Republicans vastly underperformed expectations in last night’s elections. In fact, the full extent of their failure remains unclear at this point. They may end up with the barest of House majorities (House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has already declared such a victory), but their chances at a Senate majority are currently slim to none. In the best-case scenario, everything will hinge upon a flawed candidate, Herschel Walker, performing significantly better in a Dec. 6 runoff than he did on Election Day when he enjoyed the coattails of his party’s successful governor.
But the Republican disappointments and losses of 2022 were not distributed equally. There were two different Republican parties running in various states last night, and one of them did a lot better than the other. It’s almost as if there’s one Republican Party (will call it the winner party) that has strong local infrastructure and good leaders, and then another one (the loser party) that puts all of its eggs into the basket of a single celebrity politician’s national reputation.
The winning party was on display in several states last night, but Exhibit A has to be Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Republican Party of Florida. They blew the doors off Democrats all over the Sunshine State. They swept all statewide offices and won all close House races. They secured two-thirds majorities in both houses of the state legislature. DeSantis improved his performance over 2018 in every single county of Florida. He carried Miami-Dade, amazing for a Republican, and Palm Beach County, which is unthinkable. (Anyone else remember those hanging chads from 2000?) All six of DeSantis’s remaining school board endorsements won their runoffs.
If you were watching the returns in Florida and thinking they might be reflective of things to come, you would have been justified in expecting a 54- or 55-seat Republican Senate next year. But that party wasn’t running in most states.
This is what a really good state party looks like — it punches above its weight in a swingy state, as Florida Republicans have been doing since the turn of the century. This isn’t just about one guy, but such a party does need a strong leader. Such a party fights and stands on its principles even under withering criticism, but it does so in a way that alienates as few voters as it has to. It banks on voters’ common sense. It knows how to hit the issues people care about and hit them hard. Politicians and party operatives work together, setting aside feuds to maximize turnout and win races at every level. They try to avoid actions that force their candidates to weaken themselves.
This is the opposite of the loser party’s approach. The loser party first weakens its nominees in one very specific way. In exchange for the golden endorsement that gets them the nomination, Donald Trump insists that they debase themselves by publicly declaring that the 2020 election was stolen. In several primaries, multiple obeisant candidates compete to be the most obsequious, thus also tarnishing their future in case they lose the primary. After securing the nomination, these candidates go on to underperform what their primary election opponents — most of them conservatives and proven election winners — could have accomplished.
Loser party nominees get no financial help from Trump, of course — that hundred million dollars he’s been raising is for a future presidential run. Which he is likely to lose.
Mind you, this isn’t a question of who is conservative, or even of who fights. The loser party does not care much about ideology. It isn’t about Trump-Republicanism as an ideology, because most Republicans have adopted that already. No — remember, there is only one litmus test in the loser party, and it has nothing to do with ideas. The loser party backed Mehmet Oz for Pennsylvania Senate, despite his lack of any coherent political record or discernible philosophy of governing — overlooking his public support for legal abortion and even irreversible hormone treatments and gender transition surgeries on minor children.
The loser party did have a few winners in safe states, to be sure. It may yet have one big winner in Arizona — a winner who wisely dialed back the conspiracy theories the moment she had the nomination (but also never stopped attacking the media, which was also smart). It also padded its endorsement record by backing some easy winners without the usual weakening process. But all in all, the result it produced was last night’s disappointment.
The loser party also endorsed a lot of less competitive candidates than Oz in winnable races such as Michigan and New Hampshire. They lost, and demands that Trump be given “all the credit” for midterm wins are conveniently forgotten when the credit turns to blame. That’s par for the course, given the nature of its single requirement for membership in the loser party.
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Wherever the loser party lays hold of the Republican primary process, even easy wins turn to losses.
Going forward, Republican voters are going to have to decide which party they want to belong to.
