Boiled down to its essence, the act of voting is fundamentally transactional: You cast your ballot in exchange for the policies you support from the politicians you entrust to enact them. And this, boiled down to its essence, is why Republicans lost so badly on Tuesday.
The vast majority of voters in this country are, at best, only vaguely ideological. They have basic ideas of the sort of policies that they want to see enacted but don’t think too deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of them. They simply “want to see results.” They “want things to get done.” Or maybe they just “want both parties to stop bickering and come together to solve problems.”
To the ideological voter–someone who does think more deeply about issues–these seem like the tired cliches of the hopelessly uninformed (and to a large degree they are), but they are the philosophy, such as it is, of the transactional voter. Their vote is their product, and it is available to the highest bidder.
Naturally, Democrats have a huge advantage with these voters and have been promising them trillions of dollars in exchange for their votes for nearly a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s make-work jobs programs provably extended the Great Depression by many years, but they got him elected to three more terms. 30 years later, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare spending demonstrably caused the urban decay of the next three decades, but they produced generations of loyal Democrats who would never dream of voting against their own subsistence.
President Trump’s winning coalition in 2016 was comprised of a sizable number of these voters, who believed the Democratic Party to have abandoned them on immigration and social policy (and who flatly rejected the idea of “President Hillary Clinton”). For years, President Trump delivered on the promises he made them: The border was closed, boys were kicked out of girls’ locker rooms, and blue-collar jobs were coming back to America in huge numbers.
They were satisfied with their purchase, until they weren’t.
In 2020, enough of them believed that President Trump was responsible for COVID-19 that they returned to and elected President Biden and a Democratic Congress based on a simple transaction: We will vote for you if you return us to a sense of normalcy. Think it was a coincidence that Democrats essentially rigged their primary for Biden, the blandest, most grandfatherly Democrat in a huge field? He represented that return to a pre-COVID, pre-Trump craziness normalcy.
But then Democrats immediately reneged on their promise by spending to much money so quickly that inflation spiked to its highest levels in 40 years within just a few months of them taking over the presidency and Congress. By the time the 2024 election rolled around, things had gotten so bad that the average American family was paying $15,000 a year more for the same goods and services they bought before the Democratic takeover.
The transaction was not fulfilled, and if this was the new normal, voters wanted nothing to do with it. So they did something they had done only once before in American history; re-elect a president whom they had already voted out of office. And they did so with a simple transactional calculation based on Trump’s core campaign promise: Get costs down and focus on the Americans that Democrats have forgotten.
Trump’s promise was as explicit as it could possibly get: It was the central theme of his 2024 Republican Party Convention, which was dedicated to “the forgotten men and women of America.” He would make America great again by making America affordable again.
But he failed to deliver on that promise and, worse yet, appeared to forget Americans by launching a new war in the Middle East, which actually drove costs–especially of gas and groceries–even higher. The electoral narrative wrote itself: Trump promised lower costs and no new foreign wars but delivered the exact opposite.
And millions of transactional voters punished him and his party for it. It’s really no more complicated than that. The 2024 campaign was the pitch, the election was the sale, and after a trial period, 2026 was an emphatic demand for a refund.
