Take heed.

I n 2019, Boris Johnson led a smashing victory for the Tory party in the U.K. He hammered and knocked down the great red wall and turned many former Labour voters into first-time Tory voters. The Tories won an 80-seat majority, winning 365 seats out of 650. Their percentage of the vote in a multiparty system, 43.6, was the highest for any party since 1979.

Five years later, the party looks like it could go into liquidation. In 2024, the Tories suffered their worst-ever defeat — not just hammered by a suddenly resurgent Labour Party but outflanked on the right by Reform, led by Nigel Farage. The average Tory voter is now 57 years old. A third of young voters rate their chance of voting Conservative at 0 percent.

In this story is a warning that applies to Republicans in America who are currently overconfident.

A few parts of the Tory-collapse story are unique to the U.K. Johnson was blamed for an overly strict Covid response and for not even following his own government’s rules. One major problem for the Tories is that in four elections their manifesto promised immigration controls, and their governments increased mass immigration at every turn. That is something President Trump is successfully avoiding.

But the Tories have fallen into a political trap that, in some ways, they sprang on themselves, and a similar dynamic stalks Republicans. Johnson’s victory in 2019 was associated with the cause of Brexit and finally getting it done. Brexit, like MAGA, was a kind of branded populist agenda that had purchase beyond the traditional party. It also loosened the identity of the Tories, allowing people to dissociate from them more easily. The Tory party, through its own fault, generated an air of scandal and incompetence around itself. All failures of government could be associated with it in the public mind.

But chiefly, the Tory party is dying because it is the party of homeowners. For decades, Conservative policy promoted homeownership and the protection of property values. That was the party’s promise of a “property-owning democracy.” But the Conservatives also pursued policies that had a dual effect of constricting housing supply and elevating home values. This gave the party a deeply loyal following among those who had achieved a decent height on the property ladder. But the party became captive to them.

Now a few macroeconomic shocks — namely, inflation and rising energy prices — have led to a cost-of-living crisis. Younger generations feel absolutely excluded from owning property anywhere near the parts of the country that provide opportunity and good jobs. Yet any solution to radically increase housing supply is bound to be seen as a direct threat to the paper net worth of the core Tory voter.

The U.S. crisis is not nearly as bad as the U.K.’s, but we are seeing similarities. In the U.K., only 39 percent of people aged 25 to 34 owned their home as of 2022. That’s a huge drop from 59 percent in 2000. The median age of first-time homebuyers in the U.S. climbed to 38 in 2024. It was 28 in 1991. In both countries, young people’s homeownership is well below historical levels. And in both countries, housing prices are inflating far faster than wages.

This is an issue designed to crack up conservative coalitions, and it creates zero-sum economic warfare between generations. The whole point of voting for a conservative party is that one feels gratitude for the system, that it is delivering a lifestyle one wants to preserve and pass on to future generations. Right now, homebuying and family formation are going into reverse. This should be the loud Klaxon haunting Republicans as they go to bed at night.