In ballot items, fiscal conservatism beats socialism

By John Hood
Real Clear Politics

The 2026 midterms will go down as one of the worst cycles for Republicans in modern times. In key congressional, legislative, and local races around the country, Democrats crushed their GOP foes, winning U.S. Senate seats in the likes of Texas, Iowa, Kansas, and the Carolinas; capturing the U.S. House by a surprisingly comfortable margin; and flipping several Republican governorships and legislative chambers.

But was conservatism itself defeated? Hardly. While the GOP is, indeed, the movement’s main political vehicle, American conservatism’s founding principles of liberty, order, family, federalism, and free enterprise cannot be negated by a single election cycle, even one as cobalt blue as the one we just witnessed.

Don’t just take my word for it. I admit I’m a movement lifer, with dozens of years of experience establishing and running conservative organizations, and I co-founded the Freedom Conservatism project to restore these principles to the core of the American Right. A skeptic might say I only see what I want to see.

Well, examine the 2026 results more closely. The overriding issue was affordability, about which victorious Democrats talked incessantly and doomed Republicans never found their voice. What was the single most potent Democratic attack? That President Trump had raised rather than lowered consumer prices by socking Americans with tariffs. It was an anti-tax message! It was correct on the merits. And it worked brilliantly.

More to the point, while a blue tsunami swept across the country, swamping even Republicans in supposedly safe seats, the same electorate opted for fiscal conservatism on a host of ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments. In the most prominent case, California voters simultaneously shrank the already diminutive ranks of GOP officeholders while also appearing (at this writing) to reject a proposed 5% tax on the assets of billionaires domiciled in the state. Assured that the wealth grab would only happen this once, and would affect only a small coterie of the super rich, voters properly disbelieved such disingenuous assurances. While making some temporary tax hikes permanent, Californians also voted to forbid new taxes on assets as well as the retroactive enactment of new taxes except under extreme conditions.

In Iowa, which just flipped a U.S. Senate seat and governorship from red to blue, voters simultaneously voted to require a two-thirds majority of state lawmakers to raise income taxes. In Arizona, the Democratic governor skated to reelection even as voters opted to cap sales taxes on groceries and require a referendum for any new taxes on prepared food and drink. In my home state of North Carolina, Democrats had their best election cycle in decades, flipping two dozen seats in the state house and winning a U.S. Senate seat for the first time in nearly two decades. Still, 62% of North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment to cap the income-tax rate at 3.5%.

On property taxes, it was more of a mixed bag, with voters in Florida and North Carolina approving limits while voters in Oklahoma and Wyoming rejecting them. Nor did fiscal conservatism prevail in every other instance. Still, there are plenty of evidence for the proposition that this year’s partisan outcomes, as exhilarating as they were for Democrats and dispiriting for Republicans, did not reflect a broad ideological shift away from free markets and fiscal conservatism toward central planning and socialism.

I don’t mean to suggest just America’s free-enterprise system is safe. It faces grave threats. Still, the anti-tax votes of 2026 provide grounds for hope. These threats can be turned aside. Americans haven’t abandoned their inherent fiscal conservatism.

Converting those sentiments into future political and policy victories requires more than hope, however. Conservatives must strategize, organize, educate, and nurture a new generation of leaders to combat both left-wing socialism and right-wing populism. That’s where Freedom Conservatism enters the picture. I co-founded the project three years ago, and it now encompasses hundreds of conservative leaders in politics, policy, journalism, academia, philanthropy, and the law. We collaborate on projects, convene annual conferences and other meetings, and regularly brief members and staffers on Capitol Hill. Our partners do the same in state capitals around the country, as befits a republic established with federalism as one of its founding ideas.

FreeCons aren’t in denial about the election results. We’re already preparing for the battles to come. On November 16, we will launch a series of regional forums with an event called FreeCon Phoenix, hosted by the Goldwater Institute and other partners. It will be followed by FreeCon Philadelphia on November 17, FreeCon Raleigh on November 18, and Freedom Conservatism panels at the 2026 Freedom & Progress Conference, to be hosted on November 18 in Washington by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

The 2026 midterms were a disaster for the GOP, but it may also serve as a catalyst for the creation of a broader, wiser, and more-principled conservative movement.

John Hood is president of the John William Pope Foundation, a North Carolina-based grant maker, and co-founder of Freedom Conservatism.