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Repudiation Elections

Repudiation Elections

Last updated on: November 12, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Repudiation Elections 2026-11-07T12:59:11-05:00 Gene Veith

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In the midterm election, as in the other national elections of the past decade, “the public rendered a negative verdict on the loser, not a positive verdict on the winner.”

So observes American Enterprise Institute think-tanker Yuval Levin in his National Review piece Another Repudiation Election. Levin has been drawing attention to how voters have been voting against candidates, as opposed to voting for candidates, for a long time. The recent midterm election is an especially clear example of the phenomenon.

Levin says that Americans have just gotten sick and tired of President Trump and his antics. The war, the tariffs, his Truth Social rants, his grandiose construction projects, his desire to put his name on everything, his lining his own pocket and that of his family members, etc., etc., have made it so that legions of Americans just can’t stand him. This includes many of his former supporters, indeed many Americans who support most of his policies but have given up on his ability to implement them due to his egotism and lack of self-discipline. So the midterm elections were a broad-based repudiation of President Trump, not necessarily an embrace of leftist ideology, which the victorious Democrats hardly bothered to put forward.

This dynamic of “repudiation elections” is nothing new, as Levin points out:

The American electorate has been repudiating the status quo again and again, but our political leaders have refused to offer something different. Trump’s election in 2016 was a rebuke of the increasingly culturally radical Democratic Party of Barack Obama’s final years. Joe Biden’s election in 2020 was a rebuke of Trump and his ridiculous approach to governing. But in its place, Biden offered a return to exactly what voters had rejected by electing Trump to begin with. So in 2024, voters rejected that cultural progressivism yet again, but all they were offered in its place was literally the return of Donald Trump. Now they’re rejecting that again, and presumably the next two years will only make them more eager to put it behind them.

Here is Levin’s best quote, something he said two years ago after President Trump’s re-election, “which his supporters hailed as ushering in a grand new Republican coalition for the ages” and which now sounds prophetic:

This is the trap that our 21st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.

Levin thinks the newly-ascendant Democrats will fail to learn that lesson:

The Democrats will resist it because it’s hard to learn anything from your own election victories. It just feels too good to win. You would think it should be obvious that this was not a public endorsement of anything about the Democratic Party: The party remains exceedingly unpopular, and its politicians didn’t even run on anything in particular in this election. Voters can’t stand the Democrats, but this election was not a referendum on the Democrats. It was a referendum on the Republicans, whom voters clearly also cannot stand.

As for Republicans, “Losing big is pretty much the only way that political parties can ever be moved to make significant change, and this was certainly a big loss.” But Trump remains president for the next two years, and he thinks it will be difficult for Republicans to shake him off.

Levin stresses, though, that any post-Trump Republican party cannot just be a reversion to the pre-Trump Republican party. “The past decade has had a lot to teach us all about the country and its 21st-century circumstances, and some of those lessons are plainly in tension with what were the GOP’s political assumptions and policy priorities in the Bush and Obama eras.”

The repudiation elections demonstrate that a large segment of voters are not bound to either party. “The idea that these voters are now committed Democrats is no more plausible than the notion that they were committed Republicans two years ago.”

Add up even just the Americans who have gone back and forth between the parties over the past 15 years, and it looks like it ought to be possible for a broadly appealing presidential candidate to win a much bigger victory than anyone has won in a generation. The electorate may not be as stuck as the political class. And, ironically, it is the party that loses big and learns from its loss first that stands a chance of reaching for that durable majority coalition.

Finding a “broadly appealing presidential candidate.” What a concept!

Photo: Yuval Levin by Taylordw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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