From The Verge · Gaby Del Valle · · 3m
X is not real life, midterms proved
Republicans lost badly in 2026 because they were too online, obsessing over culture war memes while voters cared about groceries and gas.
In brief
Republicans lost badly in 2026 because they were too online, obsessing over culture war memes while voters cared about groceries and gas. Republicans' 2026 midterm losses show that dominance on X does not translate to political power when voters care about cost of living, not culture wars. Originally reported by The…
Vance jokes instead of answering
Vice President JD Vance hosted a town hall in Texas with Fox News host Jesse Watters a week before the midterms.
“When a college student earnestly asked how the right expected young people like her to settle down and have kids, given the ever-growing cost of living, Vance replied with a quip about Jon Husted's ass.”
The student was a conservative activist
Kate White introduced herself as vice president of the Texas Christian University chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative group started by Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk.
Vance eventually answered but revealed the problem
Vance did eventually answer, saying Republicans don't pay enough attention to affordability and blaming rising housing costs on institutional investors and the twenty million illegal aliens supposedly living in the United States.
Republicans built their own platform
For the past decade, Republicans adhered to Steve Bannon's maxim that politics is downstream from culture.
They convinced themselves they were winning
Cocooned in their online echo chamber, MAGA figureheads convinced themselves the public was on their side, even when polling suggested otherwise. They ignored their base's valid concerns about affordability and served them nonsensical memes instead.
“Cocooned in their online echo chamber, MAGA figureheads convinced themselves the public was on their side, even when polling suggested otherwise.”
Republicans lost historically red states
Republicans not only lost historically red states like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina, but barely managed to win Florida.The Senate race in Mississippi, of all places, is still too close to call.
“X, we can now declare once and for all, is not real life.”
Vance's X following is extreme
Vance is a creature of X, where his following list includes accounts like Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert, Howling Mutant, and Captive Dreamer.
Government officials posted extremist content
Kingsley Wilson, the hard-right press secretary for the Department of War, has posted antisemitic conspiracy theories about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Georgia in nineteen fifteen.
They doubled down on culture war
Republicans saw their twenty twenty-four victory as a mandate. Having clawed the White House and Congress back from Democrats, they assumed the public was on board with MAGA's cultural project when in fact people were…
Memes about Harry Potter and Star Wars
In the run-up to the midterms, the Department of Education was posting about Malfoid, a gender-swapped version of Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter.
Anti-Indian memes cost a candidate
Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, lost his election by a huge margin after posting anti-Indian memes on X.
Musk spent half a billion dollars
Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars on Republican candidates and PACs. But even Musk's money failed to make up for voters' dissatisfaction with Republicans' performance, perhaps because the ads focused largely on culture…
The algorithm trapped them in one issue
The answer lies in the algorithmic nature of social media, X especially.If you interact with even one post about a niche topic, the algorithm feeds you post after post about the same thing.
Here's the gist
Republicans' 2026 midterm losses show that dominance on X does not translate to political power when voters care about cost of living, not culture wars.
