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 himself. When a college student earnestly asked how the right expected young people like her to settle down and have kids, given the ever-growing cost of living, Vance replied with a quip about Jon Husted’s ass.

The midterms proved once and for all that X is not real life

The student, Kate White, introduced herself as the vice president of the Texas Christian University chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative group started by Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk. She was offering Vance an opportunity to explain how MAGA could work for young people, and he turned it into a joke. Vance did eventually answer 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 of Republicans’ 2026 strategy: Everything is a gag to them, and they’re way too online.

For the past decade, Republicans have adhered to Steve Bannon’s maxim that politics is downstream from culture. This fixation with liberals’ alleged capture of elite institutions has animated 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 succeeded in building 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 media that really represents the people, unlike platforms like Bluesky, which have more left-leaning user bases.

Cocooned in their online echo chamber, MAGA figureheads convinced themselves the public was on their side, even when polling suggested otherwise. They ignored their base’s valid concerns about affordability and served them nonsensical memes instead. And they failed spectacularly in the realm where it actually mattered: politics. X, we can now declare once and for all, is not real life. Republicans not only lost historically red states like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina, but 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 X, where his following list includes such illustrious accounts as Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert, Howling Mutant, and Captive Dreamer. But White House aides, department employees, and Hill staffers are stewing in the same ecosystem. Writer John Ganz has termed this phenomenon “groyperfication,” after followers of influencer Nick Fuentes, who call themselves groypers. This is a useful shorthand, though Fuentes’ fans are mostly too NEET-pilled to land jobs on the Hill. American Moment, a boot camp for young conservative up-and-comers, reportedly screens out groypers. There’s a real need for such protective measures. Kingsley Wilson, the hard-right press secretary for the Department of War (or per its legal name, Defense), has posted antisemitic conspiracy theories about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Georgia 1915 for allegedly raping a teenage girl. (Historians largely believe Frank was innocent.) The Department of Homeland Security regularly posts fascist fancams and wink-wink references to white supremacist memes.

Republicans saw their 2024 victory as a mandate. Having clawed the White House and Congress back from Democrats, they assumed the public was on board with MAGA’s cultural project when in fact people were largely mad about the price of eggs. And with two years of dominance under their belt, they decided to go even harder on culture, not realizing — or maybe just not caring — that people are still mad about gas prices and groceries.

Cocooned in their online echo chamber, MAGA figureheads convinced themselves the public was on their side, even when polling suggested otherwise.

In the run-up to the midterms, the Department of Education was posting about “Malfoid” — a gender-swapped version of Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter that far-right influencers claimed would save Western literature from the scourge of wokeness. The Department of Homeland Security was bragging about record lows in legal immigration, which outside white nationalist circles is typically not considered a negative thing. Pseudonymous shitposters like Howling Mutant were posting memes comparing themselves to noted child murderer Anakin Skywalker, the new avatar for the online right. Musk, a Republican megadonor, got in on the fun, as did Katie Miller, wife of ultranationalist White House adviser Stephen Miller, who dressed up as Anakin’s wife Padmé Amidala for Halloween. (Katie Miller’s last government role was advising Elon Musk’s failed Department of Government Efficiency; now she devotes her time to throwing lavish parties and hosting a podcast no one listens to.)

Most of the American public isn’t on X, but the conversations conservatives have there do bleed out into the mainstream — often with disastrous results. Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, lost his election by a huge margin after posting anti-Indian memes on X. (Asian American voters, including Indian Americans, moved to the left in Texas elections down the ballot.) Musk did his part to drive turnout, spending nearly half a billion dollars on Republican candidates and PACs. But even Musk’s money failed to make up for voters’ dissatisfaction with Republicans’ performance, perhaps because the ads he funded focused largely on culture war issues that were out of step with voters’ concerns about the cost of living.

And Miller, it turns out, didn’t even vote, telling CBS Newsshe feared doing so would put her safety at risk, since Virginia law makes voters’ home addresses public. (The Millers, like other members of the Trump administration, live on a military installation with tight security; it’s unlikely intruders would be able to get to their home.) Republican myopia may have contributed to their poor performance across the board, including with groups that were touted as their new base. One poll found that a majority of young men of all races — including young white men — voted for Democrats in the midterms.

In a long postmortem on X — reportedly posted without input or permission from White House officials — Vance said he asked “the smartest data guy” he knows for insight on the electorate ahead of the midterms. Vance claims several pollsters told him that voters’ main concerns were the war against Iran, the cost of living, and America’s relationship to Israel. So why didn’t Republicans listen?

The answer lies in the algorithmic nature of social media, X especially. If you interact with even one post about a relatively niche topic — say, genderbent Harry Potter fanfiction — the algorithm will feed you post after post after post about the same thing. Just like Trump spent the early years of his first term obsessing over Fox News, the single mainstream network that would reflect his biases back to him, MAGA is now all in on X. And if you’re the kind of person who spends a lot of time scrolling, you may even delude yourself into thinking the issue clogging up your feed is something people just can’t stop talking about.

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