When I first came to Washington nearly four decades ago, a colleague of mine greeted me with, "Welcome to the marble asylum!"
I politely inquired what he meant, and he answered bluntly: Washington was the one place other than a mental ward where everyone walks around delusionally certain they know what was going on.
On Wednesday, the day after the worst political bloodbath in three decades of American elections, there was a lot of idle chatter in the asylum. Democrats crowed their far-left, socialist-infused agenda got a rousing mandate. It did not.
Anti-Israel conservatives claimed Republicans got rebuked for falling prey to a warmongering Jewish lobby. The GOP did not. Pro-Israeli Republicans made the opposite argument. They, too, were wrong.
Americans spoke clearly on Tuesday night. They were driven singularly by one issue: affordability. After four years of Biden inflation, they were promised a swift and complete reprieve from high prices in 2024, and they went all in to form a historic new coalition behind Donald Trump, JD Vance and the GOP Congress.
And then 24 months later, gas for the car was still above $4 a gallon, diesel for the truck and tractor was above $6, prices on the restaurant menu made going out to dinner painfully too expensive and mortgage rates were still double their lows from Trump's first term.
As many as three quarters of voters Tuesday said their financial condition had worsened since they placed their trust in the GOP ticket.
In other words, Republicans failed to deliver. They promised courage, but acted tepidly. They offered excuses for inaction, and infighting over unity. They forgot what they promised and chased other priorities rather than deliver the No. 1 promise on their agenda. They had no coherent message for the clearly coherent demands of their constituents.
And so that coalition of young voters, Hispanics, working-class tradesmen and independent middle-class voters exacted revenge as only they knew how. They fired national Republicans by the dozens, which by default put a far-left Democrat Party in control of Congress, many gubernatorial mansions and state legislatures.
But exit polls showed they did not fully sour on the GOP's policy ideas, nor did they embrace the Democrats' far-left polices. Those who voted made clear they preferred capitalism to socialism, and a closed border and lower crime to the alternative, the exit polls show.
The voters simply didn't get a more affordable life back under two years of GOP rule, which was their top priority. And they were mad as hell.
The danger now for both parties is to misread the verdict and misadjust.
Democrats cannot afford to swing to socialism, green new deals 2.0 and massive spending that drive up prices more. Nor can they exact a retribution agenda against Donald Trump at the expense of lowering prices quickly.
Republicans, likewise, cannot afford to revert to an older agenda or abandon the one that got them through the 2024 election. They must double down on what proved, and remains, popular: safer streets, a more secure border, common sense justice and no forever wars. They just need to effect more affordability ... for food, homes, energy, education and medicine.
But now, after a historic loss, they also have lost confidence, infrastructure, talent, years of political capital and miles of political boundaries. It could take years to recover. Or as Rep. Beth Van Duyne, one of the few Texas Republicans to have a good night Tuesday, said: it could just take one election cycle if Democrats fumble.
In interviews with a dozen strategists who saw the bloodbath coming long before Tuesday night, five ideas most commonly emerged as the antidotes for a broken conservative movement. Here they are:
1. Mount a vigorous lawfare defense, and protect your own
Like one Democrat boasted Wednesday, Trump World will need to "lawyer up." Lawfare and legal retribution will be in full bloom for the next 24 months. The strategists suggested that GOP leaders begin by creating a well-funded lawfare defense operation to keep your best talent defended and in the game for 2028, and not let the process of constant hearings and investigations bankrupt them.
An executive order assuring every Trump appointee and government employee get their legal bills paid for congressional, state, local or private lawfare defenses was one idea. A $50 million private donation fund was another.
2. Reboot the message and the policy focus.
Like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who were shellacked ahead of their final two years in office, Trump must focus on what's possible and popular, the strategists said.
He must be the common sense blocker of the Democrats' worst ideas, using the power of the veto. And he must lead the best ideas for what needs to be fixed. He should go on offense, starting with the lame-duck Congress, to suggest common-sense fixes for inflation, the war, deficits, gas prices, Medicare/Social Security and a still broken health care system.
Some ideas that were suggested: a. Propose a bipartisan debt and deficit reduction commission; b. Invest federal fraud savings into extending the life of Medicare/Social Security; c. Put both feet down on the pedal of Trump's new housing affordability plan to make it the equivalent of the GI Housing Bill of the 21st century; d. Build on the lower prescription prices achieved by Trump RX with a plan to make all medical expenses tax-deductible (currently there are no deductions until those expenses reach 7.5% of gross income); e. Provide a big gift to veterans by creating a quick, clear path to settling with the hundreds of thousands of Marines injured by toxic water at Camp Lejeune.
Another idea was to avoid an ideological battle over Israel that sounds bigoted or anti-Semitic and instead deliver a win to both Jews and Israeli critics by ending Third-World aid to Israel and replacing it with first-world defense contracts. Israel gets freedom, Americans get tax relief and neither side feels abandoned.
These are big ideas that Democrats cannot ignore, and that voters will see as adult actions that start to reassemble the target coalition, the experts said.
3. Reconstruct the winning coalition.
The experts noted that the 1980-to-2024 coalition of Baby Boomers, Christian evangelicals, Fox News cable and talk-radio junkies, gun-toting NRA members and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce business cheerleaders is a vestige of the past. Streaming TV and podcasts are the new cable channels. Hispanic Catholics as the natural heir to declining evangelical voters. There's a need for a new coalition in favor of gun rights and law and order made up of cops and veterans.
The experts added that small business owners and the working class are the new heart of the economic ecosystem. Conservative efforts to court young voters who are anti-war, anti-socialist, working-class or faith and family-centric are splintered among too many groups that are crying for consolidation into a single machinery.
4. Rebuild the infrastructure.
The state GOP apparatus is dead or on life support after 2026 in many states such as Arizona, California, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the strategists argued.
The experts urged re-building the state parties with good tacticians skilled in how modern votes are gathered. End the vendors who underperformed in their get-out the vote efforts and Hispanic outreach while draining tens of millions of dollars. Build everything with an eye toward the future coalition. Settle on one stakeholder – and one only – for each core constituency. Donors will have zero appetite for inefficiency and grifting. This new infrastructure needs to have a candidate training and recruitment element to fund the perfect candidates that marry the appeal of MAGA with traditional conservatives, they said.
5. Recapture the Culture War.
Experts stress this effort must be waged on the turf where it will be won. The opportunity, they said, was to construct a new affordable TV system of the future that abandons the wires and outdated business rules of cable TV for the opportunities of a wireless streaming TV world.
This could include using the Federal Communications Commission to solve the greatest living room crisis of present: the affordability of multiple pay-per-view streaming services that can run into the thousands of dollars a year.
The experts urged the nurturing of an ad-supported, affordable streaming TV world in which conservative and wholesome values are welcome like they were in the 1980s cable TV universe. Other ideas: reposition Hollywood to the Nashville/Dallas corridor, and move from wired to wireless delivery by leveraging an alliance between satellite and cellular infrastructure.
Such an alliance increases the ubiquity of a family's TV package while lowering the cost of entry to content creators. Comedy should just be about laughs, sports just about competition, news just about facts and movies just about entertainment. Politics must win upstream at the level of the culture. Conservatives have yielded this fight to the left since the early 2000s. It can be restored at the advent of the streaming TV era, the experts argued.
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