The Asymmetric Campaigns of 2026

How will history remember the campaigns of 2026? I’m not referring here to the electoral results, which we’ll know soon enough, but to the messages that our two parties have run on. And what future historians will be sure to note, I suspect, is that while there was no overlap in the parties’ arguments (as is usually the case), there was also no overlap in the topics they dealt with. A more asymmetrical campaign year is hard to recall or even imagine.

Democrats left, right, and center ran on that most bread-and-butter issue, affordability. This was already clear last year, when centrist Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, and socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City, all won their respective offices by highlighting what they’d do to mitigate the soaring costs of living. That Mamdani’s subsequent policies—chiefly, instituting a rent freeze for a million or more tenants—were more sweeping than anything that the two governors have been able or willing to enact speaks to some of the differences within Democratic ranks, but that doesn’t gainsay the common primacy all three gave to affordability in their campaigns.

The results of last year’s elections might have struck a cautionary note in most any White House, but not Donald Trump’s. By instigating a war on Iran that he can’t figure out how to end, he’s inflicted higher oil and gas prices, and all their spillover effects, on the home front (and the whole planet). By continuing to impose his sweeping and indiscriminate tariffs on goods of all nations, he’s made clear his responsibility for the higher prices that now attend the rather basic act of shopping. By supporting the metastasizing spread of data centers, he’s become seen as complicit in, or at least indifferent to, the hike in his fellow Americans’ utility bills, and their looming fears that AI will render them redundant.

The economic gains to which Trump periodically points—more investment, more construction, more profits, the stock market going up—are standard-issue for Republican candidates. That they don’t trickle down to most Americans has long been the case, but this year, they actually come at the expense of ratepayers and motorists.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, most of the usual issues they invoke to steer voters away from Democrats haven’t been top of mind for this year’s electorate. Despite long-standing Democratic control of America’s cities, crime is way down this year. With the possible exception of the Bolsonaro family, no one is sneaking over our borders. Democratic candidates have also abandoned some of the policies and all of the language associated with 2010s-vintage wokeness. (Francesca Hong stands out as one who didn’t, which partly explains why she lost the party’s gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin.)

Republicans still had to campaign on something. Returning to the good old days of McCarthyism, they ran against socialism, though their having cried wolf over the alleged socialism of every Democrat since William Jennings Bryan left them at a disadvantage, as did the growing support for socialism particularly among young voters. They homed in on the issue of trans rights, particularly having trans women participate in women’s sports, which, unfortunately for the GOP, was a more theoretical concern than the price of gas. They gay-baited James Talarico and Arab- and Muslim-baited Abdul El-Sayed, in the flailing hope that bigotry would eclipse economic struggle in the minds of swing voters. And in the campaign’s closing weeks, Trump himself bizarrely focused on the bodies of male Republican candidates, which increased speculation about his own psyche while having no appreciable effect on the prospects of Republican candidates, the jacked and the flabby alike.

To the extent that Republicans have had a strategy, it hasn’t been about their messaging, much less Trump’s record as president, or the Republican Congress’s record of submitting to his every whim. It’s been their efforts to suppress or negate Democratic voting. So far, the vast majority of their ploys have been struck down by the courts and rejected by state election officials, who have developed Election Day game plans if Trump’s agents seek to stop the vote counting. Right now, that effort is focused on California, where the GOP’s intention appears to be impeding and delaying the state’s count and ratification of its votes. If the state hasn’t certified its elections come January 3, when the new Congress convenes, then the 45 to 50 Democratic House members who will have been elected in California might be kept off the floor, though I deeply doubt any court will allow this to happen. Hail Mary pass though it be, it’s the closest thing the Republicans have to a strategy—and a de facto acknowledgment that they know full well they have no message or record to run on.