In November 2010, Republicans gave Democrats a “shellacking,” regaining control of the House of Representatives. In 2014, they held the House and captured the Senate, swept a majority of governorships. Overall, the GOP gained more state legislative offices that they had held since the 1920s.
In the face of this, President Obama made it clear that he was not about to move to the right in any fashion.
“Everybody in this White House is going to look and say, ‘All right, what do we need to do -differently?’?” Obama said. “But the principles that we’re fighting for — the things that motivate me every single day and motivate my staff every day — those things aren’t going to change.”
As Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty observed, “he did not speak of trying to find middle ground on areas of fundamental disagreement.”
Fast forward to November 5, when Democrats flipped both houses in the Virginia legislature, the boards of supervisors in previously Republican-controlled Prince William and Loudoun counties, elected several Democrat Commonwealth’s attorneys and swept the school boards in Loudoun and Fairfax.
Leftist media writers, such as Ms. Tumulty, insist that Republicans need to look and sound more like Democrats if they know what’s good for them.
That means the GOP should do the exact opposite, since the people advising them in this fashion are working feverishly toward a Democratic trifecta in 2020’s national election.
“Republicans would do well to consider it a reminder that when the tide is rising, it’s a good idea to quit swimming against it,” Ms. Tumulty advised in a Thursday column. Better to sink and drown by abandoning their base.
Likewise, a Post editorial told Republicans to “reverse course and tack to the center.” Which, again, means looking and sounding more like Democrats, who have essentially embraced Marxism.
If the GOP wants to win in 2020, the party needs to boldly champion its values and strengths, such as a roaring economy and a measure of sanity.
It did not help that the Democrats were uncontested in 10 of 40 Senate races and in 22 of 100 House races. Democrat Senate candidates outpolled Republicans by 1.2 million to 892,000, and Democrat House candidates in Virginia drew 1.1 million voters against 985,000 for Republicans.
That’s not a huge gulf, but obviously, the GOP needs much better organizing and a massive outreach, especially to minorities, not a token effort.
Victor Davis Hanson, a prolific historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, explained in a recent Washington Times column that many people now embrace socialism despite unarguable evidence that socialism brings only misery.
That’s because “massive immigration is changing the demography of the United States,” he says. “Many of these immigrants flee from poor areas of Latin America, Mexico, Africa and Asia that were wrecked by statism and socialism….many assume that America will simply offer a far better version of the statism from which they fled.”
That makes them easy prey for Marxist demagogues to enlist them in the Democrats’ Free Stuff Army.
Many minority citizens share important values with Republicans but vote Democrat because of their perception that Republicans are haters and bigots, the relentless message fostered by leftwing media and schools controlled by leftwing teachers unions.
Conservatives also have to pony up more. Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety group outspent the National Rifle Association in Virginia by 8 to 1. Leftist billionaire George Soros spent at least $2.1 million on Commonwealth’s Attorneys races, winning most of them. The New Virginia Majority, controlled by the communist-led Freedom Road Socialist Organization, mobilized volunteers to register hundreds of thousands of new voters, according to investigative journalist Trevor Loudoun.
Northern Virginia, the most populous area, swung the election. A spillover of Washington, D.C., NOVA is fat and happy from federal largesse. Counties around D.C. in Maryland and Virginia rank in the top 10 for income, with Loudoun first in per capita wealth.
Democrats promise to exact higher taxes from the rest of the nation and keep power and money flowing to the D.C. area. Given these dynamics, it’s amazing that it’s only been fairly recently that Fairfax and then Loudoun and Prince William counties flipped from Republican to Democrat.
Meanwhile, Republicans won easily in Mississippi, and despite a narrow loss of the statehouse in Kentucky, the GOP won all of the other statewide offices in the Bluegrass State. The new attorney general is Daniel Cameron, who is black and the first Republican to win that office in 70 years. The GOP also picked up seats in New Jersey and defeated a sanctuary city measure in Tucson, Arizona with 71.4 percent of the vote. They lost seats in three Philadelphia suburban city councils.
There’s no doubt that many suburban voters, especially women, voted Democrat to protest President Trump. The real test will come next November. Mr. Trump is likely to face a candidate so far left that it will scare the socks off some of those who cast a “message” vote this time around.
As for Virginia, much of the state apart from NOVA and a couple other urban areas remains Republican. They might soon get some help making their case.
Giddy with power and aided by a governor whose support for abortion includes infanticide, Virginia Democrats may lurch so far left that voters might actually think twice before giving that party even more power in the Old Dominion – and nationally.
Unless, of course, Republicans foolishly join the chorus singing the siren song of socialism.
Robert Knight is a Townhall contributor.