Post Mortem: The Mechanics Of Winning And Losing

Underappreciated structural factors and predictable messaging failures explain GOP underperformance.

Why did the GOP embarrassingly underperform on Tuesday? It’s the key question, but most analysis is too compromised by conflicts of interest to be meaningful.

For their part, the establishment GOP apparatus did exactly what they always do: squander transformative disruptive energy through a combination of complacency and incompetence. Accept this, and future strategy can be developed around accurate expectations.

Plainly, the party has not contended with structural factors that make it an unfathomably hostile environment for anyone who gives the right-leaning half of our country a voice. Nearly all theories of Tuesday’ disappointments are unconvincing case studies in projection and delusion, with the funniest advanced by business-as-usual extraction class types unjustly blaming President Trump for their own failures. (And so soon after he single-handedly revived their own party from life support, endured their profound betrayals for years, and, as the lone voice on key issues, formed an energized, victorious voter coalition to steer the country’s trajectory away from certain death by globalization. The thanks you get!) Other tepid explanations range from “candidate quality” to insufficient embrace of Marxism, but these quickly become marginal when you accept that ballot harvesting operations don’t discriminate on policy or personality.

What the country needs now is vision. But we must study the past to make some notes for next time.

Structural Factors

#1 The Democrats’ massively fortified, unscrupulous vote-by-mail and ballot collection operations have gone entirely unanswered by the GOP. This is obviously the most important factor in elections going forward. Here is a very good thread on “votes” versus “ballots.” Here is another one. It should concern the public that “ballot collection” has supplanted any recognizable form of campaign strategy for the Democratic party. Allow me to remind readers of a case study that exposed how jealously they guard this powerful advantage.

The contest was for the Congressional seat representing the 9th District of North Carolina. The year was 2018. Republican candidate Mark Harris appeared to have won by 905 votes. Then, the state board of elections shocked the country by refusing to certify the result. Politico wrote that a Democrat on the board, Josh Malcolm of a county near Harris’s district, piped up during the certification meeting:

“I’m very familiar with unfortunate activities that have been happening down in my part of the state,” Malcolm said. “And I am not going to turn a blind eye to what took place …”

Hours later, five Democrats and four Republicans returned from a closed session and voted unanimously to certify the election results throughout the state with a fairly big exception: the 9th District.

Familiar with “unfortunate activities” in this region that may have tainted a close Republican win, but unanimously confident in the miraculous integrity of the rest of the state, they had Harris investigated in a disproportionately vigorous show trial for the world’s most pathetic ballot harvesting operation, conducted by a well-known local operative who by all accounts had been manipulating elections in this exact same manner through illegal absentee ballot operations at scale and for hire by both parties in this region for a decade and a half. Per the New York Times, this operative would pay destitute associates “$3 for every collected absentee ballot request and $2.50 for each collected absentee ballot” in this rural North Carolina district where the median income was $36,000.

In a dramatic and rare let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you move, the state board overturned the election and ordered a new one. The media delighted in humiliating Harris and in drawing special attention to the fact that here was a Republican, caught in a ballot harvesting scandal, after North Carolina Republicans had long warned of rank voter fraud. But read the backstory to get a flavor for what was going down for many years.

From the New York Times (emphasis mine):

By Mr. Harris’s own account on the stand Thursday, it was his narrow defeat in the 2016 race that set a course toward the board’s decision. By March 2017, according to a text message turned over to investigators only on Wednesday, Mr. Harris was communicating with a political ally in Bladen County, a rural part of the district, about “the guy whose absentee ballot project for Johnson could have put me in the US House this term, had I known, and he had been helping us.”

“Johnson” was Todd Johnson, one of Mr. Harris’s rivals in the 2016 race, and “the guy” was Mr. Dowless, a Bladen County operative with a felony record and a reputation for shadowy work for Democratic and Republican politicians. Mr. Dowless and Mr. Harris met in a furniture showroom about a month later.

“How did you beat us so bad?” Mr. Harris said he had asked Mr. Dowless about the 2016 race. Mr. Dowless then explained a two-phase effort that concentrated on absentee ballots.

In the first phase, Mr. Harris testified, Mr. Dowless and his associates would help voters submit requests for absentee ballots — an ordinary and legal political activity in North Carolina. In the second, workers would ensure that voters had received the ballots and would inquire whether they needed assistance. But under no circumstances, Mr. Harris was assured, were the workers to collect the ballots.

Two weeks after the meeting, Mr. Harris pulled out his personal checkbook and paid a $450 retainer. The next month, before Mr. Harris entered the congressional race, he paid Mr. Dowless another $2,890.

Mr. Dowless and his associates, who were often his acquaintances or relatives with little interest in politics but hoping for fast cash, went to work. Mr. Dowless, who refused to testify before the board, has not been charged with any crimes in connection with the 2018 election, nor have any of his workers. Prosecutors are examining the operation, though, and are considering whether to bring any criminal charges.

[…]

But over the years, Democrats and Republicans alike in North Carolina courted Mr. Dowless, who, over almost 15 years, went from being a registered Democrat to unaffiliated to Democrat to unaffiliated to Republican. They fraternized with him, and hired him to work his magic in service of boosting their vote tallies. They did so even though local news reports going back to at least 2010 noted his criminal record, which included felony convictions for perjury and fraud.

And they did so despite longstanding rumors that his get-out-the-vote tactics were unsavory at the least, and perhaps illegal.

“I only knew of him that he was crooked, as far as elections are concerned, and he had a way of doing it, and avoided prosecution and that kind of thing,” said Ben Snyder, the chairman of the Bladen County Democratic Party, who said he did not meet Mr. Dowless in person until 2016.

In a weirdly sympathetic profile, the New York Times feigns ignorance that Mr. Dowless, known as the “guru of elections” in the area (!), was using a common electioneering tactic that melds questionable but legal “voting help” with outright illegal ballot harvesting and fixing for years, and they sweetly describe his well-protected felonious ballot harvesting operation as “a do-it-all vote facilitating business that was part of the community fabric.” They go on to downplay the implied ubiquitousness of these methods, despite admitting: “While cash-driven voter turnout efforts are a cottage industry in campaign seasons, Mr. Dowless’s operation appeared to run like a family business that crossed lines laid out in election law.” If the country’s biggest newspaper is comfortable describing this activity so cavalierly as a “cottage industry” that’s “part of the community fabric,” why was THIS particular ballot harvesting situation pursued with such vigor, turned into a national spectacle, and punished by the state board of elections through the rare step of ordering *an entirely new election,* despite the board members’ apparent longstanding knowledge that elections in the region were tainted by this particular operative and this particular election subversion method for years? Because they protect their structural advantage by cracking down hard and fast on Republican efforts to play the game by the Democrats’ rules.

Obviously, nobody should be doing this. I am completely anti-ballot harvesting and, frankly, our elections have been corrupted beyond public trust by mail ballots. The point is, this North Carolina operative was so well-known for helping politicians weaponize absentee ballots to cheat he was called the “guru of elections.” The Democrat on the state board of elections obviously KNEW he was doing this, but only piped up to question election results when a Republican candidate wised up to how the game was being played. Multiply this brazen manipulation across all of the nation’s districts and counties, and you can only guess how much of this activity is tolerated at scale by compromised public officials and ignored or euphemized by the media.

#2 Beyond tactical ballot electioneering, another structural factor is questionable election administration in key states (documented in PA and AZ this year, GA and others in 2020) disenfranchising voters. And these are merely the known issues. Are we truly asked to believe on blind faith that operatives would run elections properly because they are motivated by altruism? How many unknown Rick Barrons are running elections improperly in how many Fulton Counties across the nation? What political machine infrastructure was built up over nearly 40 years during which a judge banned Republicans from observing polling activity?

#3 Further, the GOP lets partisan GOTV operations to go unmatched. Harry Styles (a foreign interloper from England who is not a citizen, cannot vote, and endorsed Joe Biden in 2020) bribed 54,000 people to register to vote with entry into a contest:

“Individuals could visit the website to check their voter registration and sign up to vote – or find out how to register to vote, in some states – to enter a competition that gave one lucky winner two concert tickets, airfare, a hotel stay and merchandise to the musician’s much-hyped Halloween show, dubbed “Harryween,” on Oct. 31.”

In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg paid for enormous voting ops in such blatant and unethical electioneering that state legislatures reacted with new laws against it as soon as it was known what effect this was having. Again, our preference is obviously for none of this activity to be necessary, but contending with reality as it is, what would it look like if Republicans responded in kind to Zuckerbucks? Do they lack creativity? Or is it risk aversion and fear of being sued? Have they been intimidated out of upping the ante because of the Democrats’ disproportionate backlash, e.g. the peacocking in NC-09? Clearly this mechanism of “charitable” funding to influence elections is regarded as an important advantage to the Democrats because prominent anti-voter reporter Tim Alberta made the appalling insinuation that voters don’t deserve competent elections unless they accept “private funding,” obviously referring to Zuckerberg-style infusions of weaponized activist cash. And what is the GOP plan for Biden’s explicitly announced (via Executive Order!) repurposing of government agencies into GOTV efforts? Why won’t the administration release information on how this money and power is being used, even after ordered by a court?

#4 If the GOP apparatus does not want to appear as though it is run by completely corrupted zeroes, they ought to stop working overtime to convey the impression. It’s unbelievably costly that our party’s giant institutions cannot be counted on to make smart decisions. They are staffed by RINOs who regard our party’s voters with contempt—people who cried when President Trump won in 2016. They are confused on policy, preoccupied with nonsense, and deficient in the spiritual fortitude needed to defeat the opposition’s hostile narratives. This is how we ended up with messaging in 2020, as BLM riots burned cities to the ground, accusing Joe Biden of being too tough on crime 30 years ago. Central command is plainly awash with defective judgment. As such, do not put it past establishment Republicans to prefer losing over winning with candidates they cannot control. Much of the post-mortem coming from this camp is motivated by guilt over their incompetence, shame over their desperation for their enemies’ approval, and cognitive dissonance over their ignoble aspirations for power with no responsibility.

#5 Another way the GOP has permitted great disadvantage is failure to match the Democrats’ enormous creativity on election laws that advantage their voting blocs. The opportunity cost is catastrophic. Democrats weaponize policy explicitly designed to bolster their election performance ten times before breakfast. They are literally making laws in some municipalities so illegal immigrants can vote. They’re brazen about it. Meanwhile, Republicans do not respond in kind. They compete to see who can earn the most praise for passing the voting laws that help Democrats. That the party has not developed a compelling way to contradict this is a relevant structural factor that nobody is allowed to talk about. They have to get over the fear of being smeared by the media for protecting the franchise, or we will not win elections. We are in a position where we must respond in kind, because there has been so much one-sided escalation for so long. To understand the mindset that pervades figures responsible for protecting our party’s viability over the years, former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, by all indications a controlled opposition figure, actually discouraged Republicans from being involved in poll watching and other important election integrity efforts once the consent decree I referenced earlier was lifted, because he said it would be bad optics. It is impossible to overstate how damaging this loser mindset is. In Politico:

“Now, with the order’s demise appearing imminent, the question is turning to what the RNC will do with its newfound freedom.

Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele said he believes the party deserves to be out from under the court order, but he worries that lifting the decree will call attention to ongoing efforts by some Republicans to put more restrictions on voting.

“I think from the party’s ongoing perspective, it will be a burden lifted off of them,” Steele said. “There’s good reason the party should be out from under it. … The party is still left with an optics problem.”

It’s not clear how years of malpractice at the very top of legacy GOP leadership eroding structural viability could be overcome by tweaking “candidate quality.”

#6 Hurting us further, the GOP does not organize effectively, and when their voters do, the extractive class of establishment Republicans works against them to neutralize it. I cover this in depth in these podcast episodes: Our Democracy, The Media Playbook Against Populism.

Fetch the National Review their smelling salts because they won’t like what I have to say. To perform better in elections, we need well-organized Tea Party style grassroots mobilization against SPECIFIC policies and people, and FOR specific policies and people. This is something the Democrats did very effectively in 2018 (remember “kids in cages?”) This is a leadership problem. Even when we have a tremendously energized base, there is very little energy matching it at the top. Ours is an inversion of the Democrats’ battle formation. They have lots of coordinated energy and brainpower on top, and very little going on at the bottom. Lack of enthusiasm is their Achilles heel, and can be a real liability (as seen in Virginia’s governor race last year), but in well-oiled machine states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, they make up for it with brute force. The GOP has become expert at squandering authentic popular energy, while the left is in the inverted position of resorting to race war propaganda in an effort to drive public sentiment from the top-down. The left is so good at top-down organizing they ran an experiment telling voters to “Save the US Postal Service” to see if they could excite movement populism out of simping for government bureaucracies. The answer was yes, although happily constrained to a limited audience of a market they’ve already saturated: middle-aged women who spend too much time on the internet.

#7 We don’t have an intelligent strategy for forming and keeping voting coalitions. There is little creativity or scientific precision about how to confidently hold our coalitions together. The Democrats work tirelessly on forming coalitions and keeping voting blocs together, largely through public policy that rewards them with Republican voters’ money. Republicans have been intimidated out of responding in kind, or they waste their opportunities to secure patronage windfalls for their voters by rewarding special interests first. It’s a bad strategy, because corporations can’t vote. This type of failed public policy strategy is essential to correct. When voters can’t count on you, perhaps you shouldn’t count on them.

#8 The energy of the party’s top figures simply does not match the energy of our voters and potential voters. Recall when Twitter bought Vine and buried it alive, leaving its highly creative, emotionally invested devotees with nothing. Running a movement with a giant enthusiastic audience into the ground is malpractice. And that’s what the Republican establishment did with the precious gift they were given to build upon after the Trump Wave in 2016, the backlash to the year of horrors in 2020, and the public’s discontent with the Biden decline. They wanted to coast to victory, promise nothing, and clearly wanted a return to business as usual. Observe how pundit Ben Shapiro was talking on election day.

What did he mean by this? He was advocating for a return of the loser mindset. Now, the establishment coalesces around pointing fingers when it’s clear the GOP apparatus has no clue how to win elections even in the most favorable environments.

Messaging problems are also significant.

1. No positive vision, meaningless prescriptions. They bore witness to the transformative power of “Make America Great Again” then ran a midterm cycle on platitudes. I will not be explaining this further.

2. Little contrast to the failed ruling party. Enormous lost opportunities to differentiate from Biden’s failures on Ukraine, his corrupt infrastructure bill, his pro-pedophile Supreme Court Justice, his anti-citizen cabinet appointees. They were signaling a return to a pro-China trade policy, for crying out loud. Who was supposed to be motivated by all of this?

3. Lack of strategy for channeling the power of public opinion. Democrats see it as a weapon and Republicans always take the backseat, doing very little to make sure that the public sees things their way. They back their positions out from top-issue polls, rather than tapping into any sort of psycho-emotional framework or zeitgeist. Who was writing the GOP talking points? Where was the flood the zone propaganda? Repeating the words “crime,” “inflation,” and “Joe Biden” is not a propaganda strategy. The Democrats would NEVER treat public opinion in this manner. Democrats, at times to their disadvantage, spend a huge amount of resources on highly targeted polling and focus groups to refine their propaganda—with an eye toward OWNING public opinion and MOTIVATING voters. Republicans use polling and focus groups to figure out the least interesting, most noncommittal things they can say while still appearing to address issues of public concern.

4. Swamp consultants encourage complacency and advise GOP politicians not to make any policy commitments to voters. This is to keep the agenda clear for lobbyists to swoop in and write the laws. It’s very costly.

5. No real promises were made regarding the use of power to reverse the decline and alleviate the misery. You can get somewhere by merely turning up as the alternative for people seeking a reprieve, but it clearly is not enough of a strategy. Were people supposed to make a vote of confidence on the IMPLICATION that Republicans would do something different? I wrote an essay warning of this in March: No Country For Bold Men.

6. The GOP obsession with outflanking the left on identity politics with candidate recruitment looks weak and has dubious results.

7. Tuesday’s performance is the culmination of a LONG credibility problem. Biden and his one-party rule in Washington are historically unpopular, yet the GOP behaved as a nebulous mess of special interests, not champions of our country and its people. Our voters are deeply motivated to improve their country, but the party is incredibly defective at channeling this. Displacing their failures on the only party leader who successfully re-oriented the country’s trajectory around a positive vision of the future and who built a winning coalition signals they do not appreciate or understand what it takes to win.

These issues must all be addressed for Republicans to perform adequately in elections. Lack of focus on organizing voter energy and dissatisfaction into results and lack of attention to structural disadvantages are not things the party can blame on any one man nor the electorate they routinely disappoint yet depend on to win.

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