Republicans Lose Because They’re Fake Populists with No Real Policy PlansRepublicans are running either like the clock is set back 20 years or as performative populists without substance.BY: JOE POPULARIS
NOVEMBER 21, 2022
Republicans won the popular vote in House races by at least 6 percent and have taken the House. But the midterm elections were, overall, a massive disappointment for conservatives, with Republicans losing key races and seats in the Senate.
Cue the Republican infighting. The establishment quickly blamed former President Donald Trump for the losses, and it seems to care little about the fact that delayed vote counting and massive Democratic turnout due to ballot harvesting now appear to be a fact of life in American elections. Trump did pick some terrible candidates, such as Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, who by many accounts ran an extremely subpar campaign. Trump’s picks, true to form, appear to be based on loyalty to Trump rather than substance. But establishment candidates performed poorly also, and explicitly anti-Trump Republicans did worst of all.
Meanwhile, some blamed abortion. But many Republicans who performed poorly were not pro-life, such as Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. Also, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott all recently passed pro-life bills and won their races (with DeSantis massively outperforming). Democrats ran on abortion in New York and California too and still lost key House races.
Republicans were also massively outspent, as corporate money flooded to the Democrats. Anti-establishment conservatives point out that Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., spent $10 million on pro-abortion Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s campaign to help her defeat a conservative challenger, and spent $20 million on a safe Republican Alabama seat to elect the establishment’s preferred candidate. Meanwhile, McConnell cut funds for anti-establishment candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona (who might have voted against McConnell as Senate majority leader). Masters spent $7 million, and his Democratic opponent spent $73 million. This lopsided campaign spending dynamic existed across the country, including in the Georgia, New Hampshire, and Nevada Senate races.
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Real Populism, Not PerformativeThe reason Republicans underperformed, and will keep underperforming until something changes, is that they have broadly rejected populism — which is what put Trump in the White House in 2016, not his personality. The populism on the campaign trail hit a brick wall in Washington. McConnell has bragged that he steered Trump away from the populist items Trump was elected on. So did former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who allegedly worked behind the scenes to slow Trump’s border wall.
Even Trump, aside from blockage by establishment Republicans and his terrible personnel choices, failed to govern as a populist. Yes, he had positive achievements like China tariffs (hated by the GOP establishment and Wall Street), but in his last year in office he was adding troops to the Middle East and Africa, and his signature legislative achievement was a corporate tax cut that enriched the senior employees of large corporations who largely hate his voters (the accompanying small business tax cuts were not permanent, while the corporate cuts were permanent). Trump’s 2020 campaign was starkly different than his 2016 campaign, and gone was the messaging that Trump would take on a corrupt system. In Trump’s 2020 campaign, he ran on himself.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/21/republicans-lose-because-theyre-fake-populists-with-no-real-policy-plans/
