By the time voters go to the polls in November, most forecasters expect Democrats to retake the House. That alone would be an unremarkable feature of a midterm cycle under an opposition president. What should concern anyone who cares about markets and opportunity is which Democrats are winning, and why.
Across the country this year, insurgents aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America have picked off establishment incumbents not by running on foreign policy or abstract ideology, but on rent, groceries, and health care. DSA’s membership has grown roughly twentyfold since 2016. Its most visible proof of concept, New York City’s democratic-socialist mayor, was elected promising city-run grocery stores and a rent freeze. Whatever else one thinks of these candidates, they did not win by being vague. They won because enough voters believe the cost of living is a crisis, and that government intervention is the answer.
That is the movement against which conservatives are competing, and whom the country may be choosing between in 2028. And here is the uncomfortable truth for the right: on the current trajectory, it has no coherent answer.
Some on the right have responded to populist Democrats by becoming populists themselves, in the process abandoning commitment to free markets and limited government. Tariffs and handouts present the same instinct to reach for government levers, just pointed in different directions. Others have retreated to a message of restraint and austerity that, whatever its intellectual merits, does not speak to a family that cannot make rent. Neither approach offers a real alternative, and both make the same fatal error: they accept the left’s premise that the debate is fundamentally about how much government does for people, and then try to compete on those terms.
We will never win that argument. The right cannot out-promise a party willing to run city grocery stores and freeze rents by government decree. Every time the debate becomes a bidding war over who hands out more, more generously, faster, then conservatives will lose, because that is not the argument conservatives are equipped, or willing, to win.
We shouldn’t engage in that argument. We should have a different one.
The reason DSA-aligned candidates are winning isn’t that Americans have suddenly embraced socialism. It’s that the cost of living has genuinely outpaced what ordinary families can manage, and nobody with real power has offered them a credible alternative to “more government.” Housing costs are high because localities have made it nearly illegal to build. Health care costs are high because subsidies and consolidation have gutted competition. Energy costs are volatile because slow permitting has throttled new supply. These are not mysteries, and none of them require a government check to fix. They require removing the barriers that government itself created.
That is where the right’s opportunity lies. Permitting reform that lets housing and energy projects proceed is not a partisan idea. It has co-sponsors on the left, including some of the same officials frustrated that their own cities can’t build enough housing and energy infrastructure to support it. Hospital price transparency and antitrust enforcement against consolidated health systems draw support from progressives who are just as angry at monopoly power as conservatives are. Zoning reform has passed in blue states and red states alike, often over the objections of entrenched interests in both parties at the local level.
None of this requires Republicans to promise more spending than Democrats. It requires them to promise something Democrats’ government-first instincts cannot deliver: innovation that produces abundance through the power of freedom.
Combatting the leftward swing of the Democratic Party will not happen by racing it toward ever-more government, and it will not happen by lecturing anxious families about fiscal discipline while offering them nothing else. It happens by building a real, results-oriented alternative, one that takes the affordability crisis as seriously as the DSA does, and answers it not with a bigger state, but with a freer one. The movement that convinces voters it can actually bring down their rent, their premiums, and their electric bill will win this argument. Right now, nobody has made that case loudly enough. The right has an opening to show how market-driven abundance is the best solution. It should take it now, before 2028, when the argument will no longer be theoretical.