By now the consensus is clear: This week’s midterm elections offered a striking rebuke of President Donald Trump and his policies, from the Iran war to disruptive tariffs and an immigration crackdown featuring masked government agents. The Trump brand of economic populism that has animated global debate for more than a decade just ran into an unforgiving political wall.

It would be wrong, though, to equate the repudiation of America’s foremost populist with the death of economic populism in America. It was actually reborn on election day. Until Trump’s arrival on the scene just over a decade ago, populists were an exotic species in contemporary US politics. They are now everywhere and diversifying. And they’re likely to define the direction of not just the 2028 US presidential race but economic policy across the political spectrum for years to come.

Until this week, the most compelling evidence for the durability of American populism was Trump and the growing expectation that Vice President JD Vance was his likely successor. Armed with an economic nationalism shaped by Appalachia, Yale, the Marine Corps and a stint as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Vance is now the rising figurehead of a New Right techno-populism that mixes protectionism and immigration restrictions with conservative family values.

More on Vance shortly. After this week, though, the best case for a new awakening of economic populism is being offered by the very Democrats who handed Trump and Republicans their humbling defeat. The inescapable conclusion is that pretty much everyone in US politics is a populist these days.

In their speeches Tuesday night, victors including Georgia Senator John Ossoff, his incoming colleagues James Talarico of Texas, Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Adam Hamilton of Kansas, as well as state-level winners like incoming Iowa Governor Rob Sand each offered their own spin on the textbook themes of populism. Each lamented a broken economy and an ineffectual political system. They aimed their ire at oligarchs and the concentration of wealth and vowed to lift up everyday people.

“Amidst our celebration tonight, we must acknowledge that the underlying crisis gripping our republic remains,” Ossoff told his supporters at an Atlanta victory party. “Because while the wealthy and well-lobbied feast on inside information and official favors, America’s forgotten families are treated to systemic corporate disrespect and official indifference, working harder and harder while the treadmill just gets faster and steeper and the bills get higher and higher.”“The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom,” Talarico said more succinctly.

Progressive activists like Jarred Abbott, a political scientist who directs The Center for Working Class Politics, have for years been assembling a manual for Democrats on how to engage working-class voters. The manual, dubbed “The Working-Class Win-O-Meter,” calls above all for a relentless focus on the economy and tangible issues like removing medical debt from credit reports, making community college tuition-free and capping drug costs.

Abbott spent this week going through his data and the election results, and his initial conclusion was that candidates who embraced populist language did better than those who didn’t. That meant talking about “the elites versus ordinary people” and calling out “the corruption of the billionaires or of political insiders screwing over ordinary people.”But what was remarkable in this year’s campaign was how Democrats adapted the core populist economic message to local sensibilities and circumstances, including fears around data centers in their backyards. They have moved from the populist rebellion of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a broader one with at least three different identities.

The first is the combative, urbane and t-shirted approach of El-Sayed, which seems designed to appeal equally to progressive health care wonks, Rust Belt gym bros and anyone just plain struggling. “It shouldn’t be this hard to buy a second bag of groceries or fill your tank. It just shouldn’t be this hard to afford a home. It shouldn’t be this hard to see a doctor in the richest, most powerful country in the world,” he told his supporters Tuesday night.

“We need to embrace that thing about us that has always made us great — the will to be more perfect. And right now that means taking on the corporations, the billionaires and the special interests who’ve rigged the system against us.”The second identity is the faith-wielding prairie populism of Adam Hamilton and James Talarico, with its focus on values. Hamilton is a Kansas megachurch pastor, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that his victory remarks drew on scripture and felt more like a Sunday sermon than a stump speech. What was striking was its core: an invocation of the need for “decency” in the heartland as an economic leveler.

“This kind of decency doesn’t belittle people. It doesn’t benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. It doesn’t ignore the cries of the needy. It’s not cruel or unkind,” Hamilton said in his victory address.

The third face of this movement is a more complicated one. It’s the post-partisan populism embodied by Rob Sand, the new governor-elect of Iowa, who has said he would much rather run as an independent than a member of any political party. It pairs a folksy call to get along and singalongs of “America the Beautiful” with a promise of good governance and fiscal rectitude, a message grounded in Sand’s two terms as state auditor. As offered by Sand or incoming Texas Governor Gina Hinojosa, it’s not just a call for good government or bipartisanship. It’s about helping people overcome a crooked political elite that lives inside both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The three identities overlap. They also share an understanding that the political battle heading into the 2028 presidential elections will again center on the economy — and that it will not be defined merely by GDP or even job growth but by inequality, including the fact, reinforced by data released this week, that the share of the pie ending up in the hands of workers is at its lowest level on record.

Of course, the key factor in the stunningly broad Democratic victories was Trump, who opened the door to the new populists by ignoring his own promises to voters to lower prices and avoid intractable wars. Instead, he embraced the AI boom just as Americans were increasingly expressing doubts about it, while dismissing concerns about affordability or the economy. “The overwhelming story here is extremely simple: It’s Trump,” said Abbott.

Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, who in an influential 2016 essay in linked Trump to the rich history of American populism, questions just how lasting the current populist moment will be. It’s still not clear that congressional leaders can translate the rhetoric on the stump into policy.

Moreover, the populism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that ultimately helped lead to the New Deal was a grassroots movement built over decades and supported by strong unions and other institutions, he pointed out when I called him this week.

“I think it certainly is a winning message,” Kazin said. “But it’s a winning message only if it’s backed up by grassroots groups and by institutions like labor unions and those institutions, for the most part, don't exist. Right now it’s backed up by social media primarily. And that’s the problem.”So this may turn out to be a temporary movement, especially if Democrats lose their focus on economic issues or become paralyzed by factional infighting.

Critics like Adam Ozimek of the Washington-based Economic Innovation Group argue that some of today’s most prominent populists, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have veered back toward a more orthodox center on issues like trade and housing policy once in government.

“There’s some interesting examples where we’re seeing sort of populism in the streets, neoliberalism in the sheets,” he said in an interview. “Tariffs are unpopular, free trade is popular. The progressives who are winning are focused on deregulation towards housing supply. It sounds to me like neoliberalism, except nobody wants to call it that.”JD Vance, still the most likely successor to Trump as the figurehead of populism on the right, quickly blamed the Iran war for the midterm losses. That read like a pre-emptive defense of Trump’s broader agenda, potentially including unpopular policies like his tariffs.

The big question facing Vance going forward is whether he can rebound from the broad repudiation of Trump in this election. Another is whether an agenda focused on reviving manufacturing and tariffs still has the appeal it did in 2016. Just under 8% of the American workforce goes to work in its factories. And tariffs are now more unpopular than even Trump by some measures, and more widely associated with higher prices than jobs.

On the other side of the debate will sit the Democrats who in this campaign tapped into the broader economic anxiety not just over inflation but over the increasingly unaffordable structural costs of grinding out a middle-class life in America. That goes beyond the gas pump to health care, education, housing and child care.

The anxiety also extends to AI and data centers, where the populists have found a new target. Whereas Trump publicly rejected concerns over AI and the rapidly growing investment in its physical infrastructure, the new Democratic populists seized on that angst as a symptom of the fragility many Americans feel amid the breakneck changes hitting the economy.

Come 2028, people like Abbott argue the economic debate is more likely to be about AI than manufacturing. “There’s so much anxiety now about data centers,” Abbott said. “But also just this sort of impending sense that what’s about to happen to white-collar workers is going to be the same bloodbath that happened to blue-collar workers” as a result of the wave of automation and globalization launched in the 1980s. “That’s the cliff that white-collar workers stand on,” he says. “And the degree to which people in both parties are tapping into that kind of really existential sort of dread I think is going to be central to the 2028 election.”

Soon after I woke up on Wednesday, I texted one of my favorite aficionados of populism, a conservative who long before Trump was quietly working in Washington to push the Republican party towards a more populist path on economic policy. “So what does this mean for the populist project?”I wrote.

I was prepared for him to be downbeat about the Trump rebuke, and when he called me back he was. Like Vance, he was determined to blame the war and gas prices rather than anything else. But as he went on, he became ebullient about the populists he suddenly saw everywhere.

Every single one of the new Democratic senators who will be moving into offices on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks is more populist than the Republicans they are replacing, he argued. Set aside Trump’s bad night and this week’s takeaway for him was clear: America cast an overwhelming vote for populists.