This stupid “bipartisan” legislation, which fulfills Democrat priorities at the literal expense of the Republican base, is why. Conservatives have zero faith, and zero reason for faith, in Republicans in Washington. Their performance has been utterly indefensible, and as a result nobody thinks they’re ever going to be anything but the Stupid Party. – The Spectator, December 2022
Having looked at the methods used by the Democrats to cheat in US elections over the course of more than a century (see below 1 ), it’s interesting to see how the GOP successfully dealt with that in 2024.
But before that success came failure, lots of failure, and not just in the 2020 election and not just in terms of failing to beat the cheat but even in basic GOTV (Get Out The Vote) and electioneering in general, as the Democrats in the Mid-Term election of 2022 turned what was supposed to be a Red Tsunami into a Red Trickle, with the GOP barely capturing the House and actually going backwards in the Senate when they seemingly had everything going for them in terms of issues, plus a Democrat President who was very unpopular – and despite winning the popular vote by 3%.
An article that looked at how the GOP lost a perfectly winnable Senate seat in Georgia – it is not a swing state. Republicans overwhelmingly swept all other down-ballot races – listed the three simple reasons why the Democrats won:
- Ballot Harvesting.
Going door-to-door soliciting mail-in ballots from voters. The rules as to who can do this vary between states. Covered here in a 2022 post. The Democrats started this in California in the mid 2010’s and expanded it in 2020 to crucial swing states. Democrats in key battleground states know that collecting ballots is more important than collecting votes (i.e., generating Election Day turnout), and so they calculate how many ballots they need to secure a victory, and aim singlehandedly at that. - Smart Spending.
The GOP focused on election turnout generated via campaign mailers and TV adverts – the old model. A Democrat firm paid 1,455 Georgians $200 each to contact between 40-50 family members and friends urging them to vote for Senator Warnock. Research shows that voters are more likely to respond to appeals to vote from people they know. - Litigating Election Law
Democrat mega-lawyer Marc Elias, the Georgia Democratic Party, and the Warnock campaign filed a lawsuit back in November against the Peach State to prevent it from banning early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving — despite a state law explicitly prohibiting it. A Georgia appeals court bought their argument. The Georgia lawsuit is just one example of multiple efforts by Democrats nationwide to manipulate election law in their favor or sue until they get what they want.
But before getting to solving these practical problems from 2020 and 2022 – and there were plenty of others, which I’ll cover in Part II – there were internal GOP problems that had to be resolved, starting with leadership:
….namely House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell…. GOP leadership lit money on fire in the primaries to prevent America First candidates from making it to the general….A report from the Washington Post in late September outlined exactly how McCarthy’s inner circle went about trying to damage Republican primary candidates who wanted to change how Republicans work on Capitol Hill and called for new blood to fill leadership positions that would better fit the GOP’s MAGA base
…
The network of organizations that received money in order to impose McCarthy’s will on the GOP primaries was vast and had a number of go-betweens.
Specific examples are given in that 2022 article. One was where the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), run by McCarthy ally Dan Conston, dumped money into supporting a pro-Trump-impeachment Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in Washington state against Joe Kent, an ex-Army Special Forces guys running on foreign policy restraint, championing working class Americans – and rooting out “the corporate GOP”. He won the primary anyway but the fight meant he didn’t have enough money to combat the Democrat’s three-to-one spending advantage in the general election.
The same shit happened to pro-Trump candidates in Florida, California, North Carolina and Arizona, with McConnell and McCarthy groups spending millions to defeat them in primary campaigns. When it came to the General Election the same sort of decision-making problems popped up:
Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute echoed Anderson’s complaints in a phone interview with TAC. “He pulled money out of winnable races in Arizona, in New Hampshire,…. And this whole notion that he spent all this money to help J.D. Vance—yes, he spent money there. But he also wasted money in Alabama because he just doesn’t like Mo Brooks. And the amount of money he spent helping Lisa Murkowski fend off a challenger from the right—not against Democrats, against Republicans.”
That last one has probably been the blackest of black marks against McConnell. Murkowski had only got to the Senate thanks to Daddy becoming governor in 2002 and picking her – and she replaced him as the Senator!!! GOP voters grudgingly accepted this and voted for her in 2004 but by 2010 they’d had enough and booted her in the 2010 GOP primaries. Her response was to run a write-in campaign, pulling in Democrats who loved her squishiness, and she won. Her next stunt in 2022 was to get the voting system changed to ranked-choice voting, which also enabled Democrat voters to have more influence, and she won again.
Something to remember the next time the GOPe (Establishment) talks about supporting a candidate in the general election no matter what.
But there were others almost as bad, like Thom Tillis, who was not on the ballot in 2022 but undoubtedly hurt his own party with tin-eared proposals for putting millions of illegal immigrants on a pathway to citizenship, which he hashed out with Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The proposal was in the works before the election and would have permitted two million recipients of Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to get on the citizenship track, but also permitted them to then sponsor extended family members so that two million-figure could be closer to seven million:
Let’s start with the most obvious point of all: when your party, which was in an absolute minority (both House and Senate, plus the other side owns the White House), just took over one of the two houses of Congress in a midterm election, what you want is to pass zero legislation, period, in a lame-duck session.
Why? Because any bills left out there are going to be drafted and passed chiefly by the other side. And they will fill those bills with all kinds of awful things that victimize your voters and make life worse for your people.
…
Republican voters are beyond furious with the party’s Washington establishment, so much so that even the fundamentally transformative failure of the Biden regime wasn’t enough to generate the red wave. You had five million more people voting Republican than Democrat last month, and it didn’t even move the needle in Senate races (and moved it just enough in the House for a precarious majority). When there should have been a political sea change.
This stupid “bipartisan” legislation, which fulfills Democrat priorities at the literal expense of the Republican base, is why. Conservatives have zero faith, and zero reason for faith, in Republicans in Washington. Their performance has been utterly indefensible, and as a result nobody thinks they’re ever going to be anything but the Stupid Party.
It therefore came as no surprise that both McConnell and McCarthy faced growing opposition staright after the 2022 election, with McCarthy losing the House Leadership role in 2023 and McConnell pushed into retirement in early 2024.
But perhaps the worst leadership of all was at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC): one Ronna Romney McDaniel (yes, she was a niece of Mitt Romney, which is one hell of an omen of uselessness). She actually boasted in public about her success after the 2022 elections, “our ground game worked”, when it was actually the local GOP in New York and Florida that made the difference, with no help from her stupid spam emails. This just added to her failures in the 2018 and 2020 elections and the December 2022 delusions enraged many Republican workers. It didn’t matter to McDaniel, who made it clear in the New Year that she wasn’t going anywhere.
As a result of all this, at the start of 2024 I wasn’t confident that the GOP could actually turn it around. Others in America thought the same, as this article from early February, 2024 showed, The Republican Party Is Not Prepared for the 2024 Election:
The Republican National Committee (RNC), beyond issuing the usual fatuous press releases and reports about what they are going to do, has done nothing of substance on the ground to offset the Democrat’s determination to repeat their success of 2020.
In an effort to do what they can, individuals such as Scott Presler and his PAC have been on the ground in the various battleground states not only registering voters but instructing and recruiting volunteers to promote early voting, mail-in voting and to ballot harvest where legal.
However, instead of supporting and coordinating with Presler and various other get-out-the-vote organizations such as Turning Point USA, the RNC has deliberately ignored them and criticized their emphasis on direct contact with potential voters in their efforts to get-out-the-vote.
…
Ronna McDaniel and the RNC proudly announced to the world that the RNC has begun a “Bank Your Vote” initiative, which they touted as an all-out effort to offset the party’s mail-in ballot deficit. However, this inane initiative simply calls for voters to visit BankYourVote.com to confirm that they have mailed their ballot. It does nothing to recruit volunteers, work with independent groups, or encourage low frequency voters to vote.
…
The RNC is broke, and its finances are in shambles.
And then, at almost the same moment that article was published, a miracle happened.
On January 31, 2024, the RedState journalist, Jennifer Van Laar, published a detailed story about the fantastic amounts of money McDaniel had wasted and was continuing to waste in the RNC on:
- Management consultants: $83,000 per month in 2023 – the Democrats spent $114,000.
- Floral arrangements: $70,328 – the Dems spent $795.
- Limos: $263,127 – the Dems spent $7000.
By contrast the DNC spent twenty times as much as the RNC on GOTV texting and six times as much on voter file maintenance – stuff that would actually get votes on the board.
Trump saw the report, hit the roof, and after some squealing and crying McDaniel announced she was quitting a few days later, and Trump was free to nominate two people to the job of co-chair of the RNC: Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP who had fought hard against all the Democrat election stunts in 2020, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, a former senior advisor to him.
There was much snickering about Lara Trump and family ties but within days of being elected she showed she was a ruthlessly competent as she re-allocated funding, booted consultants (and presumably florists and limo drivers) and announced an aggressive strategy focused on three things: “Turn out the vote, protect the vote, and raise money“. She made it clear that these were not just words:
- The GOP would embrace ballot harvesting and throw huge resources at staffing and voter-outreach.
- She established an Election Integrity division and immediately began staffing it with thousands of poll watchers, trained poll workers, volunteer and paid lawyers based in the voting areas (so no more bullshit about election fraud cases being dismissed for “lack of standing”)
“Here’s what I want to say to anyone out there who is thinking about cheating in an election: we will go after you. You will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. It is not worth it.”
The change in attitude and tactics and the speed with which it happened was incredible, and it immediately lifted the moral of the RNC and the GOP in general. If they lost this time it would not be because of fecklessness or stupidity.
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No Minister 
There was still a ton of cheating in this last election. It didn’t affect Trump, because he got past the threshold in most instances, but he still could have won more states. There was probably four Senate seats that were lost due to the fix, and a whole bunch more House seats. The GOP needs to redouble their efforts in 2026.