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November 15, 2022

What was supposed to be a red tsunami last week turned out to be a ripple. It didn’t take long for the GOP establishment to place the blame: Donald Trump! It couldn’t be because Mitch McConnell decided to spend $10 million supporting the treacherous Lisa Murkowski against the state’s GOP nominee, rather than in Arizona, Georgia, or Michigan. No, it was Trump. It wasn’t Kevin McCarthy’s embarrassing attempt to recreate Newt Gingrich’s successful “Contract with America”—which galvanized America and brought the GOP 54 seats in a year with 2.99% inflation—with his facile “Commitment to America.” No, it was Donald Trump. It wasn’t McConnell’s August derision of MAGA candidates, claiming the party lacked “candidate quality,” while his handpicked Colorado senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea went on to lose by 13 points, 3 times as much as Oz lost by in Pennsylvania. No, it was Trump.

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Despite the GOP establishment’s desire to pin their failure on 45 and his supporters, the truth is, this failure has numerous causes.

Needless to say, the GOP establishment is at the top of the list. Its members failed to embrace their own party’s candidates or execute a compelling national campaign that focused on the kitchen-table issues of inflation, crime, immigration, and parental rights. In reality, 2022 was the single best landscape for a GOP wave in modern times, but rather than focusing America’s attention on those issues, we had Lindsey Graham threatening Vladimir Putin and sending $50 billion to Ukraine while McConnell and John Cornyn were busy selling out the 2nd Amendment. The leaders of the GOP are grifters more interested in the perks of leadership than winning, and it showed on November 8.

Beyond the incompetence of the GOP leadership, there were two other issues that drove the election outcome. Believe it or not, abortion, the third rail of American politics, was one. The Wall Street Journal has a fascinatingly comprehensive analysis of voting patterns, looking at dozens of criteria.

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One question asked “Which one of the following would you say is the most important issue facing the country?” and compared the voting patterns from 2018. Of the nine issues listed: Economy, Healthcare, Immigration, Abortion, Crime, Climate change, Foreign policy, Covid, and Guns, four had no change measured because the issues didn’t even show up in 2018. Of the remaining five the Democrats lost support on four by an average of 6%. One they didn’t: Abortion.

Image: Elephant by Aulalian34 (edit). CC BY-SA 4.0.

Of the 9% of voters who said abortion was the most important issue, fully 78% of them voted for Democrats, a 57% increase over 2018. That essentially translates into about 7% of voters. The GOP did an abysmal job addressing the issue of Abortion. They allowed the media and Democrats to paint the GOP as extremists who wanted to force little girls who’d been raped into having babies.

Whatever one’s opinion on abortion, the fact of the matter is that absolute bans on abortion are unpopular virtually everywhere in America, and even within the GOP fully 1/3 of the party disagrees with them. This was probably a lost cause from the beginning, but in an extraordinarily contentious election, the GOP leadership should have done a better job addressing the issue.

With the leak of the Dobbs, the GOP should have known that the Democrats were going to come after them with lies like the one surrounding the little girl in Ohio who’d been raped by the illegal alien or the prospect of birth control being outlawed—and then prepared. But the GOP did nothing. Indeed, you had the buffoon Lindsey Graham pitching the issue of passing a nationwide ban (which was cynically illusory, given that it would have cut abortions by less than 6%). Dobbs didn’t ban abortion or outlaw anything, but it didn’t matter because the GOP didn’t have a plan to address the issue, and it showed at the polls.

All of that however is incidental to the real reason the GOP failed: Voting rules, starting with early voting and mail-in balloting. By the time Dr. Oz and John Fetterman met in their debate on October 25, 635,000 of the state’s 5 million voters had already voted, 460,000 of whom were Democrats, 320,000 more than Republicans. That number is significant given that post-debate, fully 82% of viewers said that Oz won the contest, and he lost by only 225,000 votes.

That, of course, is before even considering the fraud potential inherent in mail-in voting. Mail-in balloting (and in particular universal mail-in voting) and ballot harvesting essentially provide Democrats with a mechanism to fabricate votes as well as harvest hundreds of thousands of votes from nursing homes, college campuses, and other high-density locations. And of course, Pennsylvania doesn’t require voter ID, and officials seem to have been involved in electioneering on election day itself.