4 Realities Conservatives Must Swallow In The Wake Of The 2022 Midterms

Unlike the left, the stunning under-performance of Republicans on Tuesday should not be an opportunity for screaming at the cosmos. It’s a reality check, and the sooner we adapt to reality, the sooner we can be optimistic about the future.

So what are the realities conservatives must face based on Tuesday’s shock? I see four things.

Donald Trump Has Jumped the Shark

Donald Trump was a great president who did conventional Republican things conservatives dreamed about for decades. He’s absolutely responsible for 10,000 fewer babies being aborted due to his conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and their role in overturning Roe v. Wade. He kept us out of war. He kept Russia at bay. He brought up Chinese aggression as an issue. He kept North Korea silent. He fixed NAFTA. I could go on.

But he will never win the presidency again, and the candidates he endorses do not do well. Given the fundamentals of this election cycle, the open seats in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada should have been easy wins. Instead, they were weighed down by the Trump name and the stupid Jan. 6 incident that everyone wants to forget about except Donald Trump and those who leverage his obsession with it into a leftist passion.

Trump’s recent putdowns of Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbing him “DeSanctimonious” and telling him to back off a presidential run, were the last straw for me and many conservatives. We need to be done with him.

Two years ago, I wrote an article in these pages comparing Trump’s 2020 loss to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death, arguing his loss will make his movement more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine. I still believe that. He’s brought new constituencies into the GOP. But a key implicit point of that argument is, Obi-Wan Kenobi died. He didn’t get in the way of Luke Skywalker’s (ahem, DeSantis’s, ahem!) rise.

‘Democrat’ Is Shorthand for ‘I Gotta Get Mine!’

The electorate has crossed a point of no return, shattering previous assumptions. Everyone predicted the fundamentals of the economy would determine harsh losses for Democrats. Yet here we are. A frighteningly close majority of voters don’t care how massive government spending combined with strangling our oil production has led to economic decline.

Clearly, a sizeable part of the electorate has baked into it a transactional relationship with the Democrat brand that gives the party a reliable handicap regardless of what’s happening in the real world. “Democrat” is now shorthand for livelihood security, essentially for one’s career in the bureaucracy or one’s government entitlements. 

The Republican brand is more about principles and ideas that in the long run perform better in the aggregate. This is a hard sell among an electorate, especially among younger voters, who have not been trained to think critically about second- and third-order effects, for instance, with Biden’s student loan bailout program.

Republicans will not do well simply being against what Democrats are for. They will need to figure out a way to frame their goals