Those who care about the party would be wise to listen to voters.
Those who care about the party would be wise to listen to voters.
T he GOP can squint hard enough to see a narrow path through which the party might avert a total political meltdown next week. But even if Republicans manage to avoid careening headlong into the absolute worst-case scenario on November 3, the party in power won’t be celebrating.
The range of plausible electoral outcomes has been a one-way ratchet for Democrats since Labor Day — weeks when the party’s prospects seemed to improve by the hour. Sure, there could be a polling miss. The GOP’s elusive army of low-propensity Trump fans may yet ride to its rescue. The Democratic Party’s unfit nominees and its sordid gamesmanship might convince voters to give Republican candidates a reprieve. But those aren’t the most likely scenarios. If the blue wave is as strong as the generic ballot polling suggests, most competitive races will end up in the Democratic column. And there are a lot of competitive races.
Republicans are set to endure another defeat. And perhaps this time, they’ll even take a moment to consider why voters turned their backs on the party.
That would be a rare thing for the GOP in the Trump years. Donald Trump short-circuited the process that culminates in coming to terms with loss after his 2020 defeat, convincing Republican voters and strong-arming Republican lawmakers into concluding that they hadn’t really lost at all. The party’s dismal 2022 midterm performance, despite the backlash against Joe Biden, was similarly swept under the rug. With recriminations flying over his abysmal taste in candidates and Ron DeSantis’s star rising, Trump brushed aside Republicans who urged him to take a beat before announcing his return to politics. Within a week of the GOP’s underwhelming performance, Trump was a presidential candidate again, stifling an evaluation of his failures by those best positioned to address them.
Today, Republicans are already flirting with quixotic schemes designed to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the outcomes that could bring their candidates low. The GOP may thus once again cheat itself out of a valuable confrontation with defeat and refuse to incorporate the voters’ verdict into their appeals to the American electorate that should accompany that bitter experience.
Elections aren’t just a way for a citizenry to blow off steam or a box that liberal societies check for the benefit of international watchdogs. They are a crucial feedback mechanism. They stave off sclerotic government and tunnel vision in its elected officials. They remind complacent administrations who their constituents are by diluting the influence of powerful and moneyed interests. They help systems dispense with incompetent or exhausted officials, and they surface information otherwise invisible to cosseted central authorities.
Elections aren’t just philosophically desirable. They are of immense practical utility. What’s more, the parties that take their electoral losses seriously often benefit in the long run.
After the party’s failures in 1988, Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council dragged the Democratic Party away from the flaccid, enervated leftism that had allowed America’s cities to crumble and its welfare rolls to balloon. When Clinton forgot the lessons of his 1992 victory and reverted to profligate progressivism in office, voters imposed a course correction in 1994. “Triangulation” emerged from that experience, taking the sting out of the GOP’s attacks on Clinton and delaying the party’s comeback.
The Labour Party in the U.K. followed a similar path — albeit grudgingly — during the years it spent in the wilderness when Margaret Thatcher and John Major occupied 10 Downing Street. When Neil Kinnock’s Labour suffered an unexpected rebuke in 1992, Tony Blair led the charge to slough off the party’s historic commitment to the nationalization of industry and mixed, quasi-socialist economics. He internalized British voters’ concern that Labour had become a vehicle to dispense patronage even as crime spiraled, wages stagnated, and public spending ballooned. The British electorate rewarded Blair’s prudence with a ten-year tenure as head of government.
If the GOP is repudiated at scale next week, the reasons for the party’s torment will not be hard to discern. The voters wanted 2019 back when they went to the polls in November 2024. What they got was an administration besotted with protectionist schemes that increased consumer costs, a war — however necessary — for which their support was never solicited, an unscrupulous campaign of retribution and abuse targeting Trump’s critics, and a cast of obscenely ostentatious figures who don’t even seem self-conscious about working the levers of government to line their own pockets.
Trump isn’t on the ballot, but his style most certainly is. Vivek Ramaswamy evinces all the president’s vulgar contempt for cordiality, and Ken Paxton, Trump’s loose morals and venality. From Bo French to Max Miller, the GOP seems to have confused the false bravado and gratuitously provocative posturing that passes for discourse online with persuasion. Many of the GOP’s nominees are not as fatally flawed as these candidates, but too many are nevertheless optimized to navigate the thicket of court intrigue in Mar-a-Lago, not the electoral landscapes of their districts and states.
Republicans are not forsaken. They have agency and influence over their destinies. If the GOP endures a drubbing next week, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Trump era — for real this time. If Republicans need to leave one thing behind, it’s the president’s refusal to stare defeat in the face. The voters are telling the party something. Those who care about its future would be wise to listen.