The Red Ripple – The American Spectator

“I was wrong,” wrote Melissa Mackenzie, publisher of The American Spectator, on Wednesday, November 9, 2022. “Terribly wrong.”

“I’m what happens when a conservative believes the polls,” she said. “I had wrongly thought that the polls swinging toward the Republicans meant that the polls were undercounting Republican support, as they have from time immemorial.”

Melissa is certainly not alone. Almost all of us at The American Spectator missed the call. We all thought that the red wave would come ashore with a furious assault on the Democrat Party and its collection of misfits, overeducated dunces, fraudulent “experts,” race hustlers, sex hustlers, crony capitalists, rent seekers, and Marxist wreckers who have spent the past two years abusing power to bring America to a depth not seen since the miasma of the late 1970s.

What goes up must come down, and vice versa, we all assumed. It’s basic physics. I myself wrote a piece analogizing the dynamics of an ocean wave as it comes ashore after being triggered by disturbances under the water, the water rising as the wave slows due to friction encountered in shallower water.

Physics very often describes politics, as human behavior is strikingly similar to the behavior of nature. It’s only rational to assume that two years of failure, corruption, nuttery, and tyranny at the hands of Joe Biden (or whichever faceless Obamites handle him like a marionette), Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi would produce a tsunami on November 8.

So, I was right there with Melissa. I saw the red wave coming. But what did reach land on November 8 was no red wave. It was barely a sea spray.

Three days after the elections, the counting in Nevada and Arizona continued, a shameful and suspicious governmental failure that fueled familiar accusations of cheating, and Republican expectations of as much as a 54–46 Senate majority disintegrated with the close-but-no-cigar defeats of Adam Laxalt and Blake Masters — excellent candidates who in any favorable Republican year should have won handily over very nondescript Democrat incumbents.

With those losses, Republicans were stuck at forty-nine seats, requiring Herschel Walker, thought by some to be the weakest of the major GOP challengers in Senate races, to pull out a runoff victory in Georgia just to recreate the 50–50 parity in the Senate that the cycle began with. And look how that turned out.

Yes, Republicans won the House — by the narrowest of margins. That’s certainly something. It’s not a red wave.

What to believe in the aftermath of this? Why were Melissa and I, and so many others on the right, so wrong about the 2022 midterms?

Why couldn’t the Republicans summon up all the anger and trepidation about the state of the nation — some 75 percent of Americans surveyed in exit polling believe the country is on the wrong track under Biden and friends — into positive action on Election Day?

There were five schools of thought gaining adherence among the chattering classes. All have some merit; none are completely correct.

Trump Screwed It All Up

This is the narrative favored, obviously, by the Never-Trump gang and the legacy corporate media. It holds that Republicans underperformed because Republican candidates, particularly those whom Trump endorsed, weren’t good enough.

And that Trump is — as they’ve said over and over again — a malign influence on the party and that when he rears his orange head disaster soon follows, with the midterms merely the latest example of the GOP failure that began in 2018.

Is it true? Well …

Trump still brings a great deal of energy to the GOP. That’s undeniable. What’s more, that energy has reoriented the Republican Party and the conservative movement toward something that is unquestionably more accessible and sustainable by average Americans, particularly the working class of all races and those without political connections or degrees from “selective” colleges and universities. There is a real possibility of building out a governing majority based on the America First agenda that Trump sketched out in his time as president; without him, that simply would not have happened.

You know all this already, and, whether you’re happy with it or Trump, you can’t deny that he’s changed the GOP.

So, that’s his due. One might even go so far as to say that without Trump, if the GOP had continued to devolve from George W. Bush to John McCain to Mitt Romney to Jeb Bush, it might have even broken up and disintegrated under the weight of corporatism, militarism, and the political subservience that its own voters kept screaming was the wrong approach.

All that said, did Trump screw it all up?

Well …

He might have played a more positive role.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, his endorsee for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, was a blunder. Oz, a Turkish Muslim from New Jersey who made his money selling diet supplements on the Oprah Winfrey Show and whose political orientation was clearly not conservative, couldn’t have been a worse ambassador to the working-class, blue-collar voting base that the GOP simply must have in the Keystone State in order to offset the Democrat machine vote in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Trump endorsed Oz because he agreed not to vote for Mitch McConnell to lead the GOP Senate caucus and because David McCormick, the better candidate (McCormick is a Gulf War veteran who served as the CEO of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates and who previously served in the George W. Bush administration), didn’t. McCormick had his own problems, but those working-class voters would have related better to somebody who’d served in the American military rather than in the Turkish one, as Oz did.

Oz wasn’t the only questionable endorsement. But that wasn’t the end of the problems.

Trump may have had the same misconceptions about the red wave that Melissa and I did. A week or so from the election, he began preparing the public-relations ground for his 2024 presidential run, something that was wholly unnecessary given that all the other potential Republican candidates were going to wait on his decision. Trump teased a November 15 presidential announcement just a few days before the election, stealing headlines from GOP candidates and energizing Democrat voters still suffering from the dreaded Trump Derangement Syndrome.

We now know, as we already suspected, that Trump is a turnout engine for Democrat voting unlike anything in recent American history. That he also energizes Republicans makes him politically viable regardless — but it’s now apparent that he’s a net liability when he’s not actually on the ballot. He can turn Democrats out to vote against Republicans, but he doesn’t necessarily turn Republicans out to support the party’s candidates whether he endorses them or not.

And some of Trump’s actions made just before the election and for several days after might indicate why.

Inexplicably, he began the month of November by cracking wise against Governor Ron DeSantis (whose performance in Florida was the clear shining light of the 2022 cycle), calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” after reading polls showing that Trump held a sizable lead over DeSantis in a hypothetical 2024 GOP presidential primary race. Trump then alleged that he has “dirt” on DeSantis, in a not-so-veiled threat against a prospective challenge by the latter.

The media picked up on those statements and seized on them to fan a controversy and the impression that the GOP is riven by division. Whether it was fatal to turnout is debatable, but it certainly didn’t help.

Own goals like this simply cannot happen by the leader of a political party whose job it is to hold a coalition together, not to drop a plunger and blow it apart.

The Establishment Screwed It All Up

This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job-approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional-ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-thirty wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates such as Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer.

But at no point during what appeared to be a red wave on the horizon was there any feeling among the American people that the Republican Party deserved much, if any, preference over the Democrats in the eyes of the public.

In fact, Republican assertions that when Trump was in charge, particularly in 2018 and 2019 after his policies had taken hold and before COVID-19 changed everything, the American economy and standing in the world…