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I’ll admit it. Tuesday night was disappointing.
I expected Republicans to lose more seats than they flipped. History suggested as much. But I certainly didn’t expect the results to be quite that bad.
Still, buried beneath the headlines celebrating Democratic victories was a rather inconvenient development for the political left. Americans may have voted to elect Democrats, but that doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly developed an appetite for the progressive social agenda again.
In fact, on one of the most contentious cultural issues of the last several years, voters delivered a remarkably consistent message.
Keep men out of women’s sports.
In Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska and Washington, voters backed measures protecting female athletic competition on the basis of biological sex.
And these weren’t just Republican strongholds. Colorado and Washington are reliably blue states whose political leadership has spent years embracing progressive gender policies.
Yet the same electorate willing to put Democrats in positions of power also voted to reject a central pillar of the modern progressive agenda.
I don’t know how much clearer voters can make themselves.
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For years, elected Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media have insisted that protecting women’s sports is an extreme position and that anyone who dares advocate for it is a hate-filled bigot. And believe me, that’s one of the nicer things I’ve been called.
We’ve been told that acknowledging biological differences between men and women is transphobic. That girls who object to sharing locker rooms or competing against male athletes are the problem. That sports should prioritize inclusion and kindness, even when doing so comes at the expense of fairness and safety.
I’ve personally experienced what happens when you challenge that orthodoxy. I’ve also watched countless female athletes lose opportunities, endure public ridicule and face enormous pressure to remain silent simply for asking for something as basic as a fair shot.
I’ve watched politicians, university administrators and athletic organizations bend themselves into knots trying to explain why women should be expected to sacrifice their own opportunities in the name of inclusion.
Voters made their position clear in 2024, when the Republican agenda prevailed nationally. Apparently, even after voting for Democrats in 2026, they still aren’t buying what the progressive left is selling on this issue.
Consider Colorado.
Opponents of the girls’ sports initiative reportedly raised roughly $4 million, with substantial backing from unions and progressive organizations, including Planned Parenthood. Proponents raised approximately $200,000, largely through grassroots efforts.
They prevailed despite being outspent nearly 20 to 1.
That’s a staggering disparity, and an even more telling result. At what point does the political left accept that this is a losing issue and give it a rest?
Women’s sports protections are not some fringe position held exclusively by Republicans. The issue cuts across party lines, and the people who have spent years insisting otherwise have a serious problem on their hands.
The cultural shift is evident well beyond the ballot box.
Look at the response WNBA player Sophie Cunningham has received.
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After publicly expressing support for protecting women’s sports, Cunningham didn’t issue a groveling apology. She wasn’t shunned into professional exile. Quite the opposite.
Her public profile exploded. Her social media following and engagement skyrocketed. Her merchandise became some of the most sought-after in the league, and her Adidas shoes reportedly sold out almost immediately.
On Halloween, I saw countless young girls wearing her jersey and dressing up as Sophie Cunningham.
The notion that expressing a common-sense view about women’s sports is automatically a career-ending offense looks increasingly ridiculous.
For years, corporations, celebrities and athletes were conditioned to believe that stepping outside progressive orthodoxy would destroy their reputations.
That threat doesn’t carry quite the same weight anymore.
And I think that’s worth celebrating, particularly after an election that otherwise gave conservatives plenty of reasons to believe a serious reckoning is overdue.
But there’s another part of Tuesday’s results that Republicans would be foolish to ignore.
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Affordability is a real problem. And I believe that was the bigger message voters sent on Tuesday by voting for Democrats.
Americans are tired of working harder just to afford less. They’re tired of watching their grocery bills climb, calculating how much they can spend at the gas pump and wondering whether homeownership will ever be a realistic possibility.
Young people, in particular, are confronting an economy that often feels stacked against them. And when they express their frustration, they’re too often dismissed as lazy or entitled.
Sometimes that criticism is warranted. Most of the time, it isn’t.
I believe Americans have remarkably short memories about just how bad inflation became under the Biden administration. But telling a struggling family that things used to be worse isn’t going to make their next grocery bill any easier to pay.
People vote based on the lives they’re living, not just the economic statistics politicians would prefer they remember.
And when people feel financially desperate, promises of sweeping government intervention can sound awfully attractive.
That’s part of what makes socialism so dangerous. The promise of essentially free everything is appealing, particularly to generations that have never been adequately taught its historical consequences. Of course, nothing is actually free. The bill always comes due, whether through higher taxes, mounting debt or diminished economic opportunity.
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But dismissing every voter concerned about affordability as ignorant or entitled would be a serious mistake.
I understand why people are frustrated. Republicans should, too.
But I don’t think the voters’ message of "affordability" in voting for Democrats is what Democrats will hear.
Elected Democrats will be tempted to interpret their victories as permission to expand DEI mandates, advance gender-transition policies for minors, allow boys access to the girls’ locker room, raise taxes, advocate for more lax immigration policies and continue placing ideological priorities ahead of the concerns of ordinary families.
Those are two very different mandates.
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Winning an election doesn’t mean voters have endorsed every plank of your platform. And it certainly doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned their common sense.
Tuesday’s ballot initiatives should serve as a warning against making that assumption.
They should also give Republican lawmakers in politically competitive states some much-needed confidence.
Take Pennsylvania, where legislation protecting women’s sports has faced significant political resistance.
For too long, some Republicans have treated this issue as politically radioactive, apparently convinced that defending female athletes is too controversial to be worth the fight.
Well, voters in Colorado and Washington just offered a pretty compelling rebuttal.
If these protections can earn majority support in states that routinely elect Democrats, what exactly are Republicans in purple states so afraid of?
Of course, winning at the ballot box doesn’t mean the fight is over.
Colorado’s newly elected Democratic governor, Phil Weiser, has already suggested that the state’s transgender-related ballot measures may need legislative adjustments.
And we’ve seen elsewhere, including Maine, how officials such as Secretary of State Shanna Bellows have resisted efforts to restrict male participation in girls’ sports.
I fully expect more legal challenges, political maneuvering and attempts to weaken these protections.
But those efforts only reinforce the larger point. When the public is given a direct say, the progressive establishment doesn’t always like the answer.
For a party that prides itself on defending democracy, it might consider respecting the democratic process even when the outcome is inconvenient.
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As for the next two years, Democrats will have an opportunity to show Americans what their governing priorities actually are.
And if recent history is any indication, I suspect they’ll provide plenty of reminders of why voters rejected their national agenda in 2024. For some reason, this is the hill they continually choose to die on.
Republicans, meanwhile, have work to do. They need to take affordability seriously, offer credible solutions and stop assuming that winning the cultural argument automatically translates into winning elections. It doesn’t.
Voters can agree with you on cultural issues and still vote against you when they feel their financial concerns aren’t being addressed. Tuesday’s midterm election results proved that these realities can coexist, and Republicans would be wise to recognize it.
Still, I refuse to confuse one disappointing election night with a wholesale cultural reversal.
I’ve spent years speaking with parents, students and female athletes across the country. I’ve seen firsthand how much the conversation has changed.
People who once whispered their concerns are increasingly willing to say them publicly. They’re less intimidated by the accusations, less willing to accept obvious contradictions and less interested in being lectured by institutions that have spent years squandering their trust.
That’s not something that disappears because one party has a good election night.
Political power changes hands. Cultural convictions are often much harder to reverse.
Democrats won important elections Tuesday. Republicans should take those losses seriously, learn from them and make the necessary adjustments.
But the voters also made something unmistakably clear once again. They haven’t suddenly decided that women and girls are undeserving of their own athletic categories, free from mediocre men.
And if the progressive left believes Tuesday was a mandate to resurrect every unpopular cultural crusade Americans have spent years rejecting, they’re in for a rude awakening.
Democrats may have won the election. They haven’t won the culture.
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