How populist politics succeeds and fails
Why is populism, broadly defined, on the brink of historic victories around the world, while populism in the form of President Donald Trump's Republican Party is poised to lose one or both houses of Congress in the United States?
The troubles Trump's Republicans face are not a mystery. It was always unlikely that Republicans would maintain their hair's-breadth House majority.
But the 2026 lineup of Senate seats looked favorable, with only one Republican defending a seat in a state Kamala Harris carried and all but one defending seats in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. At least two Democrats were defending seats in states Trump carried in 2024, and retirements opened up two other seats in marginal states.
That picture has now changed. Persistent inflation, some of it plausibly triggered by Trump's tariffs, has hurt Republicans. Democrats have sprinted to big polling leads in Georgia and North Carolina, and various combinations of weak Republicans and strong Democrats have left Republicans trailing in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Texas — states Trump carried by double digits two years ago.
What a different picture in the rest of the world. So how do we explain why populism is on the rise beyond the U.S., even as it seems mired in failure here?
One explanation is that Trumpism is not really mired in failure. Trump has been president of the U.S. for almost six of the last 10 years and has had substantial policy successes. They range from economic growth exceeding that of other major countries to the recent treaty promising American control of Greenland.
That success is part of his problem. After three and a half years of the Biden administration arguing that the law left it no alternative to an open-door immigration policy, the second Trump administration has proved that the border can be controlled.
And, given the messiness of everyday life, it's been done with some collateral damage to the populist cause. Consider the heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Minneapolis choreographed by the oddball Homeland Security appointee Kristi Noem and her consigliere, Corey Lewandowski.
There is something in the nature of populist politics — the willingness to take on and persevere against established media, corporate, academic and party elites — that produces a peculiarly personal kind of leadership. Success in ignoring hoary shibboleths only encourages such leaders to defy warnings they would be better off heeding.
Populism has saddled the Republican Party with inflation imposed by tariffs for which there is no perceptible demand from even the smallest subgroup of the electorate. Yet Trump supplies them in abundance, driven by idiosyncratic theories he concocted in the 1980s.
The president's party has suffered as well from his choice of suboptimal Republican nominees, which has already cost Republicans several Senate seats and seems on the verge of, amazingly, costing them a Senate seat in Texas as well. A leader who has gotten where he is by defying conventional wisdom that proves wrong gets into the habit of defying it even when, as on many occasions, it is absolutely right.
From time to time, we hear predictions from politicians, both populist and conventional, that their side will govern for the next generation. That seldom happens. The Democratic Party won House majorities in every election from 1954 through 1992. But Republicans held the presidency for 26 of those 40 years, and Democrats were usually split between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals.
In the 32 years since 1994, presidential elections have produced party trifectas — majorities in both houses of Congress and control of the presidency — in six of eight election years. But only once did a trifecta last as long as four years, and in one case, it ended after five months. Populist movements can achieve worthy goals spurned by more conventional forces. But they are subject to the rules that every person's strength is also his weakness and that, in human affairs, success tends to breed failure.
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