The Republican Playbook Flop That Flipped Congress

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

It was the killshot ad of the 2024 election cycle, featuring a clip of Kamala Harris talking about how she supported using tax dollars to fund gender transition surgeries for transgender-identifying prisoners, including transgender-identifying illegal migrants. Per Harris’s main political action committee, voters who watched the ad shifted 2.7 points toward Trump in the general election. It’s not surprising Republicans would want to replicate the ad in the 2026 midterms: they want to replicate the 2024 victory.

That Republican victory didn’t happen. Not only did Democrats easily win in purple states like Michigan, North Carolina, and Georgia, and in red states with shaky Republican candidates like Texas and Ohio that everyone was looking at nationally; Democrats won in places that had been on almost no one’s radar at all — like the Mississippi Senate race, for goodness’ sake, with Democrat Scott Colom in the lead against sitting Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Even small races, like the one for Indiana’s secretary of state, went to the Democrats. Eric Armstrong, a Democrat in Iowa who suspended his candidacy in September because of health issues, won his State House race anyway in a red-leaning district.

Republicans also seemed determined to run the 2024 playbook without acknowledging that the political landscape had fundamentally changed. They failed to make the case for the administration’s accomplishments over the past two years while largely ignoring new, deeply unpopular developments — from the war in Iran to high gas prices — that were shaping voters’ perceptions of the party.

The fact that someone like Armstrong won — a guy who technically wasn’t even running, but still had people pulling the lever for him presumably because he had a D next to his name — suggests that voters around the country didn’t just want to elect worthy Democrats; they wanted to defeat Republicans wherever they could.

But Republicans had replayed the wildly successful 2024 playbook. Republicans spent more in 2026 on ads attacking transgender ideology — nearly $200 million total — than in 2024. It’s not as if professional Democrats had truly moderated their positions, even if they emphasized issues like transgender ideology less than they used to. Americans hadn’t changed their minds on transgender ideology either. In fact, when it came to ballot questions, voters in as liberal a state as Colorado voted to prohibit gender transition surgeries on minors and, alongside another very liberal state, Washington, voted to prohibit boys in girls’ sports.

So why did the Republican playbook attacking Democrats on social issues work in 2024 and not in 2026?

Well, because, as it happened, Republicans fundamentally misunderstood why that playbook succeeded in 2024. “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” worked because it showed the absurdity of the Democrats focusing on social issues at the expense of the bread-and-butter material problems of normal Americans, especially inflation. But now, nearly two years into a Republican administration, what voters saw was Republicans focusing on social issues at the expense of the bread-and-butter problems of normal Americans, especially inflation, which remains a problem.

And just as Republicans pounced on the opportunity to call Democrats out for this problem two years ago, Democrats pounced on the opportunity to call Republicans out during the current election cycle. “Republicans are against they/them; Democrats are for you,” was their implicit message, and it was a winning one.

Many people this week are looking for monocausal explanations for the blowout. It was Iran, some are saying. It was inflation, say others. It was gas prices. It was health care. It was AI. It was data centers. Everyone has some explanation.

But maybe all of those explanations are partly right. And maybe what happened is that while Republicans fixated on culture wars — not only transgender issues, but topics like socialism and Islam and totalizing immigration restrictionism — Democrats were talking about all of those material problems, all of which mattered to normal voters whose first-order concern was that Americans simply aren’t feeling better off economically than they were two years ago.

Now, will Democrats solve this? Doubtful. Democratic governance across blue states has been a failure, which is why so many former blue staters and private-sector employers have fled to red states with fewer regulations and lower taxes. Beyond that, given the history of the past several years, it is exceedingly likely that Democrats will misread the mandate that voters have given them and focus on their own culture wars yet again.

Ultimately, the basics — free markets and individual liberties — are what will resolve Americans’ economic concerns. While this election was extremely painful for Republicans, hopefully it will be a reminder to return to those basics and remember that while culture matters, culture warring alone is not a path to victory.

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Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice (iwvoice.com).