The Republican Path to Victory in 2026
The path to Republican Victory has three components.
Despite all the gloom and doom talk among liberal talking heads, the slanted and biased polls used by the liberal media, and the exhaustion among House and Senate Republicans (and even some in the Trump Administration), there is a clear path to a historic Republican victory in 2026.
The path to Republican Victory has three components:
1. Bring down the price of gasoline and clearly communicate a series of steps toward affordability (for example, the dramatic breakthroughs in drug costs and the increased income from a variety of actions).
2. Communicate clearly and emphatically the enormous number of positive achievements in the first two years of this term, including enormous savings from fraud, etc., so people have a context for understanding how Republicans are making their lives better despite every effort by the liberal media to block the good news from reaching the American people.
3. Convince the vast majority of the American people that President Trump was right in his State of the Union comment that “these people are crazy,” and drive home to every American the extraordinary range of issues on which the Democrats oppose the American people sometimes by as much as 85 to 15.
Karl Rove caught a large part of this opportunity in his April 29, 2026, Wall Street Journal article “To Save the Midterms, go on the offensive” when he wrote, “Republicans must contrast - a polite word for attack - whenever possible.”
He expanded on that theme with a great example: “Last year’s tax cut is an obvious target. Republicans shouldn’t only talk about what is in the package. They should aggressively hit Democrats for opposing the bill and ask them whether they will repeal the tax cut. Democratic candidates could say yes or ignore the challenge, shifting the argument to favorable turf for the GOP. Or they could say no, in which case the party’s left wing becomes unglued.”
Rove also reminded us that “Republicans also can’t dwell on the past. Successful campaigns are prospective more than retrospective. GOP candidates must have fresh ideas that will improve the lives of ordinary Americans.”
Rove is right, but he is only scratching the surface of what needs to be done to win the kind of historic upset victory in 2026 that is possible, though it would be an historic shift from the most likely future.
I have participated in a number of upset or come-from-behind victories and studied a lot more. There are several principles that make them possible.
First, this scale of change from the probable defeat to the historic, shocking victory requires planning, research, careful systematic thought, and training, lots and lots of training.
The great Truman upset come-from-behind victory of 1948 (so far behind that Gallup quit polling because Dewey was inevitable) actually began with a 43-page memorandum from Clark Clifford written almost a year earlier, on November 19, 1947. You can get the memorandum from the Truman Library, and it is an education in deep analysis and bold strategies in a very challenging situation.
Vice President Bush’s campaign was 19 points behind in May 1988, but we already had focus groups and polling based on deep research into Governor Dukakis’ record, which made us comfortable that with a planned methodical campaign, including a wide range of validating allied groups, we could expose how radical Dukakis was and win the election. We went from down 19 to winning by 8, so every fourth American switched their vote during the campaign.
We developed the 1994 Contract with America over a number of years, in part by using Remini’s brilliant work on the election of 1828 as the model of a disruptive outsider defeat of an establishment. The 1994 campaign, which led to the first House GOP victory in 40 years, and the 1996 reelection campaign, which produced the first re-elected House GOP since 1928, were both principled, methodical projects with a lot of research and an enormous amount of training for candidates, campaigns, consultants, etc.
Implementation of a coherent methodical campaign against the enormous hostility of the liberal media, the full-blown attack of the Democrats and their allied groups, the normal confusion of daily events, and the usual Republican ineffectiveness at communications is a major undertaking requiring planning, preparation, training, and practice.
If the Trump Administration and Republicans are prepared to undertake the kind of methodical campaign this requires, then the odds are very high that the GOP will win an historic victory this fall by margins far greater than anyone currently thinks possible.
Over the next week, I will expand on the details of this kind of methodical campaign and the victory it can bring.
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You nee massive street rallies, too, akin to no kings protests