In the words of Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, the midterms were ‘an extinction-level event’ for the Republican party.
Only two-years after returning to the White House with an emphatic victory, President Trump and his party suffered enormous losses.
As the American election analyst Sean Trende pointed out yesterday, this was easily “the worst election for a party since 1974” — when an earlier generation of Republicans suffered huge losses after the Nixon presidency and Watergate.
But instead of focusing on the implications for President Trump, I want to offer my candid thoughts about what I think this means for the British Right.
There has already been much debate.
Already, liberals are jumping on Trump’s defeat alongside Bolsonaro’s loss at the recent election in Brazil to claim that the national populist moment is ‘over’.
President Trump is a lame duck president. Brexit is being unravelled. Reform UK are down in the polls. The populist zeitgeist that began in 2016 is now in full retreat.
There’s no doubt that some of these things have happened.
But this narrative is far too simplistic.
Just look around.
Marine Le Pen is still on course to win the presidency in France. The Alternative for Germany is still topping the national polls.
The Freedom Party of Austria appears to be cruising to victory at the next legislative election. Norway is moving right. Georgia Meloni and Itay’s Right remain dominant.
The populist right is climbing rapidly in Spain against the backdrop of the chaos in Ceuta, and ahead of national elections later this month.
And while Andy Burnham and Labour are ascendant in the UK polls, the fact remains that today right-wing parties combined (Reform UK, Tories and Restore Britain) are polling at 48 per cent — ten points higher than the Right vote in 2024.
Yes, the British Right is divided.
But there’s little evidence that the British people themselves are moving sharply Left (if anything they’ve become even more sceptical of key left-wing policies).
So things are not quite as straightforward as liberal columnists would have us believe.
Yet having said that, I do think there are some very important lessons the British Right could learn from the midterms and where President Trump and the MAGA movement have very clearly gone wrong.
Specifically, I see four key key messages for the British Right …
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