Conservative National Review writer Noah Rothman is throwing in the towel on Republicans this year. There’s really nothing for it now, he says, but for the party to learn from its mistakes — and there’s so very much to learn.
“Republicans are set to endure another defeat. And perhaps this time, they’ll even take a moment to consider why voters turned their backs on the party,” said Rothman. “That would be a rare thing for the GOP in the Trump years.”
This is because President Donald Trump “short-circuited the process” that Rothman said typically culminates in parties coming to terms with loss after his 2020 defeat. Instead, after losing without conceding, Trump convinced Republican voters and lawmakers that they hadn’t really lost at all. Likewise, the party learned nothing from its dismal 2022 midterm performance.
“With recriminations flying over his abysmal taste in candidates and Ron DeSantis’s star rising, Trump brushed aside Republicans who urged him to take a beat before announcing his return to politics,” said Rothman. “Within a week of the GOP’s underwhelming performance, Trump was a presidential candidate again, stifling an evaluation of his failures by those best positioned to address them.”
And today, instead of examining where all they’ve gone wrong, Republicans are trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of likely Democratic victories, so that the GOP “may thus once again cheat itself out of a valuable confrontation with defeat and refuse to incorporate the voters’ verdict into their appeals to the American electorate that should accompany that bitter experience.”
But elections aren’t just for voters “to blow off steam,” argues Rothman.
“They are a crucial feedback mechanism. They stave off sclerotic government and tunnel vision in its elected officials,” he said. “They remind complacent administrations who their constituents are by diluting the influence of powerful and moneyed interests. They help systems dispense with incompetent or exhausted officials, and they surface information otherwise invisible to cosseted central authorities.”
They’re not just here for appearance, Rothman raged. They serve a practical purpose.
“… [T]he parties that take their electoral losses seriously often benefit in the long run,” said Rothman, referencing Democrats’ failures in 1988, which he said shifted the party away from “flaccid, enervated leftism that had allowed America’s cities to crumble and its welfare rolls to balloon.”
Similarly, Britain’s Labour Party readjusted itself during the Margaret Thatcher years when the party got shutout, giving Tony Blair the chance to move away from the “nationalization of industry … as crime spiraled, wages stagnated, and public spending ballooned.”
It’s not like Republican self-assessment has to get too deep, said Rothman. It’s very clear where the party has gone wrong.
“The voters wanted 2019 back when they went to the polls in November 2024. What they got was an administration besotted with protectionist schemes that increased consumer costs, a war … for which their support was never solicited, an unscrupulous campaign of retribution and abuse targeting Trump’s critics, and a cast of … figures who don’t even seem self-conscious about working the levers of government to line their own pockets.”
If the party gets dumped next week, it will be because “the voters are telling the party something.”
“Those who care about its future would be wise to listen,” Rothman concluded.
