Who or what was responsible for the nationwide midterm collapse of the Republican Party? After all, experts, politicians and pollsters predicted a “red tsunami.”
Moreover, each president’s average loss in the first half of his term is 25 seats in the House. And when his approval rating drops to 43% or below – like President Joe Biden – the loss increases to an average of more than 40 seats.
Former President Barack Obama lost 63 seats in 2010. So is Biden more charismatic and energetic than Obama? Was his program more effective and popular?
With Republican expectations so high, the blame game for defeat is as piercing and confusing as the election itself.
Here are some of the most common targets of criticism.
Former President Donald Trump is being impeached on a variety of counts. Before the midterms, he strangely attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. And he loudly made it clear that he would run away again.
This histrionics allegedly distracted attention from the Republican candidates. Trump alienated some DeSantis fans from Trump-backed candidates and motivated Trump-hating leftists to turn out and vote to stop the momentum on a second Trump presidency.
But the idea that Trump was inconsistent and reckless wasn’t really modern and didn’t surprise anyone on either side of the political divide.
Second, Trump promoted many losing candidates, often based on whether they accepted his claims of fraud in the 2020 election. His critics countered that while his MAGA candidates won primaries in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, they had little chance of winning the general election.
However, several essential Trump-backed candidates won, including J.D. Vance in Ohio and Ted Budd in North Carolina. At the same time, many centrists and moderates lost, such as Joe O’Dea in Colorado.
Third, why did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the ossified Republican hierarchy run candidate Blake Masters in Arizona while pouring money into an internal fight in Alaska on the side of a less conservative Republican candidate?
Nevertheless, the Republican House and Senate coffers likely gave more to MAGA candidates than Trump did from his more than $100 million in campaign stockpiles.
Fourth, are we not in the midst of the greatest political revolution of our times? In most states, the number of votes cast on Election Day was reduced to about 30% of the electorate. What replaced it was a complete mess of early voting, mail-in voting, mail-in voting, ranked-choice voting, runoff voting, and endless counting.
The left has seen an advantage in these radical changes, many of which have been made under the pretext of Covid-19 lockdowns. And he has mastered them to such an extent that most Republicans with a slim lead at the end of Election Day now expect to lose in the days and weeks that follow.
But Republicans have already burned themselves in 2020 with these ongoing radical changes. Didn’t they have enough time to avoid it happening again?
Fifth, this time the mute and uncounted voters were not disappointed MAGA supporters who hung up on pollsters’ phones.
Instead, pollsters missed 70% of people under 30, including single women, who voted straight for the Democratic Party.
Well-mannered Republicans could mock Biden and the left’s demagogueing of the abortion issue or denigrate Republicans as semi-fascists and un-American insurrectionists. They shrugged at Biden’s bogus efforts to bribe newborn voters with amnesties for marijuana convictions and student loans, or offer slightly cheaper gas by depleting strategic petroleum reserves.
However, all these low-minded strategies resulted in high enthusiasm and turnout from the left.
Six usually reliable conservative pollsters are predicting a huge Republican victory. They apparently oversampled conservative voters, arguing that left-leaning pollsters tended to underselect them.
Not only were they wrong, they were downright wrong. And the resulting hubris of assured victory led to a nemesis as Republicans let the last few weeks go. Thousands of conservative voters could have given up the opportunity to go to the polls, considering their votes unnecessary.
Seventh, the left vilified conservatives as destroyers of democracy and violent insurrectionists. So when Republicans continually offered a negative assessment of Biden’s failed policies without proportionate alternative positive programs, they unwittingly fueled Democrats’ false narrative of corrupt nihilists.
Couldn’t Republicans offer America an sanguine and coherent contract that offered uplifting, concrete solutions to every Biden mess?
Finally, Democrats are now the party of the very affluent. There are more billionaire capitalists in the neo-socialist Democratic Party than free-market Republicans.
In almost every major Senate or governor race, the Democratic candidate was the significantly better-funded of the two. In some races, such as the U.S. Senate runoff in New Hampshire, the Democrat outperformed his Republican counterpart by a stunning 17-1 margin.
Has the Republican Party of Capitalism forgotten the power and role of money in politics? Why is he once again so easily overestimated, outdone and outsmarted?
All of these writings provide different explanations for the Republicans’ inexplicable, dismal behavior.
But all of these multi-faceted issues have a common denominator for Republicans: either different leaders or different strategies – or both – are necessary to ensure different outcomes.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Confused Was Fought and Won” from Basic Books. You can contact him by email at authorvdh@gmail.com.
