A week before the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance hosted a town hall in Texas with Fox News host Jesse Watters. It was a friendly event with a friendly audience in what should have been a friendly state, and maybe that’s why Vance couldn’t help it. When a college student seriously asked how the right expected young people like her to settle down and have children, given the rising cost of living, Vance responded with a joke about Jon Husted’s butt.
The student, Kate White, introduced herself as the vice president of Texas Christian University’s Turning Point USA chapter, the conservative group started by Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk. She was offering Vance a chance to explain how MAGA could work for young people and he turned it into a joke. Vance finally answered the question, saying Republicans don’t pay enough attention to the issue of affordability and blaming rising housing costs on institutional investors and the “20 million illegal aliens” supposedly living in the United States. But the order of operations revealed the fatal flaw in the Republicans’ 2026 strategy: It’s all a joke to them, and they’re too online.
For the past decade, Republicans have adhered to Steve Bannon’s dictum that politics follows culture. This fixation with liberals’ supposed capture of elite institutions has emboldened the right’s war against Big Tech and, in particular, social media platforms (which the right claims actively silenced conservative voices) and its crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion. With his purchase of X, Elon Musk finally managed to build a conservative platform where right-wing voices not only had real influence but also a direct line to those in power. More recently, some people have claimed that Musk’s X is the only social network that truly represents people, unlike platforms like Bluesky, which have more left-wing user bases.
Ensconced in their online echo chamber, MAGA figureheads convinced themselves that the public was on their side, even when polls suggested otherwise. They ignored their base’s valid concerns about affordability and instead served them meaningless memes. And they failed spectacularly in the area where it really mattered: policy. X, we can now declare once and for all, is not real life. Not only did Republicans lose historically red states like Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, they barely managed to win Florida. The Senate race in Mississippi, of all places, is still too close to call.
Vance, especially, is a creature of But White House aides, department employees and Hill staff struggle in the same ecosystem. Writer John Ganz has called this phenomenon “groyperfication,” in honor of the followers of influencer Nick Fuentes, who call themselves groypers. This is a useful shorthand, although Fuentes fans are mostly too full of NEET to get jobs in the Capitol. American Moment, a training camp for promising young conservatives, supposedly excludes groypers. There is a real need for such protective measures. Kingsley Wilson, the far-right press secretary of the War Department (or by his legal name, Defense), has published anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Georgia in 1915 for allegedly raping a teenage girl. (Historians largely believe Frank was innocent.) The Department of Homeland Security regularly posts fascist fancams and references to white supremacist memes.
Republicans saw his 2024 victory as a mandate. After taking back the White House and Congress from the Democrats, they assumed the public was on board with the MAGA cultural project when, in reality, people were largely angry about the price of eggs. And with two years of dominance under their belt, they decided to push the culture even further, not realizing (or maybe just not caring) that people are still crazy about gas and grocery prices.
Ensconced in their online echo chamber, MAGA figureheads convinced themselves that the public was on their side, even when polls suggested otherwise.
In the run-up to the midterm elections, the Department of Education was posting about “Malfoid,” a gender-swapped version of Draco Malfoy. harry potter which far-right influencers claimed would save Western literature from the scourge of wokeness. The Department of Homeland Security boasted of record lows in legal immigration, which outside of white nationalist circles is not typically seen as a negative thing. Pseudonymous shitposters like Howling Mutant were posting memes comparing themselves to notorious child killer Anakin Skywalker, the new avatar of the online right. Musk, a Republican megadonor, joined in the fun, as did Katie Miller, wife of ultra-nationalist White House adviser Stephen Miller, who dressed up as Padmé Amidala, Anakin’s wife, for Halloween. (Katie Miller’s last government role was advising Elon Musk’s failed Department of Government Efficiency; she now spends her time throwing lavish parties and hosting a podcast that no one listens to.)
Most of the American public disagrees with X, but the conversations conservatives have there do reach the mainstream, often with disastrous results. Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, lost his election by a wide margin after posting anti-Indian memes on X. (Asian American voters, including Indian Americans, moved left in Texas elections in the last vote.) Musk did his part to boost turnout, spending nearly $500 million on Republican candidates and PACs. But even Musk’s money failed to offset voter dissatisfaction with Republicans’ performance, perhaps because the ads he funded focused heavily on culture war issues that were out of step with voters’ concerns about the cost of living.
And it turns out Miller didn’t even vote, telling CBS News that he feared doing so would jeopardize his safety since Virginia law makes voters’ addresses public. (The Millers, like other members of the Trump administration, live on a military installation with tight security; it is unlikely that intruders will be able to reach their home.) Republican myopia may have contributed to his poor performance across the board, even with groups that were touted as his new base. One poll found that a majority of young people of all races, including young white people, voted Democratic in the midterm elections.
In a lengthy post-mortem on Vance says several pollsters told him that voters’ top concerns were the war with Iran, the cost of living and the United States’ relationship with Israel. So why didn’t Republicans listen?
The answer lies in the algorithmic nature of social media, especially harry potter fanfiction – the algorithm will give you post after post after post about the same thing. Just as Trump spent the early years of his first term obsessing over Fox News, the only major network that would reflect his biases back to him, MAGA is now totally on board with
