Harry Shannon
Unless you were living under the proverbial rock, you’ll have seen pre-election coverage of the American mid-terms. Reporters went to red (Republican) areas and talked to the locals. There was serious dissatisfaction among the people who voted for Trump in 2024. They were concerned about the cost of groceries, the price of gas and diesel, housing affordability, the Iran war, the corruption of the Trump family and friends, and so on. They were angry and frustrated.
After the polls closed and the results came in, the pundits repeated these complaints. Voters had rejected Trump and the Republicans big time. Control of the House and even the Senate was shifting to the Democrats. Some “deep red” seats were flipping.
Watching the broadcasts, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Republican vote had collapsed, that former Trump voters had either stayed home or opted for Democrats. Well, not really.
Let’s look at the comparison we can make that covers the whole country: what happened to the proportion of votes for the Republicans for the House of Representatives from 2024 to 2026. (The final results aren’t in yet but they’re pretty close.) It dropped from 50% to 44%. Just 6% down, hardly the apocalypse you’ve been hearing about. Despite all their resentment at what’s happened, the vast majority of Republican supporters still went to the polls and voted Republican.
The explanation, as I see it, is this: politics is so tribal that people continue their support regardless. Remember when Trump said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single voter. And support for the Democrats and Republicans is so evenly split that it only needs a shift of a few percent of voters to radically change the seat counts. And that’s enough to turn the result into a landslide.
There’s a better example of a political party’s catastrophe in the U.K. The Conservatives were in power when the 2024 general election was held. In the previous election in 2019 they got 42.6% of the vote, in 2024 just 23.7%. Their seat count fell from 365 to 121. Now that’s a catastrophe.