The Republicans didn’t quite sweep the board in Tuesday night’s mid-midterm election, but they very nearly did.
It must be quite a thing for Democrats who were so giddy after having claimed the White House, Senate, and House late last year and January of this year.
But then they got to the part where they actually had to govern, to deliver on promises made. So here they are, just ten months later, as flatly rejected by voters as a poor, homely man hitting on a Victoria’s Secret angel.
Shrieking “ORANGE MAN BAD!” is easy. So is shutting down the country’s economy just to ruin a sitting president. Governing is hard; owning up to the bad results of your governance is harder still. Democrats did neither this election season and paid the price last night.
They would do well to learn from their mistakes… but it’s an easy call that they won’t.
So I’d like to show you the lessons Democrats ought to take home, and the ones they probably actually will.
Midterm Election Lessons They Ought to Learn
Basics Matter. This is an easy one for politicians to ignore, but not for voters frustrated with daily concerns. Everyone with a brain saw the logistical crisis coming a year ago, and the Biden administration could have done a few simple things to alleviate it. Instead, nothing was done until it was too late, and even that was too little or ineffectual, or both. Voters saw their holiday plans ruined and took it out on the party responsible.
Americans Hate Inflation. Stop printing money and suppressing production, investment, and innovation.
Don’t Piss Off Parents. We love nothing more than our children, and by and large, Democrats told us with increasing firmness that we ought to have little or no say in their education. Parents replied, “[REDACTED] YOU!”
Don’t Wish Away Cultural Trends. “Politics is downstream of culture,” the late, great Andrew Breitbart observed. When you see a new cultural phenomenon like “Let’s go Brandon!” it can’t be wished away or ignored. Same thing with critical race theory and a rapist-in-a-skirt allowed to use the girls’ room. But what the Democrats did was even worse: They went on the attack, viciously, wrongly, against genuinely frustrated Americans expressing (in a fun, harmless way) their frustrations. By dismissing us — and worse, calling us every name in the book — Democrats said they weren’t merely dismissive of our concerns, but actively hostile to them.
Midterm Election Lessons They Will Actually Learn
Very little.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out here predicting a “Permanent GOP Majority” like some overly-confident Democrats did after the GOP’s dual shellackings in 2006 and ’08. Politics is a fast-moving business, and this election’s winners could very well be losers the very next time around.
In terms of policy, however, I don’t expect much to change. Unlike conservatism, leftism has no limiting principles: They’ll keep trying to nationalize everything from schoolbooks to social media to banking privacy because that’s what leftists do.
They’ll soften the presentation some, though. Already, critical race theory is being rebranded as nothing more than teaching all of America’s history, instead of just the “good stuff.” But CRT was and remains old-school anti-American Marxism dressed up in the modern language of racial grievances.
And the fact is that voters have short memories. Democrats thrive on that, and the disorder they create by pushing CRT, normalizing transgenderism, reckless spending and overregulation, are all things that, in the long run, further the leftists’ statist cause.
In other words: We’re never more than one repeat of 2008 or 2020 from letting Democrats indulge in their most destructive and divisive desires.
I’m reminded of what the IRA terrorist said after the Brighton hotel bomb failed to kill UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
I guess the lesson here for conservatives is that Democrats are the IRA of elective politics: They only have to get lucky once, or once in a while. Those of us trying to stop their divisive grievance culture and ruinous economic policies have to get lucky every time.
So: Saddle up, and stay that way.
