A red ripple? Perhaps. A red wave? Definitely not.

Despite two years of appalling leadership by the Biden administration and an ultra-radicalized Democratic Party, election results for what was touted by the likes of Newt Gingrich as possibly the biggest Republican victory in a century were disappointing, to say the least. Not only did the GOP fail to pick up the net one seat required to take control of the Senate, they actually lost an open seat in Pennsylvania, and, as of this writing, may or may not retain 50 seats, pending the runoff election results in Georgia. Meanwhile, the GOP has barely taken control of the House, though by far less than the 20- to 40-vote majority anticipated by most of the polling punditry. As a visibly disappointed Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told NBC News late at night on Election Day, when the contours of this election were first becoming clear, “definitely not a Republican wave, that is for darn sure.”

Dems’ Bragging Rights

No matter how the final results play out, bragging rights have been claimed by the Democrats. After all, despite two years of rising inflation, extreme radical social-justice policymaking, relentless attacks on the half of America that supported Trump, destructive energy policies, and all-around executive ineptitude, the Democrats not only held onto their razor-thin control of the Senate, they managed to get Pennsylvania’s incoherent John Fetterman elected over Trump-backed Mehmet Oz, flipping that crucial Senate seat, and both defended and flipped a significant number of House seats that they were expected to lose. Meanwhile, GOP darling Mayra Flores, who turned heads last June when she won a special House election in one of Texas’ most blue districts, was promptly unseated by Democratic challenger Vicente Gonzalez, putting an end to a short-lived fairy-tale candidacy and calling into question the widely-circulated narrative that Hispanics are abandoning the radicalized Democratic Party in droves. 

Hurry up and wait: In many precincts, voters faced long lines and hours-long waits in order to cast ballots in person in the 2022 elections. Under such conditions, in-person voting is seriously disincentivized, creating a pretext for making drop boxes and mail-in ballots permanent. (AP Images)

In a remarkable demographic swing, New England’s electoral map in 2022 has been turned completely blue, that entire region having failed to send a single GOP candidate to Congress. This makes New England by far the most left-leaning region in the country, as other areas, including the Pacific Coast and the Mid-Atlantic states, both left-leaning Democratic strongholds, still sent significant numbers of Republicans to Congress.

As for the notorious “Squad” members led by the likes of AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, they not only cruised to reelection but added significantly to their numbers with the election of at least four more like-minded young Marxists masquerading as progressives and social-justice warriors. In Texas, Greg Casar won resoundingly in a Democratic district stretching from San Antonio to Austin. The “labor organizer” was endorsed by AOC, who touted his credentials as a supporter of open borders. In Florida, Maxwell Frost, who was born in 1996 and claims to be the first Generation Z member of Congress, has pledged to “end gun violence, win Medicare For All, transform our racist criminal justice system, and end the climate crisis.” Frost’s website touts his anti-gun and pro-abortion activism, including his successful lobbying of President Biden and congressional Democrats to end the Hyde Amendment, which until 2022 prohibited the use of federal funding, such as Medicaid, to pay for abortions. Summer Lee, a self-proclaimed “dedicated organizer, activist, and advocate for social justice” and Pennsylvania state legislator, successfully flipped one of 11 GOP-held seats. And in Illinois, Delia Ramirez, the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, has pledged “to fight for the rights of all working families struggling to survive, whether it be housing justice, fully funding public schools, women’s reproductive rights, or Medicare for all.”

At the state level, too, Democrats appear to have made significant gains in some key regions. In the Pennsylvania Legislature, for example, the GOP has lost at least 12 House seats, with one district, which did not even bother to run a Republican candidate, overwhelmingly electing a Democrat who passed away in early October. The composition of the Pennsylvania House could result in a tie and trigger a crisis over the selection of speaker.

Meanwhile, well-funded Democrat Robert Shapiro easily defeated Doug Mastriano for the Pennsylvania governor’s seat. As a state senator, Mastriano worked hard to expose widespread voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election in his state and for his effort was branded an “election denier” by the major media. In other gubernatorial races, MAGA favorite Kari Lake, who also was besmirched as an election denier, was defeated by lackluster Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs in Arizona after a week of vote tallying. In Kansas, a state won handily by Trump and where the governorship was regarded as a top Republican pickup opportunity, Democratic incumbent Laura Kelley defeated Republican challenger Derek Schmidt in a closely contested race that, like many other cliffhangers this election, ultimately broke the Democrats’ way.

The man in black: Pennsylvania’s Senator-elect John Fetterman is just one of a host of grotesquely radical candidates elected by the Democrats this year. (AP Images)

Some GOP Gains

On the other hand, the GOP made gains in some unexpected places, picking up seats in New York State, including a district on Long Island won by Democrat Tom Suozzi by 17 points in 2020. The winner, openly homosexual Republican George Santos, triumphed over openly homosexual Democrat Robert Zimmerman, marking the first-ever congressional race pitting two openly homosexual candidates against one another. Also in New York, Republican Michael Lawler won a historic upset victory over incumbent Sean Patrick Maloney, a prominent Democrat who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In Florida, the GOP now controls every state executive office, and voters reelected both Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio by resounding majorities.

Utah’s Senator Mike Lee, one of the Senate’s most reliable constitutionalists, was reelected for a third term despite strong opposition from some in Utah’s RINO (Republican in Name Only) establishment and a non-endorsement from fellow Utah GOP Senator Mitt Romney.

In Wisconsin, incumbent GOP Senator Ron Johnson, a staunch opponent of Covid vaccine mandates, survived a strong challenge by Democrat Mandela Barnes, while former Navy SEAL Derrick Van Orden flipped Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District red for the first time in 26 years.

And in Iowa, Republican Zach Nunn ousted Democrat Cindy Axne, the only Democrat-held seat in Iowa, which Axne won by a narrow margin in 2018.

In historically Democratic south Texas, Monica de la Cruz became the first-ever Republican to win District 15, an improbably serpentine district stretching from the east side of San Antonio all the way to the Mexican border.

In general, though, it appears that, with the exception of DeSantis’ Florida, the Latino vote is still overwhelmingly Democratic from Texas to California, although the GOP has made some inroads, mostly among socially conservative Hispanics.

Media Chorus: Blame Trump!

One outcome of the underwhelming GOP performance is the chorus of voices, urged on by a triumphalist media establishment, that are now blaming Trump for the poor showing. Several prominent Trump-endorsed candidates, such as GOP Senate candidate Mehmet Oz and gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, lost embarrassingly, while the only candidate that Trump badmouthed immediately prior to the election, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, posted an overwhelming win and is now being touted as the favorite for the GOP nomination in 2024. Meanwhile, Georgia’s Republican establishment governor Brian Kemp, with whom Trump feuded over the 2020 election results, defeated perennial radical Democratic candidate and all-around malcontent Stacey Abrams for the second time.

While we hate to give the mainstream news media too much credit, it is undeniably true that Trump’s proclivity for bad-mouthing fellow conservative Republicans has alienated some on the Right, not all of them RINOs and neocons. 

So what is going on across the fruited plain? Part of the problem, where the Senate was concerned, was the simple electoral math. This year, the GOP had to defend 20 seats, as opposed to only 14 for the Democrats, meaning that, in addition to keeping those 20 seats red, the Republicans would have had to flip at least one Democratic seat — not an impossibility, given the current mood across the country, but mathematically far less likely than what actually happened.

GOP Party Leaders Backed RINOS, not MAGA

Moreover, as Fox News commentator Mark Levin pointed out, the Senate Leadership Fund under Mitch McConnell made some very poor decisions, opting, for example, to pour millions into RINO Lisa Murkowski’s race in Alaska against a much-more-conservative GOP candidate, in a race the GOP was guaranteed to win one way or the other — while withholding funding from Arizona’s GOP senatorial candidate Blake Masters. Money was poured into the RINO candidate in Colorado — who lost resoundingly — while being withdrawn from much-less-establishmentarian candidates in both New Hampshire and Nevada.

From a fund that held well in excess of $100 million, not a single cent was given to Masters, while $6 million was unexpectedly withdrawn from New Hampshire candidate Don Bolduc, a retired brigadier general, in the crucial final week of the campaign. Millions of dollars from the fund were poured into the ill-fated campaign of Colorado’s Joe O’Dea. As for the Alaska misadventure, nearly $9 million of the fund was spent attacking the more conservative of the two GOP candidates on the ballot for senator — “because McConnell wanted Lisa Murkowski to win. She’s a sure vote for him in the majority,” Levin observed tartly. “They interfered in the decision-making process of the people of Alaska, the Republican Party of Alaska, and blew nine million dollars.” Levin went on to point out that the McConnell-led GOP establishment did exactly the same thing in 2010 against the Tea Party movement.

None of this is surprising to longtime RINO-watchers. The hostility of the GOP establishment toward any stirring of popular discontent — be it a Reagan Revolution, a Tea Party, a Ron Paul candidacy, or a MAGA movement — is a long-established fact. They have long shown a preference for sabotaging their own party’s chances for a governing majority in Congress rather than lose their own tenuous control over GOP affairs. That said, the electoral math in 2024, when the Democrats will have to defend 23 seats as against only 10 for the GOP, bodes much more in favor of a possible “red wave.” But even then, no one should underestimate the ability of GOP “leadership” to deep-six their own party.

House and state electoral results are much harder to explain in such terms, however. As of this writing, the GOP appears to lead in enough districts to put them barely past 218. Regardless, Democrats will see these unexpectedly favorable midterm results as a referendum on their radical and ruinous socioeconomic policies.

Indeed, the Democrats may not be entirely mistaken. The 2022 elections have yielded the most favorable results for the party in power in many decades. Typically, the party controlling the White House loses a significant number of seats in a midterm election, and a party controlling the White House and both houses of Congress even more so. But in defiance of expectations and recent precedent, the Democrats have succeeded in flipping many GOP seats (something they were unable to do in 2010 and 2020, for example), and also elected an unusual number of extreme radical candidates, such as Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and many soon-to-be Democratic House freshmen.

The GOP’s Milquetoast Message

It is impossible not to conclude from this election that a significant portion of the voting public is either indifferent to or outright supportive of the economic, cultural, political, and moral lunacy of the Biden administration and its Marxist myrmidons dominating Democratic Party policymaking at the federal and state level. Confident predictions of a “red wave” were predicated at least in part on the commonsense assumption that most people are appalled by the chaos on our southern border, by the willful destruction of our energy sector, by our disorganized and utterly callous withdrawal from Afghanistan, by vertiginous levels of consumer price inflation not seen in more than 40 years, and by all of the extremist social agenda items, from drag-queen culture to “trans” activism. 

As an instructive contrast, the elections of 2010, midway through President Obama’s first term, yielded very different results. At that time, the “Tea Party” movement, inspired in large measure by then-Congressman Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, took on the Democrats and the GOP party establishment alike in leading the charge for genuine reform in the direction of smaller, constitutional federal government. The Tea Partiers were reviled across the mainstream media by the bipartisan punditry, Beltway insiders who viewed the movement as a dangerous threat to the political status quo.

Falling short: Firebrand Trump supporter Kari Lake fell just short of victory in Arizona’s gubernatorial race — although the ballots will likely be recounted. (AP Images)

The result? Republicans took control of the House, winning 63 House seats, and made huge gains in the Senate, picking up six seats. The message of the Ron Paul movement at that time was, as Ron Paul has recently reminded us, “restoring constitutional government in all areas, ending our interventionist foreign policy, and changing our monetary policy by auditing and ending the Federal Reserve,” while the Tea Party focused its message on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. The two movements became largely harmonized by shared opposition on a range of issues.

“Many members of both groups,” Paul wrote recently, “fought for auditing and ending the Fed, ending bailouts, and preventing Congress from passing Obamacare.” This convergence of interests, in combination, perhaps, with an avoidance of touchy social issues, produced the 2010 Republican victories, a bona-fide “red wave” if there ever was one. “Many Republican candidates in 2010 appealed to Tea Party voters by not just promising to repeal Obamacare,” Dr. Paul observed. “They also promised to work to restore limited, constitutional, fiscally responsible government in all areas. In contrast, in 2022 the average Republican candidate offered little in the way of a substantive agenda. In fact, few Republicans called for reversing President Biden’s massive spending increases, much less for restoring the federal government to its constitutional limitations.”

Unfortunately, the story of the 2010 elections did not end happily. Once in Congress, many newly elected Republicans began compromising with the Big Government agenda of both the Democrats and RINOs who still controlled policymaking on Capitol Hill. Debt and spending continued to soar, in spite of GOP controls over House spending, and did not slow down under the Trump administration. Small wonder that Americans genuinely sick of Big Government have come to regard the promises of the GOP with narrow suspicion!

Bipartisan Formula for Control

Many grassroots conservatives are slowly coming to the realization that partisan wrangling is not the road to national redemption. While the GOP at the grassroots has increasingly become the default home for Americanists and conservatives alike, along with the occasional Rand Paul or Thomas Massie they manage to send to Congress, procedural control over the GOP at the national level — the ability to determine how discretionary funds such as the Senate Leadership Fund are spent, as well as the power to determine who gets to chair committees and which bills are allowed to advance — still rests firmly with a handful of establishment Republicans, such as Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell. These RINOs are joined at the hip not only with Big Business and its legions of lobbyists, but also with establishment Democrats. While AOC and “the Squad” may differ radically from the GOP Liberty Caucus, the differences between a Chuck Schumer and a Mitch McConnell are negligible.

All this is in keeping with the bipartisan formula for elite control articulated by establishment historian Carroll Quigley:

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.… Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

Because of this control at the apex of both major political parties, the solution is not, and never has been, about electing Republicans (or, for that matter, Democrats). It is about creating a more informed electorate so that constitutionalists and Americanists, of whatever party, can be elected. 

Election Irregularities

That said, electing constitutionalists will become an ever-steeper hill to climb unless the current electoral system is reformed. Since the current system was put in place in 2020 using Covid as a convenient pretext, Election Day has become election season, with voting carried out days and even weeks before Election Day, conveniently anonymized by the postal service and drop boxes, while the tabulation of votes takes days and even weeks subsequent to the closing of the polls. Public skepticism in many precincts continues to be fanned by suspicious patterns of voting that consistently appear to favor Democrats over “extremist” Republican candidates, as with, for example, the ongoing charade in Maricopa County, Arizona, where massive problems with voting machines on Election Day appear to have discouraged many voters from standing in line for hours, and the counting was still ongoing a week after the election.

Adding to the widespread distrust are many curious electoral statistics, such as the fact that, although Democrats only made up 17 percent of voters in Maricopa County on Election Day, as against 52 percent Republicans, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs managed to win every ballot drop in Maricopa County except two, finally defeating Republican Kari Lake after a week of counting. While such anomalies may not constitute proof positive of electoral fraud, neither do they inspire the voting public with confidence in the system. Voting by mail and any other type of balloting other than in person have always been recognized as open invitations for fraud, while voting by machine instead of paper ballot is fraught with risks, as the Maricopa County fiasco showed yet again.

The Way Forward

To remedy such problems, state legislatures need to reassert their constitutionally protected responsibility to set proper election standards and resist the movement to establish statutory federal election standards. As John Birch Society CEO Bill Hahn observed, “There has been a push for a while to try to nationalize elections, so there are certain laws [setting national election standards] that have already been passed, that have to be reversed. And we need to work through the states to get the electoral system shored up so that we don’t have these problems associated with voting by machine, by drop box, and by mail. Everything is local and has to be worked on at a state level.”

What is the way forward for America? Even though the electoral math is much more favorable for the Republicans in 2024, when the Democrats will have to defend 23 seats in the Senate, the fact remains that the ultra-radical Left has been the real winner for the last three elections. Each electoral cycle seems to yield more and more support for the leftist counterculture and its civilization-destroying agenda. In the long run, America cannot survive the ongoing corrosion of her culture and moral values — which is precisely what the radical Left has always aimed at. Nor can she long survive the systematic degradation of electoral integrity and checks on federal power. The 2022 elections have been a wake-up call for action at the state level to return to verifiable voting procedures, for principled focus on limiting government power and reining in government spending, and for national moral renewal. 

Americans are now at a critical crossroads, and the choice they face could not be starker. The road to national renewal leads to greater freedom, prosperity, and civic virtue. That road is the road also to peace, order, and progress. On the other hand, the road to ruin being urged on us by the radical Left is not only the proverbial road to serfdom, but also to economic, social, and political collapse, with violence and tyranny following in its wake. It is a road whose early rutted passages we have already begun to explore, egged on by the frenetic rhetoric of the Left. We must recognize where this road will lead, and summon the national will to choose the better path, the path chosen by our noble Founders and our pioneer ancestors. If we do, events such as this year’s elections will end up being a mere bump in the road to a better national future.