There has been — and will likely continue to be — an enormous amount of finger-pointing and blame-assigning within the GOP, and the conservative movement writ large, in the week following the GOP’s underwhelming midterm performance. Depending on whom you ask, there are any number of culprits for the disappointing “red ripple” — Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, mail-in voting, campaign-funding decisions, MAGA candidates, the Republican establishment, and so on.
Many conservative election experts have already weighed in on the merits of these dueling claims. I admit to still being bewildered by the utter letdown of what I and many others expected would be a strong Election Night for the GOP. My only contribution to this discussion, for now, is to caution against the temptation of singular, totalizing explanations. Did Trump’s ill-advised interventions redound to a net negative effect for Republicans this cycle? Almost certainly. Was candidate selection/quality an issue? It’s difficult to see how it wasn’t, when CNN exit polls show that 56 percent of voters in Pennsylvania — one of the pivotal races to determine the balance of power in the Senate — said the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz, “had not lived in Pennsylvania long enough to effectively represent the state.” The Democratic victor, John Fetterman, “won that group by a margin of nearly 70 percentage points.” Was funding an issue? Again, it’s tough to argue it wasn’t, given that — as Ohio’s next senator, J. D. Vance, argued in the American Conservative today — “in every marquee national race, Republicans got crushed financially.” Were there structural problems with the GOP campaign apparatus? Again, as Vance wrote, Democrats whupped Republicans with small-dollar donors because “Republican fundraising efforts suffer from high consultant and ‘list building’ fees—where Republicans pay a lot to acquire small-dollar donors. . . . Democrats don’t have this problem. They raise more money from more donors, with lower overhead.”
But none of these issues are mutually exclusive. In fact, in many areas, they’re inextricably tied to one another. The efforts to present the GOP’s failure in black-and-white terms may serve the agenda of this or that faction of the party, but they harm future efforts to correct the numerous factors that killed the red wave.