Donald trrump

So now it's time to figure out who to blame. The post-election spin from the world of Mitch McConnell is that the GOP's failure to flip the Senate is on Donald Trump and National Republican Senatorial Committee head Rick Scott, and that candidate selection and expenditures are the reason that we don't have a Republican majority in the upper house. For anyone who paid attention, this doesn't pass the smell test. In the wake of a number of fractious primaries, GOP Senate candidates essentially went dark in the summer, their ad budgets expended and without the resources to get back on the air. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer and the DSCC defined the Republican outsiders for a new audience of general election voters.

If there is one lesson the Republican Party needs to learn from this year’s elections, it is that fringe politics and conspiracy theories are not popular. The GOP lost independents by three points to Democrats, a fatal statistic for any midterms. Poor candidate quality, a problem Senator Mitch McConnell pointed out to many Republicans’ chagrin, lost the party winnable seats across the country. The Democrats played a small part in this result through their cynical support for far-right candidates in Republican primaries who they suspected (correctly) would be easier to beat in November. Through various PACs, Democrats spent around $53.275 million to elevate 13 extreme Republican candidates, six of whom won their primaries. All six lost in November.

Since Tuesday’s shocking midterm results started trickling in, the chattering classes have scrambled to make sense of yet another election we forecast so very poorly. The media promised a red wave of epic proportions; instead, President Biden had the best midterm elections of any US president since 2002, despite his dreadful approval ratings. In the lead-up to the vote count, poll after poll found that Americans’ top issues were inflation, the economy, crime and immigration — kitchen table issues on which the Democrats have performed abysmally in recent years. Everything pointed to a very bad night for the president’s party. So why didn’t voters send a clear message to Democrats about their misplaced priorities, as we in the media were so sure they would?

Republican J.D. Vance wiped the floor with Democrat Tim Ryan on Tuesday night. It was a surprise for all the professional pundits only because the Ohio Senate race had been obscured by all kinds of white noise. The mainstream media worked overtime to paint the contest as a toss-up and the Democrats insisted they were going to flip the seat. Just a couple of weeks ahead of the election, multiple polls had the race at a statistical tie. Vance ended up winning by seven points. Several Republican consultants told me that they never believed the race would be close. Ohio, they pointed out, was ground zero for the working-class realignment that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016. Trump won the state again by eight points in the 2020 presidential election.