The votes are in. The BJP is leading in Assam and West Bengal. The DMK, which built India’s longest-standing welfare-transfer regime, has been defeated in Tamil Nadu by a new entrant. The Congress-led UDF has won in Kerala. One familiar explanation will now return: If the incumbent did well, welfare delivered; if it lost, welfare could not save it. Around this will sit the larger national argument: Is what we are watching redistribution, or is it freebies?

That debate has its uses, but it is now misdescribing the ground. The DMK’s defeat in Tamil Nadu , the home of India’s welfare-transfer politics, is the sharpest reminder that welfare alone does not deliver elections. It has become the floor.…