Same Mistakes, Same (Losing) Results: An Autopsy of the 2023 Off-Year Elections
The short of the matter is the GOP needs to change its strategy ASAP if it wants to have any success in the future. Until then, I guess I’ll just be writing the same autopsy year after year.
A little over a year ago, I sat down and penned my own autopsy of the 2022 midterm elections for this website.
I suggested that Republicans should do the following (among other things) if they wanted to have any success in future elections:
Move on from former President Donald J. Trump and the “MAGA” movement.
Campaign primarily on economic/pocketbook issues — and not societal/cultural ones — to win back independent voters concerned about a nation teetering on the brink of recession.
So naturally, what happened 365 days later?
Well, for starters, Trump is so far ahead in the race for the GOP nomination for president that the only conceivable way for him not to win at this point would pretty much be if he is in jail come November 2024. (Granted, with 91 felony charges against him at the moment, it’s not an entirely foregone conclusion…)
Then, rather than focus on the economy and inflation — which polls as recently as September suggested were still the most important issue to voters nationwide — what do Republicans decide to stake their 2023 election hopes on?
Yes, Virginia (pun intended)! Republicans kept with the cultural/societal playbook, pushing for limits on abortion access rather than reminding voters why they are the party best equipped to keep the economy from collapsing any further.
Sadly, the outcomes were almost too predictable:
In Kentucky, a Democratic incumbent who won his 2019 race by a mere 5,000 votes won re-election over a Trump-backed Republican by 5 percentage points!
In Ohio, voters overwhelmingly passed a Constitutional amendment to protect a woman’s right to choose in the state.
Even in ruby-red Mississippi, the incumbent Republican governor barely won re-election, besting his Democratic challenger by just 4 points.
As for the Old Dominion state, let’s just say Gov. Glenn Youngkin — who was rumored to have been considering a last-minute presidential bid pending the outcome of Tuesday’s elections — won’t be throwing his hat into that race any time soon.
Democrats won ‘bigly’ on Tuesday — maintaining control of the state Senate while also flipping the state House in Richmond. This was a stunning rebuke to Youngkin, who spent the weeks prior to Tuesday’s elections traipsing the Commonwealth with his “Spirit of Virginia” bus tour and pouring nearly $20 million from his super PAC into GOP races statewide.
Virginia Democrats had a simple strategy for victory: They took Youngkin’s pledge during the bus tour to pursue a 15-week abortion ban if Republicans won control of both chambers, and spent $17 million dollars blasting television ads statewide to convince voters that voting for the GOP this fall would effectively ban abortions in the Commonwealth.
Republicans failed to properly address this counterattack, and as a result, Democrats turned out in droves on Election Day.
What hurts even more is that the Democrats’ success in turning out the vote against Youngkin and Republicans in Richmond also nullified any efforts that local GOP party units made this year to win back ground at the county-level, especially in the heavily-populated D.C. suburbs. A number of races once thought to be competitive in Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun Counties — including several key school board races — once again went for Democrats because of the influx of Democratic votes on Tuesday1.
As more time passes and additional information about Tuesday’s election is revealed, we’ll continue to learn more about what went wrong and what could have been.
One such tidbit came from RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who told WMAL radio host Larry O’Connor on Wednesday that Youngkin turned down an early offer of financial assistance from the committee to help with election efforts this cycle. (Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Rich Anderson later told O’Connor that he actually approached the RNC for financial assistance in October but was denied.)
The short of the matter is that regardless of who’s to blame, the GOP needs to change its strategy ASAP if it wants to have any success in the future. And that starts by going back to the basics: ‘Dumping the Trump’ and campaigning on the issues that persuadable voters care about, not just the base.
Until then, I guess I’ll just be writing the same autopsy year after year.
Full disclosure: PRC owner Katie LaPotin consulted on behalf of several GOP school board candidates and a GOP party unit in Northern Virginia during the 2023 cycle.