How Tariffs Became the Millstone That Sank the GOP

By Phillip W. Magness

Thursday, November 05, 2026

 

Within hours of Tuesday night’s rout, Vice President J.D. Vance had settled on an explanation: “The reason we lost is the war.” It is a convenient story. The war in Iran is unpopular, and the spike in gasoline prices that came with it certainly didn’t help Republicans.

 

But the war is not what caused the blue wave. Tariffs were the millstone that sank the GOP ticket—and the White House had years of warning.

 

The scale of the defeat is hard to overstate. Democrats took both chambers of Congress, flipping Senate seats in places like Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. The exit polls overwhelmingly confirm why. In the NBC News exit poll, 66 percent of voters said Trump’s tariff policies hurt the national economy, and 64 percent said they hurt the economy in their own area. Just 21 percent said tariffs helped. The economy was the top issue for 39 percent of voters—ahead of the state of democracy at 33 percent, immigration at 14 percent, and far ahead of foreign policy issues, Iran included, at just 4 percent. In another set of questions, 49 percent of the electorate ranked the cost of living concerns as a “crucial” factor in determining their vote. This compares to 36 percent for immigration enforcement, 34 percent for the Iran war, and 23 percent for data centers. The only other issue that matched it was a parallel concern about corruption, which 55 percent of voters flagged as crucial.

 

These figures should not come as a surprise to anyone. We’ve had almost two years of warning in the polling data. Tariffs have never been popular with the public, save for a tiny hardcore MAGA base. Among the remainder of the electorate, opposition to trade protectionism is strong and growing. The tariff issue has steadily eroded Trump’s economic performance rating since he launched a trade war against the rest of the globe on “Liberation Day” in April 2025. The Economist/YouGov tracker tells the story. In Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021, his economic ratings remained generally high. In the second, his economic approval began at the same level as his first term, then plummeted as the tariffs rolled out—and it never recovered. It sank to a net  minus-36 by October 2026. The unpopular war in Iran and its accompanying strains on gasoline prices accelerated the decline, certainly, but the data show it was already well underway because of the tariffs.

 

So what went wrong?

 

Quite simply, the White House miscalculated on the issue. And it miscalculated badly.

 

The administration rigidly clung to “populist” arguments for tariffs, mainly pushed by voices in the White House such as Vance, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, and aligned groups such as Oren Cass’ American Compass think tank. The argument runs something like this: From the 1980s to the present, they claim that the Rust Belt states of the Midwest were “hollowed out” by free trade. Trump proved in 2016 and 2024 that he could win those states by promising tariffs and industrial subsidies to “reshore” manufacturing. Systematizing these policies as a general populist economic platform, they maintain, would solve a host of problems in this region, both real and imagined. Since tariffs attach a tax penalty to imports, they would incentivize U.S. production that brought back small towns and revived decaying communities. They would create new jobs and reopen old factories. If done properly, economic populism could even solve social problems such as drug abuse, declining birth rates, and an epidemic of disillusionment among young men.

 

Most of all, we were told, the Republican Party had no other option but to embrace tariffs and associated industrial subsidies. Failure to do so would reverse Trump’s midwestern electoral gains and return the GOP to its Mitt Romney-era malaise as a permanent minority party. As Vance is fond of arguing, free trade allegedly destroyed the social fabric of these regions and caused their youth to drift into socialist ideology. “How you fix that problem,” he reiterated in an August 2026 interview with Fox News, “is by doubling down on Donald Trump’s economic nationalism.”

 

We had plenty of early warning that this strategy portended electoral disaster for the GOP. At the time of Vance’s interview, tariffs were not only unpopular at the national level—they were despised by the very same Rust Belt voters that they aimed to attract. Polling showed the deep unpopularity of tariffs in the exact states they were supposed to win. In Ohio, 61 percent of likely voters opposed Trump’s tariff policies in September. In Pennsylvania, 71 percent said in June that tariffs were hurting them; only 9 percent said they were helping. In Michigan, 64 percent opposed Trump’s trade war with neighboring Canada as of September. In Wisconsin, just days before the election, 70 percent said tariffs were hurting the state’s farmers.

 

To make matters even worse, Trump launched his trade war against Canada just as the midterms were heating up, imposing draconian tariffs of up to 50 percent on a range of Canadian goods that took effect in August—and promising more to come on cars, auto parts, and steel. The Great Lakes states that trade most heavily with Canada—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—incurred the hardest hits. According to one estimate, Ohio faces $2.3 billion in tariff exposure from its annual exports to Canada. Pennsylvania faces another $1.8 billion in exposure. Michigan will likely incur the largest single-industry hit because of its extensive cross-border trade in automobiles and auto parts.

 

How did the White House miss this so badly? The answer is simple: It clung to tariffs for ideological reasons, despite a mountain of emerging evidence of their ballot-box toxicity.

 

Chief among these reasons was the false claim, pushed by Trump, Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and several White House spokespersons, that foreign countries would pay the costs of the tariffs. The empirical evidence conclusively demonstrated otherwise. A New York Federal Reserve study found that Americans bore nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ burden in 2025. A second New York Fed study found that tariffs added about 2.9 percentage points to consumer goods inflation at their peak, and suggested that “Liberation Day” reversed a downward trend in goods pricing after the inflationary crisis of the Biden years. And Harvard Business School’s Pricing Lab found clear evidence that tariffs triggered price increases on both imported retail goods and their domestic competitors.

 

All of this could have been avoided. The Supreme Court gave the White House a political offramp in February when it invalidated the bulk of Trump’s tariffs from “Liberation Day” and the year that followed. The court ruling resulted in refund orders for about $175 billion in illegally collected taxes. Instead of taking the hint, the White House doubled down like a petulant child throwing a temper tantrum, frantically trying to reimpose the same tariffs by “statute shopping” under different and equally dubious clauses of U.S. trade law. The Canada trade war even pushed rates on certain goods above the levels that the Supreme Court struck down. These unpopular tariffs remained in place throughout the election season, even as pending lawsuits may eventually force another round of refunds and render them all for naught.

 

Inside the White House’s economic policy echo chamber, they pretended not to notice, as evidenced by the conspicuous absence of the word “tariff” from Vance’s post-midterms remarks. But voters definitely noticed.