The culture war lost twice.

Two elections, ten days apart. In the US the right spent $183 million on a culture message and lost. In BC the Conservatives turned theirs down, the NDP turned theirs up, and the NDP lost.

Most of the takes on these two elections start and stop in the same place, voters were fed up and threw out whoever was in charge. That’s true, but it’s not the entire story.

What was more interesting to me is what happened to culture politics. In the US midterms, Republicans kept the culture message, put real money behind it, and lost, badly. In BC, the Conservatives cut loose the leaders most tied to their culture fights and ran on taxes and the deficit, while the NDP went the other way and ran on how dangerous the other guys were, and the Conservatives won a supermajority. Different bets, in different directions, and voters returned the same result.

It’s almost like these things are cyclical. Wallets full, people fight about culture and yell at each other. Wallets thin, people put aside their differences temporarily to yell at their leaders instead.

That doesn’t bode well for long-term unity, or for institutions that are already losing their gravitas, but at least there’s a pattern to predict from.

This has been my gut feeling since election night at least, so I went looking for proof points. Most of it holds up, one piece doesn’t, and I’ll try to tell you why.

The bet Republicans made

Through late October, Republican campaigns and their allies had aired about $183 million(!!) in TV ads on transgender themes, roughly 217,000 airings, according to AdImpact numbers reported by the Associated Press. That’s up from $151 million at the same point in 2024, when plenty of people gave the same playbook credit for helping win the White House, and Democrats spent about $11 million on the topic, most of it on defence.

But the thing is, voters were nowhere near there. An AP-NORC poll in October had about one voter in ten calling transgender issues one of the most important facing the country, and roughly eight in ten saying the economy or the cost of living.

Texas is the cleanest example. About $58 million of that money went into the Senate race, roughly two of every ten ads in the contest, and James Talarico still beat Ken Paxton by more than 12 points, the first Democratic Senate win there since 1988. Kansas and South Carolina got the same treatment on smaller budgets and went the same way. I’ll add that Paxton was a terrible candidate by most measures, but that doesn’t account for a spread like that in a state like Texas.

Democrats, meanwhile, talked about prices for months. NBC’s exit poll had the economy as the top issue at 39%, more than 80% of voters said they were worried about what they pay for gas, groceries and health care, and they trusted Democrats over Republicans on the economy, a full reversal from 2024.

The kicker? Before the vote, Republican pollster Chris Wilson told AP the issue isn’t necessarily a top priority for voters, and that election day would show whether the ads persuade anyone or just fire up people who already agree. Now we know.

Both bets in BC

BC is the better test, because both big parties made a call on culture, and they went in opposite directions.

The Conservatives made theirs before the campaign started. John Rustad was pushed out in December. Kerry-Lynne Findlay won the leadership in May, 51% to 49% on the fourth ballot, over Caroline Elliott, who had paired cultural issues with her fiscal pitch. Findlay lasted less than four months, with thirteen MLAs leaving or being removed on her watch through various types of purity tests before she resigned on September 20.

Lorne Doerkson took over as interim leader two days before the writ dropped and ran about as plain a pocketbook campaign as you can run, cut taxes, no new ones, expand LNG and logging, cut red tape, bring down the deficit, and take the PST off Canadian-made wine, beer and spirits. Two candidates got decisively dropped over social media posts along the way. I think some would argue they kept Doerkson out of the heat a bit too much for someone interviewing for the top job, which allowed him to stay out of any sticky policy conversations, but alas, it worked, so all’s fair in love and war, right?

The NDP went the other way. Eby’s campaign wasn’t about pronouns or flags, but it was the same kind of campaign, built on who the other side is instead of what you’ll do about the cost of living. The pitch was that you can’t trust these guys, that Doerkson couldn’t stand up to Trump (or even further, that they’d capitulate to Trump), that the Conservatives wanted American liquor back on the shelves, and that the party’s members might dump Doerkson after the vote, so voters would be handing over “a blank cheque about who actually their leader will be,” in Eby’s words. Rob Shaw went through the attacks early in the campaign and found some basis for each of them and none of them fully convincing. Eby asked Green voters to come over to the NDP to avoid splitting the vote, which is about as close as you get to saying we’re the only safe choice, and Green Leader Emily Lowan turned him down flat. On the last day of the campaign, he called Doerkson a “Trojan horse” for Conservative extremists.

It didn’t work. The NDP vote fell from about 950,000 in 2024 to about 731,000 on the final count. According to CBC, those voters didn’t go to the Conservatives or the Greens, they stayed home. A campaign about how scary the other side is exists to get your own people out the door, and this one didn’t. Running against Trump worked for Mark Carney in the spring of 2025, it didn’t work for Eby eighteen months later.

The party that ran hardest on culture got its answer too. OneBC put up 34 candidates, took about 1.5% of the vote, won nothing, and Dallas Brodie lost her seat in Vancouver-Quilchena by eleven thousand votes.

Voters said the same thing before and after. Angus Reid’s early October poll had cost of living as the top issue at 57% and health care at 42%. Léger’s post-election survey asked what the new government should do first, and the answers were reducing the cost of living at 44% and access to health care at 32%, and none of the culture files made Léger’s list of reasons for the result.

Where the theory gets thin

But this isn’t a tidy story, and three things cut against it.

First, both elections were about the incumbent before they were about anything else. In the US, Democrats won voters who picked the economy 52 to 46, but they won voters who picked the state of democracy 79 to 20, and about four in ten said they were voting to oppose Trump, per AP. So US Democrats ran plenty against Trump too, the difference is they paired it with months of talking about prices. In BC, it’s what I wrote last issue, a repudiation of Eby and his early election call more than enthusiasm for the Conservatives, and Léger backs that up. I can’t tell you how much of the NDP’s drop was the attacks and how much was the early call, my guess is mostly the call, but the attacks clearly didn’t bring anyone back.

Second, the Conservatives didn’t drop their culture files, they stopped talking about them. The platform still plans to repeal DRIPA, according to The Narwhal. Quiet isn’t the same as gone, and anyone with a project that depends on that framework should plan for it.

Third, the centre. I started out thinking this was a move back to the middle, and that doesn’t hold completely. In the US, moderates won Senate seats in Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina, a progressive won in Michigan, and Talarico ran in Texas as an economic populist. In BC, the party that put the centre in its name took about 1.6% and no seats. So voters didn’t necessarily pick the centre, they picked whoever could beat the government and was talking about making things less expensive, believably.

So the version I’m comfortable with is narrower. Culture politics lost to prices, from the right in the US, and from both sides of the ballot in BC.

What I take from it

Reaction also isn’t the same as priority. A culture message, or a fear message, gets the loudest response from people who are already with you, which makes it feel a lot bigger than it is. That’s how you end up spending $183 million talking to one voter in ten, or running a campaign about the other guy while your own voters stay home, and it’s the same trap for any organization that reads its own engagement numbers as proof of what the public cares about.

The play here is the boring one. Work out what the people you need are worried about, and show them what you’re doing about it. For anyone walking into a minister’s office in Victoria in the new year, that means leading with what you’re doing on costs, health care access or getting things built, because that’s what this government has to deliver on, and it’s what they’ll be judged on in four years.

One more thing

The final count has wrapped with the Conservatives flipping Burnaby South – Metrotown to finish with 64 seats. MLAs are sworn in on November 19 and the new cabinet on November 20, so watch what the first two weeks of announcements are about. If it’s costs, permits and the deficit, they’ve read their win the way voters meant it. If the quiet files get loud, the US result is a decent preview of how that goes.

If you want to talk through what this means for how you show up with the new government, reach out.

Cheers,
Jason