpetual losers in a game rigged against middle America.

Well, if yesterday’s Republicans were the Washington Generals, today’s Republicans are the Washington Corporals. In the midterm season we just witnessed, Republicans lost not only toss-up and lean-R elections but also offices that, at the start of the midterm cycle, Democrats hadn’t planned to contest. Both houses of Congress flipped. Democrats gained a majority of governorships and flipped legislative chambers. They won Senate seats in Texas and the Carolinas. For the GOP, it was a colossal, crushing defeat.

Sorting through the Republican wreckage reveals a striking pattern, however. In competitive races, the party’s candidates fared better when they disavowed populist policies such as taxing imports and compelling private companies to concede equity stakes to Washington. Even then, they lost more often than they won, unable to separate themselves from a Republican brand rejected by most midterm voters.

Yes, of course, the Democratic brand is also toxic. Flushed with victory, Democrats will almost certainly misinterpret the midterms as a mandate to abuse the power they just regained in Washington and many state capitals. They will want to believe that they won, that progressivism and even socialism won, rather than accepting the reality that populism lost.

National Conservatives, postliberal intellectuals, reactionaries, and other factions of the populist right will deny that reality, as well. It was all about Iran, some will say, or rigged elections, or Democratic skullduggery. They’ll blame propaganda from the left-wing media establishment or sabotage from the right-wing political establishment. Republicans just didn’t talk enough about cultural issues, they’ll assert. Real protectionism has never been tried, they’ll insist.

It won’t work. The cost of living was the top issue for most midterm voters, and ranked even higher among the soft partisans and swing voters who tip the balance in competitive races. Wisely, Democrats made affordability their primary theme, with political corruption — an issue inextricably tethered to the Trump administration’s trade and industrial policies — as a secondary theme. How did the president respond? With a mix of faulty predictions, blatant prevarications, and ineffectual diversions. He’d have done the Republican cause more good by saying nothing at all.

The GOP problem was strategic, however, not tactical, and didn’t begin this fall, or last summer, or last spring. When the 2024 election returned Donald Trump to power, Americans were already up in arms about inflation. The White House and Republican Congress could have focused like a laser beam on affordability. Instead, the president devoted much of his time and political capital to the cause of raising consumer prices — which is, in fact, what stiff tariffs and other protectionist policies are intended to do.

This was economically counterproductive and, as we know now, politically ruinous. In an Echelon Insights survey taken a few weeks before Election Day, two-thirds of American workers said the cost of housing and other essential goods and services ought to be policymakers’ chief concern. Nearly 60 percent expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s tariffs, with only a third in favor. Notably, opposition was evident among both white-collar workers (61 percent to 35 percent) and blue-collar workers (58 percent to 36 percent).

Exit polls also showed widespread disdain for the tariffs, which ought to serve as a cautionary tale for eggheads of any political stripe who misinterpret surveys about hypothetical policies as accurate predictions of how the voting public will judge those policies after implementation. Contrary to NatCon claims, the GOP’s embrace of populist economics didn’t build and sustain a broader electoral coalition. It shrank the Republican coalition. Why? Because populist economics, however it may play hypothetically, is bonkers in practice. It makes most people worse off. Once they figure this out, they get angry. In practice, it turns out, populism is unpopular.

Other than perhaps trying to rescind import taxes, Democrats seem disinclined to do anything else constructive on affordability. And if the socialists in their ranks get their way, the problem will get massively worse, not better. Still, Democrats understood what the 2026 election was about. Too many Republicans thought they could change the subject to crime, immigration, or other issues they deemed advantageous. Billions of dollars later, they have little to show for it.

Contrary to the hyperbolic claims of digital fundraisers and partisan shills, the 2026 midterms were not the most important election of our lifetimes. Republicans lost big. Democrats overperformed. But the next election cycle starts now — and the outcome isn’t preordained. Both parties will nominate new candidates for president, Congress, and other offices. Over the next two years, newly empowered Democrats may well blow it on affordability just as spectacularly as Republicans in Washington did. At the same time, the Trump administration and Congress did made real progress over the past two years on such issues as welfare reform, government waste, border control, and the discriminatory practices of colleges and universities — progress that, I suspect, Democrats will have a hard time reversing, at least not without creating a public backlash of their own.

In short, the fate of the American experiment is far from sealed. Nor is the fate of the social movement that seeks to conserve and expand it. Our country needs a conservative movement devoted to liberty, order, family, limited government, free enterprise, free speech, free trade, economic opportunity, federalism, the rule of law, and republican virtue. Launched a little over three years ago, Freedom Conservatism, which I co-founded, aspires to build that, counting hundreds of conservative leaders among the signatories to its FreeCon Statement of Principles, including several names you’ll see in National Review’s pages. In a couple of weeks, we will launch the first of a series of regional summits for conservative leaders to digest the election results, develop new initiatives, and construct new coalitions, with events taking place in Phoenix, Philadelphia (where the summit will be co-hosted by National Review Institute), Raleigh, and Washington, D.C. More Freedom Conservatism events are planned for 2027 and beyond, with most of its activities occurring outside the nation’s capital, as is fitting for a movement that counts decentralization as among the founding principles we champion.

Unless conservatives representing a variety of roles, generations, regions, and policy priorities all pitch in to help rebuild an American right capable of winning consistently and governing effectively, our country’s future may well be a bleak one. The 2026 cycle is behind us. Time to learn its painful lessons, abandon the wrongheaded policies that set so many candidates up for failure, and offer the American public something better.