We’ve all heard the famous Donald Trump quote, circa campaign 2016 (paraphrasing): “When I’m president, we’re going to win so much you’re going to get tired of it. That’s right, you’re going to beg me to stop. Stop! Stop! We’re tired of winning!”
The citation might not be verbatim, but you get the gist of the words. Trump said it. He meant it.
Then, as would be expected, whenever something didn’t go exactly right in Trump’s orbit, the boobirds emerged from the depths (these are flightless birds, mind you) to chastise the former president and blame him for everything that’d gone wrong. I’m not claiming Trump doesn’t deserve some liability for results that were less than stellar during certain election periods, but the response from many in the Never Trump troll forest and the shiny but dingy studios and editorial rooms of the establishment media have been, let’s say, a tad over the top.
Such was the case last week after the 2023 off-year midterm elections didn’t go the way many of us conservatives hoped it would. Kentucky reelected a liberal Democrat governor in a race most political observers dismissed as a sure thing in a deep red jurisdiction like The Bluegrass State. Then there was the tragic ballot initiative in next door Ohio where, at least according to the vote tallies, citizens chose enshrining killing babies into their Constitution. Last but not least (there were others, too, such as in Pennsylvania) there were the state legislature contests in Virginia, where (relatively) new governor Glenn Youngkin came up short in his stated mission to take control of the Commonwealth’s lawmaking bodies.
Democrats will now enjoy and likely exploit one-seat advantages (Republicans picked up a seat in the State senate) in both the House of Delegates and Virginia senate in order to make Youngkin’s life as difficult as possible. The partisan balance is indeed that close in a Commonwealth that went for Democrat senile Joe Biden by ten points in 2020, but still the pundit-class swears it was Youngkin who came out the big loser last week.
I’m not sure how that works… or adds up. But let’s go with it for now.
The topic of “losing” was broached at last week’s Republican presidential candidates’ “debate”, with each of the five not-Trump competitors being given an opportunity by the moderators to toss in their two cents on the basic question of “What’s wrong with the GOP?” What the liberals really meant, in my opinion, was, “What’s wrong with a party that would lose all these elections and still wants to bring back Donald Trump to be their nominee again?”
The question was fair game, but only one of the five candidates present put things in proper perspective, and the truth-teller got little credit for his salient observation afterwards. 38-year-old first-time politician Vivek Ramaswamy placed the blame for the Republican party’s lack of fortune squarely in the laps of the GOP bluebloods, headed by Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna McDaniel. They didn’t like it, either.
“Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022,” Ramaswamy said. “We got trounced last night in 2023, and I think that we have to have accountability in our party. For that matter, Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will turn over [and] yield my time to you.”
In a piece titled simply “Thank you Vivek!”, Scott McKay wrote (as part of his Friday Five Quick Things Column) at The American Spectator:
“[U]ntil Ramaswamy took the stage, nobody put a pin on the real cause — namely, the person responsible for the same GOP underperformance we’ve seen time and again since 2016. But he said what needed to be said. Yes, Trump has endorsed McDaniel as RNC chair three times. Trump doesn’t actually have a great record when it comes to personnel. And right now there are lots of people jumping on Ramaswamy’s bandwagon in calling for McDaniel to go…
“It isn’t that the Democrats are that good. It’s that the GOP is that bad. And McDaniel is the head of the party. This isn’t complicated, it just takes stones to say it. Maybe Ramaswamy ought to have her job.
Since Ramaswamy will presumably have a good amount of time on his hands starting in the next few months (after the early primaries are over), maybe he could be voted in as party chair after McDaniel takes the hint and skedaddles out of party headquarters in search of some other cushy ruling class position where she can do a crappy job and still be retained. It could happen, right?
Yes, and a meteor will strike the earth today and block out the sun for decades, ending all life on the planet. Better not get the enviro kooks started on that one!
If you haven’t seen the clip of Ramaswamy’s mini-speech, it’s certainly worth watching: click here. As I often reply to those who assert that someone is speaking a falsehood, what did Ramaswamy say that wasn’t true? Ever since Ronna McDaniel assumed the chairmanship of the Republican Party, they have become a conglomeration of losers (2018, 2020, 2022, 2023, etc.). Ronna’s job, in case you’ve forgotten, is to win elections. That’s what political party heads do. They don’t govern; they have platforms, but they don’t legislate, and they certainly don’t lead anything. They do maintain some control of messaging, since they control the money, but they aren’t supposed to play favorites in primaries or take candidate preference out of the hands of the grassroots. That’s how it works in a perfect world, which definitely doesn’t describe today’s politics.
For her part, McDaniel’s sole purpose is to maintain lists of donors, call those donors frequently to ask them for donations, attend lots and lots of lunches and dinners at establishments with fabric table cloths and then to divvy up the funds she’s raised among Republican candidates so they can run their campaigns against Democrats and win offices. That’s it. Ronna doesn’t have to worry about anything except those few delineated functions. She doesn’t even have to make coffee when she gets into the office in the morning.
Has she been a success at any of her anointed tasks? Anyone? Anyone?
Well, getting down to it, there are a few more purposes for the chief party-decisionmaker. She’s tasked with overseeing the party’s legal operations, such as getting teams of lawyers in place in states and at the national level to oversee elections and ensure that there’s no funny business involved, such as in 2020 when Democrat ballot counters in Democrat-heavy precincts were producing boxes of mail-in votes from seemingly out of nowhere and putting them through tabulating machines when the poll watchers had already been sent home for the night.
But we weren’t supposed to mention that, right?
Yet it’s far too easy for the shiny-object seeking establishment media talkers to place sole responsibility for every “loss” on Donald Trump instead, and that’s precisely what they’re after when they ask about the GOP’s curse. Or, in Virginia, blame goes to Glenn Youngkin, though he’s generally viewed as a “moderate” establishment-type who doesn’t pursue conservative windmills on a whim with little chance of success. But Youngkin isn’t thought to be a Trumper, either, so it’s hard for liberals to get directly at him.
On the whole, is it fair to blame Trump for the party’s losses? Trump haters fondly point out that a number of his key endorsements in recognizable places lost in 2022 (and in Kentucky this year), leading to insinuations that his name inspires scores and scores of angry Democrats itching to register a vote against him, even if his name doesn’t actually appear on the ballot. These folks similarly cite the statistical fact Democrats allegedly drummed up a record 80 million votes in 2020, simply because the man people love to hate – Donald Trump – served as a beacon to the mailboxes and drop boxes to lodge their formal protests against him.
Many of these same experts surmise senile Joe Biden will pull the same trick in 2024.
Commentators are also prone to weaponize the Republican Party’s pro-life stance against it, claiming that everywhere a GOP hopeful mentions the word “ban” that he or she is destined to lose. This analysis is far too simple, though it’s clear Republicans must step up their messaging on abortion to mitigate the effects of wealthy leftists pumping billions into lobbying for pro-abort candidates.
It's the one area where otherwise-annoying and haggish Nikki Haley might have touched on a message that works, namely, that she’s for saving as many babies as possible, but the political process has to determine where the compromise point would be. Youngkin campaigned for a 15-week “ban” in Virginia, and it might have contributed to the Democrats’ good night last Tuesday, though it must be reiterated that the GOP didn’t lose more than a couple House seats on the evening.
As I’ve said, a few close election losses here and there didn’t turn the entire party and platform into irredeemable “losers”. And Donald Trump has ended up the winner a whole lot, hasn’t he?
Debate will rage on as to who is to blame for the Republican party’s recent run of bad luck, with the ruling elites taking the easy road and simply placing shackles on Donald Trump, while many conservatives are looking straight at Ronna McDaniel and the Republican National Committee, just as Vivek Ramaswamy did last week. The whole party – and its candidates – must do better in mounting content-filled, substantive campaigns.
It's the key to future triumphs.
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