JD Vance gave the honest diagnosis within hours of the wipeout. The main problem, he said, was not turnout. The main problem was that a great many people who voted Trump-Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
That is a harder fact than low enthusiasm, because it can’t be fixed with better field operations. Those voters showed up. They found the Republican line and went past it.
Caroline Downey at National Review has the explanation that actually fits the data, and it’s horseshoe theory — the observation that the far ends of the political spectrum bend toward each other until they nearly touch. Her formulation: the price of populism is volatility. It can work extremely well or it can come back to bite, because it’s emotional and it’s often fueled by resentment. Vance said Trump voters turned out and flipped. The resentments on both sides, she argues, were very similar at a deep level, and they manifested at the voting booth.
WATCH:
.@CarolineDowney_: Horseshoe theory explains why Trump voters can flip to Democrats—and why former Bernie Sanders supporters can move toward MAGA. https://t.co/fMCxrRkZh9
— National Review (@NRO) November 6, 2026
Look at where the swings were worst and the theory explains itself. Young men. Working-class voters. Rural counties. Those are not groups that drifted leftward on abortion or immigration or trans athletes between 2024 and 2026. They are the groups most available to whoever is angriest at the same targets.
Because the targets are identical. Ask a 24-year-old DSA member and a 24-year-old who wore a red hat in 2024 what’s wrong with America and you get overlapping lists: housing costs nothing can touch, groceries that keep climbing, an elite class that fails upward, corporations that get bailed out, experts who were wrong about everything and never apologized, a government that serves donors. The diagnosis is shared. Only the prescription differs, and prescriptions are what principles are for.
A coalition assembled on diagnosis alone holds exactly as long as its anger stays pointed in the same direction. The moment the resentment finds a new object — and in a midterm, the object is whoever currently holds power — it goes.
Zohran Mamdani figured this out before anyone on the right did. He ran at the identical resentment with rent freezes and city-owned groceries instead of tariffs and deportations, and he pulled young men who had been drifting right. Same anger, different answer, and he got the votes.
Downey names the accelerant too, and it’s the uncomfortable one. There’s one thing that’s poison to populism, she says, and it’s corruption. Every populist movement in history has defined itself against it. Want to spark a populist revolt? Break some promises. Give off a whiff of corruption. Add a foreign war you haven’t quite made the case for.
Which is the part of the postmortem the movement keeps skating past. The conversation about Tuesday has settled comfortably on the Iran war, because blaming the war lets everyone indict neoconservatism — the old enemy, safely external. Fine, as far as it goes. But it leaves tariffs untouched, and tariffs showed up all over the exit polling. It leaves the Epstein files question untouched. It leaves the corruption allegations untouched. Each of those is a broken promise or a whiff, and each lands on the exact nerve populism is built to protect.
Phil Scott won Vermont by seven and a half points on Tuesday running pro-growth free-market economics in Bernie Sanders’ state. He has principles, they are durable, and voters who disagree with him on everything else kept hiring him anyway.
