Republicans need a serious counter-offensive if they want to stand a chance.
It might not matter whom Republicans run for president in 2024.
America’s propaganda press traffics in disinformation. Its Big Tech oligarchs censor news and information helpful to conservatives, while elevating biased news and information that helps the Left. And its election systems have been overrun by privately funded groups that run Democratic “get out the vote” campaigns to traffic ballots into ballot boxes. We catalogued this particularly complex problem in Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.
Instead of election day, we now have an “election season”—during which, over a period of months, we flood homes across the country with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, regardless of whether secretaries of state or local registrars have any idea if those ballots are being sent to the correct addresses. This in a country where 11% of residents move every year. We then wait for sophisticated partisan turnout operations funded by activist billionaires and run by ideological statisticians to round up those ballots in entirely selective ways.
This culminates with us all glued to our TVs on a Tuesday evening in November listening to “journalists” who spent the months leading up to the election smothering any accurate information about the state of the country with a pillow, making empty judgments about the health of American democracy based entirely on how much the results will further advance policies that favor a toxic admixture of their own corporate paymasters and woke Montagnards.
In this world, concerns about candidate quality are irrelevant. If we don’t fix this complete capture of election infrastructure, it might be impossible for anyone with a sincere desire to prioritize the interests of voters over the ruling class to win a national election.
Case in point: To the surprise of many, Republicans’ electoral expectations fizzled in the 2022 midterms. With runaway inflation, Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan, and a long line of electoral precedents, Republicans should have had an historic victory. Instead, Democrats gained in the Senate despite a very favorable map for Republicans, and the GOP captured only the narrowest of margins in the House.
Despite this disappointing outcome, Republicans still won the popular vote in the midterm election by a healthy 3% margin. That should have translated into much bigger electoral gains. Instead, there was “Republican robustness in the wrong places,” in the words of New York Times election guru Nate Cohn. The conventional wisdom has been that the GOP was punished for running bad candidates in key elections. Perhaps there is something to this, but GOP candidate quality doesn’t explain everything when you consider that the new Democratic senator from Pennsylvania is literally brain damaged, and the recently elected Democratic governor of Arizona was a scandal-plagued lightweight who refused to debate, and her signature gubernatorial accomplishment has been going to war against selling tamales in a state that’s 32% Hispanic.
The more likely explanation for these results is that Democratic ballot harvesting operations have reached such heights of sophistication that they can parachute into decisive battlegrounds and scare up enough votes among ignorant and unmotivated citizens to overcome the natural enthusiasm of informed and self-motivated voters.