{"id":1732841,"date":"2022-11-10T07:02:34","date_gmt":"2022-11-10T12:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1732841"},"modified":"2022-11-10T07:02:38","modified_gmt":"2022-11-10T12:02:38","slug":"the-big-midterm-lesson-defensive-victories-on-the-right-arent-going-to-save-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-big-midterm-lesson-defensive-victories-on-the-right-arent-going-to-save-the-country\/","title":{"rendered":"The Big Midterm Lesson: Defensive \u2018Victories\u2019 On The Right Aren\u2019t Going To Save The Country"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-big-midterm-lesson-defensive-victories-on-the-right-arent-going-to-save-the-country%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1732841&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>If there\u2019s a clear lesson to come out of Tuesday night\u2019s bizarre midterm election, it\u2019s that Republicans can no longer be content with defensive victories or defensive politics. To win political power and do what must be done to save the country, Republicans will have to go on offense, present a compelling vision for the future, and engage culture war issues like abortion and critical race theory without apologies.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When they do that, they win. But it stands in stark contrast to the perennial advice of Beltway GOP consultants, who think it best to avoid major culture war issues like abortion. Indeed, the \u201cofficial narrative\u201d of corporate media in the wake of Tuesday\u2019s midterms is that abortion was a big winner for Democrats, who supposedly capitalized on the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s\u00a0<em>Dobbs<\/em>\u00a0decision overturning\u00a0<em>Roe v. Wade<\/em>,\u00a0successfully making abortion a major electoral issue and blunting a red wave by boosting turnout among young, pro-abortion voters.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It sounds good, but it\u2019s not quite right. Republicans who didn\u2019t shy away from talking about abortion after\u00a0<em>Dobbs<\/em>, and who signed into law abortion legislation earlier this year without flinching or apologizing, did really well \u2014 they were Tuesday night\u2019s winners. As <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/sbaprolife\/status\/1590385802210869250?s=20&#038;t=ai495H13BQEiBDFXDbGOZA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Marc Thiessen noted on Fox News<\/a>, Republican governors in Ohio, Georgia, New Hampshire, Texas, and Florida all signed post-<em>Dobbs<\/em>\u00a0abortion restrictions, and they all won reelection by comfortable margins.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not to say abortion was a non-factor. Democrats squeezed every last electoral drop they could out of\u00a0<em>Dobbs<\/em>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/they-dont-have-a-winning-message-dems-spend-320m-abortion-ads-10-times-more-crime-economy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">spending $320 million on abortion-related TV ads<\/a>\u00a0(much more than on all other issues combined) which helped motivate a voter base that might have otherwise been depressed.<\/p>\n<p>Still, there was a clear contrast between Republicans who heeded the advice of Beltway consultants and tried to dodge abortion questions or take a noncommittal stance and those who defended their anti-abortion positions and pushed for post-<em>Roe<\/em>\u00a0legislation. Only one of those groups fared well Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>The larger lesson here is that Republican candidates should lean into the culture war and make no apologies for their positions, even on contentious issues like abortion. Fighting back against the left, it turns out, is what a lot of voters on the right want from Republicans.<\/p>\n<p>Consider what Ron DeSantis achieved in Florida, winning 60 percent of the vote after narrowly eking out a victory four years ago. He did that by not shying away from big, high-profile fights over hot-button culture war issues like critical race theory and transgender indoctrination. Glenn Youngkin did the same thing last November to pull off an upset in the Virginia governor\u2019s race.<\/p>\n<p>But DeSantis and Youngkin are, sadly, exceptions to the general rule that Republicans tend to be reactionary and defensive. Indeed, the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/10\/20\/we-need-to-stop-calling-ourselves-conservatives\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">failure of the conservative movement<\/a>\u00a0is largely attributable to this default defensiveness, and it needs to end. For decades, conservatives whined about just wanting to be left alone even as the radical left was marching through our institutions and transforming society, showing us at every turn they had no intention of leaving us alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Yet some on the right still don\u2019t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Republicans won big in places where GOP leaders leaned into the culture war and passed abortion restrictions. That\u2019s no accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":1732844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1732841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1732841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1732844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1732841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1732841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1732841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}