The Republican blame game for the Democratic midterm elections romp began before election night itself was over.
“Sources” in President Donald Trump’s White House texted everyone in their phone contacts that Iran was to blame for the GOP’s generational shellacking. Voters handed Democrats sweeping congressional majorities that could reach 260 in the House and up to 56 Democratic senators. Although the president blamed candidate quality and high prices that, he conceded, were partially downstream of his war in Iran, Vice President JD Vance preferred to politically stab his boss directly in the front on the foreign policy issue.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance said in a lengthy X post.
The vice president elaborated that the top four factors to bring disaffected Trump 2024 voters back to Republican ballots would be to “end the war,” “focus on cost of living/inflation,” “Put America First,” and “Change our relationship to Israel.”
Only one-and-a-half of those four items are true. The 614-word missive is, frankly, a whole lot of cope from a fledgling 2028 presidential candidate looking to ignore the obvious: the 2026 elections, just like the 2024 and 2022 elections before them, were about the economy, stupid.
Specifically, the No. 1 priority of the past half-decade of American voting has been inflation. And the electoral beatings of whichever party is in power will continue until the cost of living falls. The cost of living is why Democrats lost the House in 2022. And it’s specifically why voters resurrected Trump’s political career in 2024 with the mandate of both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
Two years later, the Trump administration’s stunning indifference to, or contempt for, voter panic over high prices cost the GOP its control of the House and the Senate.
The exit polls themselves give the lie to Vance’s sorry scapegoating.
CNN’s exit poll found that indeed, nearly two-thirds of voters believe Trump’s policies to be mostly responsible for higher prices. Another two-thirds insisted that Trump’s tariffs have harmed both the local and national economy.
A 39% plurality told CNN exit polling that the economy was the top issue facing the country, with 33% prioritizing democracy and 14% listing immigration. By contrast, a mere 4% said foreign policy. And whereas nearly half of all voters said that the cost of living was “crucial” to their votes and an outright 55% majority said government corruption was a crucial factor, just a third said the war in Iran was. That’s fewer than the share who listed immigration enforcement as a priority.
That the indigo tsunami was not a march toward socialism and away from capitalism was not just evident from the exit polls (overwhelming majorities reported capitalism favorably and socialism unfavorably). But also from the margins of the votes themselves. The 2026 electorate voted an average of 16 points bluer than 2024. Democratic candidates who moderated their general election campaigns, such as Sens.-elect James Talarico (D-TX) and Roy Cooper (D-NC), overperformed this swing by at least 8 points.
Meanwhile, the party’s socialist-leaning superstars, such as Sens.-elect Abdul el Sayed (MI) and Troy Jackson (ME), underperformed it by the double digits. If concerns about inflation were really just an embrace of socialism, the opposite trend would have been true.
TRUMPWORLD SEARCHES FOR SCAPEGOATS AFTER BLUE WAVE WIPEOUT
Plenty of data nerds have spent the week scratching their heads over the reason that, by the numbers, the Trump economy is obviously far better than the economy under former President Joe Biden. Inflation throughout this Trump term has fluctuated in a range with an upper bound twice as high as the Federal Reserve’s maximum 2% target. Yet it’s nowhere close to the near 10% territory where it peaked under Biden. Meanwhile, thanks to robust economic growth, real average weekly wages are still positive in Trump’s second term, whereas they fell 4% under Biden.
Voters handed the Trump administration a sweeping mandate in 2024, and officials failed to demonstrate that they took it seriously. The best hope for Republicans is that Democrats similarly ignore the electorate’s demand in favor of their own self-serving pet projects, and that the pendulum simply swings back and forth again until some faction decides to take the worst inflation in half a century more seriously.
Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
