After a shellacking like the one endured by Republicans in Texas and across the nation, the first step is to assess what it was, and what it was not.
There is no room for spin or sugar-coating. Any midterm is a referendum on the people in power. Republicans were in power. There was a strong argument to make for a fixed border, improved crime stats, lower taxes, gender sanity and more. But those things didn’t matter enough, up against the impenetrable walls of affordability and an unpopular war.
Democrat guru James Carville coined “It’s the economy, stupid!” in 1992, and it winds up true again and again. Every election is multi-layered, but a suffering economy can gulp valuable oxygen away from other issues. And the truth is that expensive gas and an Iran quagmire repelled more than just energized Democrats. Independents joined them in flipping both houses of Congress, with the company of some Republicans frustrated by the economy and President Trump’s pledge to avoid foreign wars.
The action against Iran still has its supporters, including me, but the decisive victory envisioned months ago has not happened and does not appear on the horizon. It takes a lot of explaining to convince people that a few months of expensive fuel, which can add to the cost of many other things, is worth the added safety that comes with neutering a nuclear Iran.
High prices don’t need explaining. They are just there, in our faces, every day. There was no sidestepping them, and no explanation would have fended off voter revulsion.
Trump tried. His attempts to convince voters that the higher prices were worth it fell on millions of deaf ears and made him appear unempathetic to their economic plight. Meanwhile, Democrats, who have absolutely no track record of making things affordable in a free market, were able to score enormous points, simply by “talking about it.”
“Talarico is talking about affordability,” a talk show caller told me in describing his possible vote for the Democrat, with no discernible memory of anything the candidate had said that made any sense toward solving the problem.
He will get a chance to do plenty of additional talking now, fresh off a 20-point drubbing of Ken Paxton. As it turns out, Talarico and plenty of other Democrats at various levels did not have to say much of anything to rack up sizable wins. All they had to do is not be Republicans.
Such is the nature of midterms, a regularly scheduled referendum on whoever holds power at the moment. Trump asked the public to mobilize as if he were on the ballot. One could argue that they did exactly that, and the flood of negative reaction handed both houses of Congress to the Democrats while sweeping out every top Republican official in Texas.
The precision strike delivered by voters was as laser-focused as the weaponry we used to decimate the Iranian military. This was not a national rebuke for Trump’s entire agenda, and Texans did not suddenly develop a broad distaste for everything our red-state leadership has done for more than 30 years.
But fatigue over an unpopular war and anger spurred by the high prices led to a desire to punish the party in power. In Texas, our voters yearning to deliver that national message streamed into polling places and decided they might as well give the heave-ho to the state’s incumbent power structure as well.
The Talarico win was a stunner captured in a moment in time in a fight for an open seat. The ejection of Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is a far deeper shock, blowing away two fixtures of Texas leadership who have been in place for twelve years and appeared rock-solid for four more. The ascendancy of Mayes Middleton as Attorney General and Don Huffines as Comptroller were foregone conclusions.
The Iranian mullahs derailed that plan. Connect the dots: Iran terrorizes the world for decades. Trump decides they must be stopped and goes to war to prevent them developing nuclear weapons, which they could have launched across the globe or kept in their silos while boosting gas far higher than even today’s prices. Today’s inflation sparks a voter rebellion, sending millions of people, many not even Democrats, to the polls to deliver a zero-star review to the president and the party who made this happen. In Texas, those voters decide not to stop at elevating Talarico, and choose to hand an entire slate of Democrats the keys to Austin as well.
So was this inevitable? There is no available time machine to climb into to take us back to February and have Trump decide against a war with Iran. If there were, there would be no jump in fuel prices and thus no resulting price spikes for countless other goods and services. But perhaps we would have seen Iran launch a nuke into various nations filled with infidels, and we might have been one of them.
Trump has spared us that possibility. The cost to him and his agenda is the elevation of an army of Democrats in Washington who will try to sabotage his remaining agenda in between impeachment hearings. In Texas, we have paid the price of having our red-state status stripped from our political landscape.
It is impossible to know for certain whether it was worth it. Americans maintaining support for the Iranian operation will continue to view the higher prices as a sensible cost for a safer world. But that viewpoint was vastly outnumbered by voters practicing an instinct as old as America itself—tossing out politicians for delivering things they don’t like.
Two years from now, when we choose a successor to Trump, and two years later, when the opportunity arises to return Texas to the map of red states, one presumes we will not be at war with Iran and gas prices will have returned from the stratosphere. In those election cycles, the full range of policies from both parties will be up for assessment.
Republicans, reeling from this year’s verdict, can expect a better result, in part because Democrats with actual power may reveal the party’s current flirtation with Marxist extremism even more starkly than they did on the campaign trail.
Then we will see if this embrace of today’s Democrat party is the beginning of a generational shift or a brief historical bender.
Mark Davis is a talk show host for Salem Media: 660amtheanswer.com. X: @markdavis
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Dallas Express.
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