You didn’t even have to look at the numbers on Wednesday to know the election was a rout. You could have just guessed it by the fact that Donald Trump didn’t deny the results, call the whole thing “rigged,” or vow to fight the cheaters to the bitter end. Instead he meekly congratulated the Democrats, insisted none of it was his fault, and offered to work with his opposition before getting back to the truly important work of his ballroom.

In a two-week period that saw right-wing leaders across the world refuse to concede and try to find ways to deny election results, Trump, the man who first gave them the playbook to do it, was the only one to accept his defeat. It’s a measure not of any change in the president but of how emphatically he was rejected by the country.

By now, everyone knows this past Tuesday was a generational calamity for Republicans, and the party is of course now yelling over each other to explain what went so badly wrong.

“We forgot that we’re a populist party,” one GOP operative told Politico about the party’s lack of an affordability message.

“President Trump’s message won. Unfortunately he wasn’t the messenger,” Trump’s former campaign deputy communications director told Fox News, complaining that his team had “allowed his winning message in 2024 to be co-opted by his opposition.”

The issue was just that the GOP “forgot how to win,” wrote outgoing Texas Sen. John Cornyn, blaming the poor “character and integrity” of its candidates and urging the party to be more “likeable.”

For Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now eagerly positioning himself as captain of this shipwreck, the problem was that Republicans were too obsessed with fighting “wokeness,” which was “yesterday’s battle.”

It’s not surprising that a party that would allow itself to get destroyed so thoroughly would in the aftermath still be completely oblivious about why they lost. Technically, yes, it was many of these things: the lack of populism, the bad candidates, the ignoring of affordability, the obsession with wokeness.

But that’s really underselling it. The reason the Republicans have been decimated is that the party did everything they could possibly do to make almost everyone in the country’s lives dramatically worse for the past twenty-two months: it pushed four hundred thousand people out of their jobs, it is throwing millions of people off of their health care, it wrenched Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits — also known as food stamps — from 5.5 million people, and raised their insurance premiums by 26 percent, with another 13 percent to come next year.

This was part of the party’s genius idea of slashing federal support for health care more than anyone had ever done in US history, to the tune of $1 trillion. This is all before you factor in the average of $471 per person in fuel costs alone added to US households’ expenses by the Iran war and the $1,745 more per family they’ve had to pay because of Trump’s blanket tariffs.

Mind you, all this was as Trump and the GOP shoveled a trillion dollars in tax cuts — the same amount they had cut from most people’s health care — to the top 1 percent, in a cut that gave 70 percent of its benefits to the wealthiest fifth of Americans. At the same time, it presided over record-high wage theft by employers and actively decided to let hundreds of corporate crooks who gave money to Trump off the hook for a variety of alleged wrongdoing, including price-fixing, workplace discrimination, and forced labor — all while the president and his family lined their own pockets in a way that’s never been seen before in US (or really, human) history, with the president alone growing his net worth by $3 billion through crypto scams that tricked his own voters into buying and being stuck with worthless Trump-themed digital currency.

We’re not even getting into the way Trump’s deportation crusade has caused terror, havoc, and death even among US citizens while directly hurting the farming communities that had lent him their support.

You will note the problem here is not that Trump and the Republicans were not talking about affordability. Trump could have spent the final weeks of the campaign actually talking about the high cost of living instead of droning on about his reflecting pool and men’s asses, and the reality is people’s lives still would have been significantly, materially worse off because of the policies they sunk untold months, energy, and political capital into to pursue — the same decidedly anti-populist policies Republicans have pushed for decades.

Those policies are not the ones desired by ordinary Trump voters, who — if you look at polling and the election results for ballot measures and candidates — want things like a higher minimum wage, a clampdown on price gouging, affordable childcare, and more generous employer benefits. Instead they got the bog-standard neoliberal agenda that the GOP’s donors and corporate sponsors promote, lobby for, and force onto the legislative agenda, because it benefits their bottom lines.

It’s not that Republicans suddenly forgot to be populist going into the election. It’s that they had nothing to be populist about.

The problem for the GOP here is the same one that the similarly corporate-backed Democratic Party has been wrestling with for decades: the interests of its working-class voters are fundamentally at odds with the interests of the people who fund its campaigns, who bankroll the think tanks they rely on for their policy ideas, and who are often the 1 percenters who make up its roster of elected officials.

The Democratic Party is, thanks to the left insurgency in its ranks, currently in the middle of a battle to try and resolve that contradiction. The GOP appears completely oblivious that that contradiction even exists — and as a result, has no real idea why voters just gave it a historic rebuke.