Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Oh Republicans, How Can You Screw Up the 2022 Elections? Let Us Count the Ways…
There’s no doubt that since the early morning hours of 3 November, the GOP has been on a bit of a sugar high. After the victories of Glenn Youngkin and Winsome Sears in Virginia and the strong showing of Republicans in other states, Conservatives have been plucked from the depths of despair. Suddenly, their future is no longer as bleak as they had feared.
It seems to me that every day brings fresh predictions of a GOP return to power. Two nights ago, I heard Newt Gingrich confidently state that Republicans will be gaining anywhere from 40 to 78 seats in the house and four to six seats in the Senate. Last night, I saw an interview in which Lauren Boebert (R-CO) revealed that she is working on congressional committee assignments (for the new Congress) which will serve as “payback” to those nasty Democrats.
Try as I may, I can’t get on the Republican Victory Train; at least, not yet. I’ve seen the GOP snatch defeat from the jaws of victory before, using a variety of methods:
- Run candidates who quickly became unelectable for any number of reasons. Does anyone remember the names of Christine (“I’m not a witch”) O’Donnell or Todd (“A woman’s body shuts down during a legitimate rape”) Akin? These were two individuals who had real shots at victory until their stupidity took over and, instead, became national jokes. Does the GOP have more candidates such as these waiting in the wings?
- Run candidates who persist in speaking with the wrong media outlets. What Republican in their right mind would grant an interview to the professional haters at MSNBC or CNN?
- Run candidates that act like a deer caught in the headlights each time they’re called a racist. Republicans need to face up to it; in the eyes of the MSM, they will always be White Supremacists. Instead of meekly denying the accusations, they should snarl with all the force they can muster, “You’re full of [expletive]!” to their accusers.
- Run candidates who cannot speak to cultural issues and economic issues with equal passion. Yes, abortion is an important issue but peoples’ ears pick up even more when it comes to bread and butter issues, especially in economically depressed areas.
- Run candidates who are too slow to go on the offense, tying their opponents to skyrocketing crime rates, illegal immigration, and our miserable education system.
- Run candidates who believe that their flippant remarks (and tweets) will endear them to the electorate. Democrats can get away with that; Republicans can’t.
- Run candidates with, shall we say, conflicted personalities. Thirteen Republicans voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill; need I say more?
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m getting the idea that Republicans believe that all they have to do to win back control of Congress is to run out and buy a wardrobe of fleece vests and practice up on their CRT platitudes. This is dangerous thinking.
So far, the war between the “Moderates” and the Progressives of the Democratic Party has worked to the advantage of the Republicans. So has the incredible incompetence of the Biden Administration.
However, simply standing back and waiting for the Democrats to self-destruct is not a strategy. The Republican Party will have to step up and show the electorate that it is worthy to run the Nation. By the same token, they will need to take each member of the Biden Cabinet and show how they are manifestly incompetent at their jobs. In other words, they will need to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” (I don’t understand why the GOP cannot master this technique. When Secretary of Commerce Raimondo asserted that “there’s no point in talking about decoupling” (our economy from Red China’s) the GOP should have been all over her. Instead, the response was crickets.)
For my part, I don’t want “nice” GOP candidates. I want steely-eyed men and women; White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and every other ethnic group who love this country more than they want a career in politics or a job as a highly paid lobbyist. I want GOP candidates who will smile coldly at their opponents and hand them their asses on the debate stage. I want GOP candidates who will address their local and state Chamber of Commerce and bluntly ask them, “What do you love the most, this country or your bottom line?”
I do not have a great degree of confidence in GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. I can’t explain it; I just don’t believe she’s up to the job. What is she doing to prevent shenanigans (such as those that occurred in Atlanta in 2020) from recurring in 2022? If she is doing anything, I haven’t heard anything about it.
“Irrational Exuberance” is a term usually found within the confines of Wall Street. However, I am beginning to see instances of it within the GOP, when it comes to the 2022 elections. Maybe I’m being overly cautious. However, I’ll wait before I get on the bandwagon.
What do you think?
Published in General
Unfortunately, I’m afraid, based upon recent history, that the Republicans will take your points 1 – 7 above to form their campaign plans.
I think that the most important theme is in your first point:
We lost Senate seats in CO, DE, MO, IN, and NV when we nominated flawed candidates in the primaries who went on to lose the general election. This cycle, we have very flawed candidates running in AZ, GA, MO, OH and PA, who will be very beatable by the Democrats in the general election.
Elections are about the future, not the past.
I have quibbles with some of your examples, but YES. I think the GOP participating (proudly!) in these most recent ruinous bills took the Virginia victory wind right out of the rank and file’s sails. The professionals are the only ones still excited — visions of sugarplums — about how great 2022 is going to be. Because they did not hear what we heard when McCarthy and McConnell allowed this stuff. If they had a problem with it, we would have heard about it by now — they wanted the bills. These guys.
These frickin guys.
There is an old saying that when Democrats win they are in power, and when Republicans win they are in office.
2016 through 2018 showed that the GOPe won’t actually do anything. Now that Democrats are losing support, the GOPe thinks it has this in the bag. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
Well, they may have it in the bag, but if that bag is just “being in office” it doesn’t make a lot of difference.
Where are the young and hungry conservatives, those who love the Constitution, the country and their fellow citizens? They don’t seem to be running. Even the 17 that challenged Trump in 2016 seemed more on the gentlemanly Romneyesque (or focus-grouped or parsing) side rather than the dyed in the wool ideological fighter that Trump was.
Either conservative are characterized by timidity, or intellectual incompetence, or poor speaking or leadership ability, or inexperience, OR they’re chosen because possessing any these attributes makes them certain losers and their wins are not wanted by the GOPe. Sort of like limiting membership in a gild or staying on the bench and collecting your salary.
Well put @flicker. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but given all the noise, I’m not seeing much.
I voted for Trump twice, once enthusiastically, but I would say he at least fits several of the categories you mentioned above – 1 (got elected anyway), 6, and 7.
Points 1, 4 and 6 of the list warn against running non-mainstream candidates. The remainder of the points warn against running mainstream candidates. You correctly point out the idiocy of engaging with the corporate media, but assume there should be debates, which are the most gotcha of the corporate media’s anti-conservative tools. This is not intended to be a criticism – no-one knows how to win a fair election (especially those paid the most to do so).
That the GOP will squander any opportunities handed to them by the electorate is a racing certainty, however.
I tend to think Trump won (or could have won) both times. Whatever he’s capable of doing, and does, it worked. What, 75 million voted for him in 2020? 12 million more than the 63 million he won by in 2016.
The Democrat party has a whole system of taking care of the ones that make sacrifices for long range objectives. I don’t think there’s anything like that with the Republicans.
It’s ridiculous in Minnesota. One person had a job 100% funded by George Soros, the only government funding was office space in the city. It was something about getting people to walk more. I am not making that up.
Run candidates who will say one thing, then backpedal while apologizing for saying it . . .
We prefer real people. We like them genuine. But real people are flawed (everyone is). I’d far rather vote for someone who flubs in regurgitating a flawed study in a certain way than someone who is meticulously flawless whose skeletons are ensconced in his own private closet of Epstein’s island bunker.
If we want real people, they come with opinions and no solid understanding of political speech. If we want people groomed for office, then we are voting for people who are conservative just to get close to power, who have pedigrees, and have been steeped in elitist nonsense for decades.
In other words the comfort professional establishment class
I’m referring to real people. There are those who are eloquent and communicate well, and those who are not. There are those who know, or can determine, good policy and those who can’t. I never saw the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and I don’t know how in depth they got, but snippets I’ve seen are that they both were knowledgeable on the issues, and also had to temper their speech with pithy expressions that summed up for the audience what they were saying. I do remember when the national news shows went to “headline” news format, and I thought this was flashy and uninformative, and designed to entertain viewers rather than inform them.
But two things seem apparent to me now. One is that people are not informed and only get their knowledge of national and world events in five-second sound bites; they don’t seem to have the interest or the attention span to get their news and opinion in long format. And the other is that we are in an existential information war. It has occurred to me in the past week that the surest way to communicate, be understood (if that word even applies) and to get any sort of even tentative agreement from the viewer, is to use memes: a verbal and pictorial message that can be fully taken in and understood in less that five seconds.
I think this is the way it is, poor for society and self-governance, but the reality. I did like Franco’s Epic Nexus post, thought I disagreed with most of what was said, it was broad and fairly specific but shallow. Nonetheless, I thought it was a great form of political discussion, much like I think modern “debates” should be organized around. Even still, they mostly appeared to be speaking in slogans, which is insufficient, but at the same time, understandable.
And finally, Paul Ryan was in my view the perfect example of real people: wonky, thoughtful, knowledgeable, unflashy speech. But he couldn’t enthuse a crowd. And with whatever machinations the federal government works under, he couldn’t ever balance the budget. And after a couple decades, he too, even if he didn’t like it, got turned.
It is unfortunate, but politics and political speech has shifted from thoughtfulness, to slogans and memes exclusively. Trump knew this, and used it. I think there are a few others that get this. Is there a conservative equivalent to Maxine Waters, who can rile up a crowd with the message “Racism is no way to live your lives and race is no way to gauge others! Respect all people!”?
That is because Mitch McConnell personally benefits, through his family, from the rigged deals with China. He is the happiest man in Washington to be rid of that troublesome President with the mean tweets. And the rest of Mitch’s gang, who enable his minority leadership and who he expects to lift him back into the Senate Majority Leader seat, are each equally complicit and culpable every day they fail to demand he step down. But for his gang giving the “infrastructure” monstrosity “bipartisan” cover, we would not be on the knife edge of permanent structural changes through the fraudulent “reconciliation” Build Back Better bill.
Step one in the 2022 campaign is an absolute demand that every Republican candidate first denounce current failed Congressional Republican leadership and pledge to only join and stay with the Republican caucus if there is a clean sweep of current top “leadership.”
Republicans Can Be Just as Woke as Democrats – American Thinker
Another way they can lose.
Yeah, for real. I remember back in the 1980 campaign when Reagan was asked about the Log Cabin group participating in the GOP. Reagan’s reply was “They’re signing on to my politics; I’m not signing on to theirs.”.
Ronna Romney McDaniel and the rest of her cabal would be wise to listen to those words…
Excellent points Clifford. I give credit to Mitch for his handling of Supreme Court picks, but almost everything else; forget about it.
One way to not screw up. Nominate this guy. (See the 12 second point.)
I think the jury is still out on this one…
I turn 38 on Wednesday. I’m almost 40! The most obvious thing about this fact is that the 80s WERE A LONG TIME AGO. Please join us in this decade.
Reagan was President when I was in my 30’s. That’s not so long ago.
Odd, how many people still seem to believe that the disciplined professional political party of the 19th Century is still the active model. A Political Party no longer selects or elects Candidates, voters aligned over a specific issue do.
Reagan’s candidacy was an insurgent movement against the established order of the Republican Party that would have failed against a more competent and honest Democrat opponent in 1980.
The opinion of individual Republican candidates will be irrelevant if the Party has an articulate message and policy agenda like the Contract with America to allow people to vote against the Democrats in 2022 and 2024.
The best strategy is to allow them to destroy themselves and once elected destroy their entrenched bureaucracy by cutting programs and agencies with a goal of the elimination of the Civil Service and return to the patronage model for all appointments to the bureaucracy.
I have no natural memory of Reagan. You need to move on.
A kid who is old enough to vote today has very little natural memory of that loser “W“ and none at all of Clinton.
I’d say any soundbites denouncing GOP leadership are better spent on the greater horrors of the socialist Democrats.
The forgiving thought I’d put in the head of Mitch haters (including my own pro-Trump / anti-Mitch feelings) is that were it not for McConnell’s parliamentary slow march, the not-so-moderate tyrant now serving as Attorney General would be on the Supreme Court.