Posted on 11/15/2018 5:35:02 AM PST by Kaslin
The good thing about screwing up is that you can learn from your mistakes and do better next time. That, of course, assumes you are not a Republican Party official, because the GOP Establishment seems largely incapable of learning from its mistakes.
We should try again anyway.
We won some races, but we lost a lot more. Losing has one advantage over winning – pain is a better teacher than joy. After all, winning generally teaches you the wrong lessons. It makes you complacent. Look at Texas. The governor did worse than expected; Ted Cruz had a close call, and down ballot the Texas GOP got thrashed. In Texas. With a great economy. Because the Texas GOP got soft from too much winning.
Look, there are sometimes reasons for poor performance that are beyond our control. Tex Kennedy poured $70 million into the race, and the Democrat transcriptionist media nearly flooded Houston all over again slobbering all over that skateboarding goof. It’s no surprise that these factors had an effect – I don’t blame Ted Cruz, but I do blame the guys who were supposed to be keeping the Lone Star State red. The Dems went out and mobilized people who had not been mobilized before. The GOP should have done the same with its own people long ago – it should have had its grassroots wired. But it didn’t, because for a couple decades it didn’t need to. Well, it needs to.
Lesson One: Never get into the mindset that you can’t lose. Always play like you’re 10 points back, which is what saved Ted Cruz.
Let’s look at Arizona. If resumes were competing, Martha McSally, A-10 pilot, would have crushed Pinko Barbie. But resumes don’t run for office; people do. My AZ pal Jon Gabriel has a deep dive post-mortem, but there are some key lessons we have to draw from this ~1 point debacle. McSally is an admirable person who decided to run on “I’m impressive and not one of those conservative kooks” instead of on “Here are the things I stand for that I will get done.” Now, Sinema also ran a campaign based on personality – “I’m nice and oh so moderate.” So why would the average person pick McSally over Sinema if the only difference was “Impressive” versus “Nice?” What was McSally for?
Not being either Sinema or a conservative?
Hardly inspiring. Here’s an alternative idea. How about you embody the conservative values the GOP base wants? How about you not channel Jeff “18% Approval” Flake by launching Operation Desert Sasse and imitating the gutless weenie vibe of the same dork who you were seeking to replace because the GOP base fired him for not being conservative enough?
Trump endorsed her, but like he had a choice. It kind of shows the mindset that led to this fiasco – Well, these conservative dummies will be dazzled by Trump’s thumbs-up of necessity, so we don’t need to pay attention to them. Wrong! McSally had a bloody primary against Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio – say what you want, but they stood for something, and it was something the GOP voters liked. But did McSally go on stage with the defeated primary candidates to show unity? Not that I know of. I do know she skipped out on conservative events and cancelled appearing on the Mark Levin Show. That is certifiably insane.
She ran away from being conservative, and – surprise! – when she looked back the conservatives were not behind her when she needed them. As my new book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy explains, we’re tired of being disrespected by GOP candidates who seem to find their own voters slightly icky. That 2% edge McSally needed to win was right there for the taking among the Ward and Arpaio fans, but she shunned them. She didn’t want to scare the neurotic suburban mommy demo that these squishes always seem to chase and never quite catch. Falling into that trap was the insight of the out-of-state consultants McSally hired and listened to – diss the people who would vote for you in order to suck up to people who would never vote for you. But those conservatives voted for Governor Ducey, and in droves.
Lesson Two: Be for something – specifically, conservatism. Nail down the base by not buying into the Fredocon notion that true conservatives should be ashamed of being conservative.
Florida is always close and crazy, being full of Floridians, but we need to understand that the “Why looky here, a whole bunch of new votes” thing is the wave of the future. Today, every blue enclave is Chicago, and if it’s close they will cheat. It’s going to happen. They are already planning on it. Remember, election theft is a part of the Democrat campaign plan just as much as ads about Republicans murdering grandmas; it’s neither an aberration nor a rarity, but a deliberate strategy that has worked in the past. The people who will steal our elections are not Russians; they are the nitwits who are babbling about Russians stealing our elections.
Lesson Three: We need to be ready. We need lawyers prepositioned and poised to fight wherever we expect the corruption to happen. And we need to win races outside the margin of fraud.
We got slammed below the fold. We lost 300+ stage legislature seats on November 6th. Remember how smug we were about winning 1000+ seats during the Obama years? Change is inevitable, and in a split nation we have to lose some seats sometime, but 300+? Do we have a coherent plan for recovering them? The state government seats are our farm team of future talent and they will have a huge effect on redistricting after the next census. A seat in the Idaho House of People Who Live In Idaho is not as glamorous a US Senate race, but it’s important.
Lesson Four: We need to get back in the fight down ballot. Who is the GOP leader in charge of that nationwide? If the answer is “Shrug,” that’s the wrong answer.
Finally, we need good candidates. They are out there. The search for our stars in 2020 started November 7, or at least it better have. We need a solid candidate on every ballot. Again, who is the GOP official in charge of recruiting? What is his/her/xir name?
And we need to be picky in our primaries. You know the guy who lost to Flattop Jerk in Montana? Turns out he had some baggage those of us out here in the rest of America did not know about. Montanans voted for Trump by pretty big margins; they didn’t turn into SJWs in the last two years. But they felt that liberal creep Jon Tester represented them better than the GOP candidate – why? What were their concerns that our party ignored, that our GOP voters ignored in the primary? Let’s vet our candidates better – not just the party functionaries but those of us who vote in the primaries need to be much more careful.
Lesson Five: Candidate quality matters. No more losers.
Losing sucks. But you know what sucks worse? Losing twice in a row. So we Normals need to get militant and demand that our GOP Establishment try something new – like learning from its mistakes.
Stop the other side from stuffing the ballot box.
We’ve lost over a dozen House seats and likely two senators because of this, and the Obama-appointed judges aren’t going to do anything about it.
Do you think another issue is Trump himself especially when he goes off message?
I think he is getting better at it but do you think some of his reactions actually turn off a lot of voters? For example calling someone “horseface” (while popular in this db and giving me a good laugh) would turn off a lot of suburban voters.
A good example of Trump getting better at this is with Alex Baldwin. Trump could have really let him have it after the arrest but he took the high road and wished him luck. I think that scored him points and he let Alex sink himself.
I know it’s really tough but it seems to me the more he sticks to his policies the more popular he is becoming.
Believe one thing that the retirements did was get rid of a fair bit of anti Trump dead wood. I suspect many of them were acting a lot like Dems anyway to begin with.
One mistake only. Stop electing RINOs.
Purging the voter rolls and re-registering every voter. With two forms of picture Id for the registration and one form of ID to vote.
Using voting methods that are unable to be tampered with.
Voting only in one 24 hour period.
No voting by proxy for disabled people or anyone who cannot vote.
No felon voting
These will need to go in place now.
Really, a couple of these boil down to what I’ve said for a week now:
MESSAGING AND MARKETING
We need candidates who are sincere about themselves. I’m convinced John Tester and Joe Manchin survive because, regardless of their policies, they connect with their constituents. I’m guessing they perform all sorts of LOCAL favors, know half their voters by name, visit cattle ranches and coal mines, and schmooze endlessly either “caring” about people or APPEARING to care (as Bill Clinton used to).
Cruz survived only on his conservatism in a conservative state, but he is not likeable, does not connect with people, and is a total policy wonk. Abbott? He ran 10 points better because he is real. He is genuine. Pretty much the same for Ducey vs. McSally.
I’ve had lots of conversations with people who couldn’t tell you WHO McSally was. I don’t mean a resume. I mean, who she really was. “Old Joe, yeah, I know him. DOn’t agree with his policies, but I know him.” (Even when they don’t).
The GOP got into a box-checking game. John James (black military guy), Lea Marquez Peterson (Hispanic businessowman), McSally, Mia Love (Who may survive but is total cardboard).
I’m told-—just hearsay from a Michigan Tea Party activist-—that James was 100% scripted, rehearsed, canned. That one on one he treated you like you were only valuable if it advanced his campaign. Could be sour grapes, I don’t know. But we cannot afford any more canned, scripted GOP campaigns.
They must be sincere, authentic. People are not buying policies or issues nearly as much as they are buying people. Whatever you say about that goofball Cortez, she lets it hang out. She is who she is-—a crazy Marxist who is ignorant.
Many of our “box checkers” were beaten by white women, including McSally, Marquez Peterson, James. Exit polls show we are doing BETTER with blacks and Hispanics in many races, and own the immigration issue. But this becomes a messaging problem and I’ve discussed that before.
Get back to GOD!
...or these chastisements will continue to get worse!
1) Run ads online!
Every time I watched a YouTube video I got an ad for Gretchen Whitless here in Michigan.
Over and over and over! I didnt see one ad from the GOP.
I dont have regular TV, because I’m not 65. So what did they think people in their 20s were looking at?
2) There should never be a race where there is no candidate.
3) Fund the Green Party and the Progressive party candidate.
4) Ballot proposals need to be keyed up to encourage our side to the polls.
All she can do is claim that she was the token first woman pilot. That fact doesn't create jobs or stop illegals from entering the country. She has no substance.
I hope she gives up politics.
Trump can help (or hurt), but I'd say the vast majority of the races the GOP lost in 2018 were lost on merit at the local level.
The 2018 shift was mainly in suburban areas -- and quite frankly, it's important to recognize that Trump's MAGA agenda is a solution to problems that most of these voters don't have. I used to have at least four "Big Three" auto manufacturing plants within 40 miles of the suburban town where I live. There is absolutely NO political pressure to bring those jobs back here. Heck -- you'd be hard-pressed to find any local residents who even remember where they were located.
The GOP got into a box-checking game. John James (black military guy)
He was not a “box check”, dude.
He just didnt have the budget to run ads 24/7.
This advice is useless because the elections were fraudulent and nobody is doing anything about it. Unless the GOP is going to stuff ballot boxes too they’re going to continue to be graceful losers until the demographics shift too far and it becomes irrelevant.
Kevin McCarthy has a lifetime conservative rating of "F"; he has voted liberal 2/3 of the time. In fact McCarthy's rating is even lower than Jeff Flake's whose lifetime rating is a "D". Jim Jordan has a lifetime conservative rating of "A". Who did the Republicans in the House vote for their leader? McCarthy. Sheesh.
How about getting a tough taskmaster to oversee the RNC. For the last two years we were saddled with Rona Romney, Romney’s niece,who did a lousy job. No matter what the pubbie pundits say, we took a bad hit in the house. To add to the incompetence we have been unable to deal with the RATS fraudulent voting, to which we should have been prepared.
First article from Schlicter I’ve seen that was actually useful and constructive.
The GOP held 247 House seats in 2014. That was their largest House majority since the 1940s -- and yes, that includes the historic 1994 "Gingrich revolution" sweep.
Almost every immigrant group in this country turns progressively more CONSERVATIVE with each succeeding generation. This is the lesson for Republicans to learn. They already did, in fact. That's why you had George W. Bush running around speaking Spanish on the campaign trail.
Let alone the less obvious voter fraud.
But we had some random letter of the alphabet who told us not to worry up front, in advance of the election, and has implied since that we should just sit tight while it is all somehow under control.
No they don’t this is a flat out lie used to promote endless immigration. Hispanics aren’t “natural conservatives”. They continue to vote for freebies and Democrats. In fact I’ve seen so called rock-ribbed conservative Hispanic communities like Cubans drift to the Democrats as the Cuban exiles grandchildren turn into leftists once they hit college and don’t care about Castro anymore.
If Hispanics were “natural conservatives” the border would have been sealed off by the Democrats decades ago. The Republicans electoral success recently is only because elderly baby Boomers saved the GOP’s bacon and they will be dying off soon. Which is why the media encourages elderly Boomers to “hurry up and die already”.
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