“The main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”

That was Vice President JD Vance’s diagnosis of why Republicans lost so soundly in the midterm elections. And the data supports it. Nearly every demographic swung heavily toward Democrats, including groups central to Trump’s coalition: young men, working-class voters, and voters in rural counties. The coalition that carried Republicans to victory just two years ago had turned sharply against them. 

But what explains that shift? According to Caroline Downey at National Review, the answer is horseshoe theory, and the volatility of populism.

Trump has run successfully on populism, and conservatives have increasingly embraced it as their driving political force over that of principle. But populism is a fickle beast. An electorate united more by grievances than by shared principles can shift dramatically, moving between political camps that promise to address the same frustrations. Downey argues that Tuesday was a manifestation of that volatility, this time working against Republicans.

"The price of populism is that it's volatile. It can work extremely well, or it can come back to bite, because it's emotional. It's often fueled by resentment," Downey explained. "In his post-midterm statement, J.D. Vance said that Trump voters turned out, but they flipped for Democrats in a lot of cases. The resentments were at a deep level, very similar, and they manifest at the voting booth."

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What are those resentments? On both the populist left and the populist right, affordability dominates the political debate, alongside distrust of the wealthy, elites, big business, and “experts.” Many of those frustrations are justified. But shared frustrations do not amount to shared principles, and they do not guarantee loyalty to either party. 

That is where the overlap becomes revealing. Suspicion of powerful institutions can slide into conspiratorial thinking, as the debate over the Epstein files has shown. On economics, some on the right denounce socialism while accusing oil companies of capitalist exploitation.

Principles may have taken a back seat with Trump’s election in 2016, but that lack of grounding leaves the electorate vulnerable to massive, emotionally driven shifts. Resentment can propel the right to victory, but it can just as easily send those same voters to the left.

Without shared principles to hold a coalition together, its loyalty can last only as long as its anger is directed at the right people.

Downey went on to argue that corruption is "poison" to populist leaders precisely because their movements are built on opposition to elite corruption. When those leaders break their promises or appear to embrace the behavior they campaigned against, they risk turning their supporters’ resentment against themselves.

"There's one thing that's poison to populism, corruption," she explained. "Every populist movement in history has been explicitly opposed to it. If you want to spark a populist revolt, try breaking promises, try throwing off a whiff of corruption, and throw in a foreign war that you haven't exactly made the case for."

This comes as conservatives search for something to blame for Tuesday’s defeat, with many settling on the Iran war. While it was certainly a contributing factor, many commentators have been quick to overlook its economic effects and blame the decision to wage war itself. In doing so, they preserve the populist argument by placing the blame on the neoconservatism of the past rather than examining the movement’s own failures.

That has yet to produce a reckoning with economic policies such as tariffs, which have featured prominently in voter discontent across exit polls, or with allegations of corruption and the rollout of immigration enforcement operations.