In most of the post-election analyses going on, a major theme is that it’s all Trump’s fault. Typical of that is the house editorial in the WSJ.
True to form, President Trump [R] is already blaming everyone else, but he is the main architect of this rout. He’ll say the Senate didn’t break the filibuster or pass his Save America Act. But neither would have saved the GOP this year, even if there had been enough votes to do either. He’ll blame Karl Rove and Texas Senator John Cornyn [R] for the shocking defeats in the Lone Star State, but failed Senate candidate Ken Paxton was his man—and his choice helped bring down Governor Greg Abbott [R] too.
The editors aren’t far wrong as far as they went, but they cast their analysis too narrowly.
Trump’s late season campaign rallies that were all “Yay me,” instead of touting the particular candidate and pushing to get out the vote for him/her, also were counterproductive.
Major contributing factors, though, were the Republicans’ Chaos Caucus in the House that blocked too many of the party’s priorities and the Establishment Republicans in the Senate (not only Thune) who were too timid to force on-the-record votes or otherwise actually to fight for the party’s priorities.
And too many of the candidates themselves, who kept arguing how wonderful our economy is on the national level (and it is), but who didn’t talk directly to their constituents about how they would help, explicitly, those constituents, most of whom weren’t experiencing any of that national wonderfulness at their local grocery stores, local gas pumps, or their local utility bills.
Republicans, if they’re to have any chance of recovery, will need to stop playing at the obstreperous loyal opposition and act like they deserve to be in charge. That will require more than just greater internal unity than the Chaos Caucus has been interested in. It will require, also, vastly overhauling what they use for their communications game and talk often and freely to their constituents—not at them—about those constituents’ problems independently of national conditions, and each Republican needs to lose his fear of specifics and talk to his constituents about what policies he’ll fight for that particularly address those problems.
Republicans also need to learn from the Progressive-Democrats and load up their own saps and use them. Not to smear and lie; leave those to the Progressive-Democrats, instead to call out their specific opponents and identify, with facts and specific outcomes, the emptiness of those opponents’ words and promises and those opponents’ policy failures.