AMAC Exclusive – By David P. Deavel
The red wave that many of us (this writer included) anticipated with glee arrived with all the force of a leaky squirt pistol. As I write, it looks as though the Democrats might keep their thin majority in the Senate while the Republicans are likely to get a thin majority in the House. Disappointing? Certainly. Infuriating? Absolutely. Cause for despair? Not in the least. It is, however a cause for some serious thinking and rethinking about how we go about the political task of getting this country back on track.
Indeed, the postmortem blame game has begun on our side of the aisle. And there is plenty to go around. Did Donald Trump’s unconventional candidates have something to do with it in certain races? Most likely, though the attempt to pin this all on him seems a bit too convenient for the GOP establishment. After all, establishment GOP candidates such as Joe O’Dea in Colorado did no better (and in some cases worse) than the MAGA figures. And apart from some of the House GOP offering the outline of a positive agenda, the establishment offered little in the way of a forward-looking program. “Republicans just said, ‘Well, the other side sucks, and Biden sucks,’” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley observed. “Well, no doubt! But it’s pretty hard to convince folks, particularly independent-minded ones who don’t tend to trust the process much, to vote for you, if you don’t have something affirmative to say and offer.”
Too often the positive agenda had less to do with the American people and more to do with making sure what Hawley calls “Washington Republicanism” stayed that way. Even if he didn’t like the Trumpier candidates, Mitch McConnell’s messing about with the elections in Alaska while pulling funding from a close Senate race in Arizona is emblematic of the problems of the Republican leadership class. Too many of them seem unable to see that however they judge Trump, much of what he stands for is the way of the present and future for their party. With McConnell, it meant contributing to the losses. There’s a reason why a number of Senators and Representatives have pressed the brakes on the election of leaders for the next Congress.
These hard conversations have to happen. So too the conversations about what Republicans are going to do about making sure elections are run fairly and squarely. Surely one big reason Florida actually saw a red wave last week had to do with the fact that after the hanging chad fiasco of 2000, there has been a steady improvement in the voting process all the way into this year. The Sunshine State counted their votes in hours. Arizona, where machines broke down only in red enclaves in Maricopa County, is now predicted to announce final results simultaneously with the Last Judgment. Meanwhile, blue outposts in red states such as Harris County (Houston), Texas, experienced the same dodgy chaos on voting day. Noteworthy is that the places with the most election day chaos had been sent federal “election monitors,” while Florida rejected them.
We also have to talk about early and mail-in voting. While I wish we had one election day in which people had to vote in person absent very specific circumstances, that’s not where we are. As Salena Zito argues concerning the new way of voting early and by mail, “Republicans need to step up and get their voters to do the same — otherwise, they will find themselves on the end of big elections going forward.”
There is really no need to despair. These are important things to figure out, but if we get going now, many of them can be fixed or at least improved by the time the next big election comes around in 2024. And though we didn’t win big, we were not shellacked. As noted, it’s likely that Republicans will have the House. That will put the brakes on the insanity that can be passed on to Joe Biden to sign between his ice cream cones and naps.
And though the final results were not what we would have hoped, Republicans likely had 5-6 million more votes total than did Democrats in House races. As Joel Kotkin argues, their “mild victory” this time likely “means that the Democrats will be slower to address their weaknesses, and may be forced to accept the unpopular Joe Biden as their leader in 2024.” Given Joe Biden’s response to a press conference question this week about what he will do differently over the next two years given the majority of Americans saying we’re on the wrong track—“Nothing, because they’re just finding out what we’re doing”—Kotkin looks to be correct.
Some conservatives have lamented that it doesn’t really matter because so much of our population seems to be ideologically committed to craziness. “So much,” Stephen Kruiser wrote at PJ Media on the morning after election day, “for the Red Wave, freedom, and hopes that the United States of America would continue to exist past next Arbor Day…We’re done here, kids.” To be fair, Kruiser closed his column by saying Americans still have a “fighting chance,” but I have many friends who don’t end their comments with such hope. They simply assert that our march to the left is inexorable. That the Republic is over. That the laptop class will forever hide their eyes from the consequences that their votes cause. That the Millennials and Gen-Z voters who came out in such large numbers for the Democrats this time are locked into their leftism and, in Kruiser’s words, are “socialist lemmings” who will make sure we make it over the cliff’s edge. That our base will never grow. That we are doomed.
Let’s concede that things aren’t guaranteed to work out just because we’re Americans. But Americans should also not concede that they are guaranteed to fail either.
While many parents and denizens of the blue states in extreme dysfunction have discovered what Joe Biden and the Democrats were doing by feeling its effects, there is nevertheless a portion of the laptop class that has managed to avoid the most serious problems caused by Biden’s policies and thus thinks them no big deal. But two more years of the same will blow through that insulation and expose the fact that the grip of left-wing ideology on their hearts and minds is a lot less tight when the social prestige for being “progressive” ceases to outweigh the misery caused by their regressive policies.
The same goes for the younger generations. As a Gen Xer, I have long thought my own age group was permanently lost in a haze of grunge rock and leftist politics, but now Gen X is as conservative as the 65-plus category. There is a great deal of work to do to see that more Millennials and Gen Z attain sanity and rediscover the foundational goods of religion, marriage, patriotism, and work. But we cannot write them off either. We might discover that, as quickly as Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is being scrapped, so quickly will that supermajority of under-thirty Democratic voters shrink.
And as for the base that will never grow, the exit polls on voting showed that although Democrats retained majorities for many of their traditional blocs, Republicans gained about 4% more black voters, 10% more Hispanic voters, and 17% more Asian voters (“significant ground”) since 2018. Republicans have made progress this time on these and other groups, if not as much as was hoped. That demographic shifts mean a permanent Democratic majority looks more and more dubious. Especially given the fact that efforts to get many of these groups only got going in earnest in the last couple of election cycles.
Republicans can be disappointed in our results. What they cannot do is give up as lost what is definitely not lost. There are no permanently lost causes in politics because there are no causes that are permanently won. While we may have presumed too much this time, we must not despair. Instead, let us get back to work, acting soberly, diligently, and with hope.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative.