Yet 2025 was a miserable year for small business — and 2026 will be worse.

Before I get into the reasons MAGA is so bad for some of its most fervent supporters, let’s talk about why small-business owners lean right.

Partly it’s a matter of who they are. Other things equal, higher income — which means paying more in taxes and being less likely to depend on the safety net — tends to make a voter more Republican. However, higher levels of education, which are correlated with income, tend to make voters more Democratic.

This is a fairly new development — as recently as two decades ago the correlation between education and partisanship went the other way. I would attribute this reversal to the changing nature of the G.O.P., which has become ever more anti-intellectual and anti-science. For the purposes of today’s post, however, this doesn’t matter. The point, instead, is that if we ask who in America is likely to have relatively high income either without having a college degree or without having had any postgraduate education — and therefore be predisposed to favor Republicans — the answer is clearly owners of successful small businesses.