I have been through several tsunami elections.
The first job for the losing side is to stop and think. The instinct will be to run around and expend energy just to be doing something, but that is not the right strategy. Something big went wrong. Republicans must figure out what it was and how to fix it.
I am outlining this lesson from personal experience.
When I first ran in 1974, there was a tsunami building against the Republicans over the Watergate scandal (which forced President Richard Nixon to resign), the bad economy, and bitterness over the Vietnam War. I decided that I had to run with the tsunami and not against it. My campaign emphasized the need to reform Washington and the degree to which the Democratic incumbent was the problem and I was the solution (he was the senior member of the delegation and high up on the Appropriations Committee). Despite the general Republican disaster (losing 48 House seats and five Senate seats), I got 48.5% of the vote as a reformer.
Then in 1976, I faced my own personal blue tsunami because Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia won the Democratic nomination and was overwhelmingly popular in the state. I ran the best campaign of my career and dropped 0.2% end up at 48.3%. Finally, I won in 1978.
In 1994, we created our own tsunami with the Contract with America. We gained 54 House seats and eight Senate seats, a much bigger tsunami than the one which hit Republicans Tuesday.
In fact, Tuesday’s GOP defeat is only the seventh largest midterm defeat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s majority collapsed in 1938. In all fairness to FDR, he had built such a huge majority that even when he lost 72 House seats and seven Senate seats, the Democrats still had majorities in both chambers.
Vice President J.D. Vance has done a favor for all Republicans by stepping into the vacuum created by the bad outcome and offering his list of the four things that he thought were at the heart of this week’s defeat.
Vance asserted that the defeat could have been avoided if Republicans had: ended the war with Iran, focused on the cost of living and inflation, put America first, and changed the U.S. relationship with Israel, which he credited with our failures in Iran.
Vance’s analysis is going to be the beginning of a serious debate within Republican ranks about what caused the midterm defeat and what the road back to victory for Republicans must be.
I warned about the power of affordability generally — and the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, and heating oil specifically — in a podcast with Miranda Devine released on May 27.
I told Devine, “If you tell me the price of gasoline on Labor Day, I’m pretty confident I can tell you about the election.” I added that getting gasoline down to roughly $3 a gallon, with voters expecting further declines, could produce a major Republican midterm victory.
Because I believe issues grow from the American people toward Washington and not from Washington to the American people, I have always been sensitive to the price of various necessities. As recently as a week before the election, I found myself standing at our neighborhood gas station filling up our truck and watching the cost go up.
I thought back to May 2008, when I worked with Sean Hannity and Joe Gaylord to develop a campaign around, “drill here, drill now, pay less.” We had more than 1.6 million people sign up. By August, the phrase “drill, baby drill” permeated the GOP national convention. As recently as this year, President Trump was repeating the phrase.
In 2012, I wrote a book called “Gasoline at $2.50” and got attacked by then-President Barack Obama for promising something he said was impossible. Of course, under President Trump, it dropped below that before the Iran War.
But, the war with Iran had a clear negative impact on the price of fuel and Republican prospects in the election.
If we were going to stay in the war, we needed a national campaign to convince the American people that an Iranian nuclear weapon was a real threat — and that we had to endure whatever it took to disarm the Iranians. That debate never occurred. The American people were both frustrated by the undefined war, infuriated by the affordability crisis it caused, and angered every time they bought fuel.
The average price of gasoline was $4.15 on Election Day. Diesel was $6.29. Home heating oil was $6.14 — 9 cents shy of an all-time high. That was the reality Sen. Susan Collins was trying to beat. It wasn’t her opponent’s campaign. It was the sheer pain of the cost of heating oil at the beginning of winter.
With this kind of economic turmoil, we were bound to lose some seats in the House and Senate, but utter defeat was avoidable.
However, the profound stupidity of the rest of the GOP campaign made the losses much higher than they could have been. There is a huge difference between the competent GOP campaign that could have been run and the expensive mess the GOP purchased in 2026.
Remember, money without strategy is sheer waste.
That’s the topic of my first column next week.
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"Vance asserted that the defeat could have been avoided if Republicans had: ended the war with Iran,"
And Then What Happens? Right back where we were on Nov. 5 2024?
What do you have to say about his questioning of our relationship with Israel? You seem to have ignored that part in your analysis of Vance's remarks.
Our saving grace in this country has always been that our side looked at the world with a more rational perspective. We understood that the benefits of defending our country sometimes outweigh the short-term pain resulting from those decisions. Now, isolationists like JD Vance and his comrades in the isolationist and Groyper camps are increasingly sounding like the Democrats and the far left. They are not only questioning the importance of the war against an Islamic regime that has been fighting us for more than 47 years, but are also cloaking their entire argument in anti-Israel narratives. The fundamental problem with JD and his worldview is not necessarily how best to protect the US against our enemies. Rather, it is to denigrate our ONLY real ally in this world, appease our detractors with platitudes that sound good, and blame the Jews for everything.
I've always had tremendous respect for you, Mr. Speaker. You will always be considered a hero for your actions and victories, especially during your tenure as Speaker. Please clarify where you stand on these issues today.