The conventional wisdom about the November 8 midterm elections is still taking shape. In conservative circles, the discourse about the “red ripple” has largely consisted of finger-pointing, inside-the-trenches sniping, and dueling allegations of incompetence and malice — a bitter downturn from the GOP’s optimistic expectations on the eve of voting. In some ways, the returns raised more questions than answers. In one big way, however, the message of Election Night was unambiguous: It was a Republican failure.
As is so often the case with election postmortems, the various explanations for the GOP’s underwhelming showing have tended to fit conveniently with the pre-existing political commitments of whoever happens to be doing the explaining. (As my friend Chris Johnson quipped on Twitter the morning after Election Night: “Happy ‘we would have done better if we had embraced the ideological/policy positioning I was already advocating for’ day to all who celebrate.”) With some notable exceptions, very few in any of the GOP’s, and the conservative movement’s, dueling tribes have been willing to implicate their own tribe’s shortcomings in the red wave that wasn’t. The MAGA wing of the party points to some combination of Mitch McConnell, allocation of campaign funds, and ballot harvesting. Libertarians blame national conservatives. National conservatives blame libertarians. At the Federalist, Victoria Marshall suggests that the GOP’s intraparty strife is due to nebulous “powerful special interests” that “are working overtime to pit DeSantis and Trump supporters against each other, divide the party, and take back control from the anti-establishment wing,” completing an impressive series of mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion that the fault lies with “some conservative media outlets” for noticing that Trump attacked DeSantis, rather than with Trump for leveling the attack in the first place.
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