Victor Davis Hanson
We can draw a few conclusions from an off-year election, when iconic races in blue states went, as expected, overwhelmingly Democratic.
Nevertheless, there is only a year left before the midterms. So Republicans must react to even these paltry results.
1) Democrats’ chaotic nihilism still works. The chaos strategy causes so much turmoil, noise, and negative media coverage that the confused voting public simply cannot sort it all out. The public wishes the upheaval would just go away and often blames those with the most current authority — logically, the incumbent Trump and his administration.
2) Every day of Trump’s first year, there were either campus eruptions, Tesla firebombings, street violence against ICE, or crazy district judges’ injunctions.
The bedlam becomes force multiplied by unhinged outbursts from Democrats like AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Eric Swalwell, and the proverbial Squad.
The latest firecracker was thrown by a now Biden-like, faltering Nancy Pelosi, who recently screamed on CNN that President Donald Trump “is just a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.”
The public has no time to sort out all the actual causes for such mad hattery. It knows only from Democrats that the commotion is roughly correlated with “Trump.”
Note that there is never a positive Democratic “Contract with America,” since it is impossible to advance anything popular or moderate past its now firmly socialist base.
3) Democrats also use the chaos strategy to target key electoral groups.
In this week’s election, Republicans finally grasped the purpose of the pre-election shutdown.
It was designed to galvanize key constituencies to get out the vote in a low-turnout year. The lockdown was especially aimed at two groups: laid-off and unpaid government workers and entitlement recipients terrified that their checks would dry up.
Both turned out disproportionately in Virginia and New Jersey.
The Democrats are likely to resolve the shutdown soon, as the initial momentum gained by paralyzing the government is now diminishing.
The same strategy applies to the Hispanic vote that had defected in large numbers to Trump in 2024. However, this week, in many counties, the Hispanic vote shifted back toward the Democratic Party.
The truth does not get out enough that 70-80 percent of deportations are targeted at those with either criminal records or prior deportation orders.
Instead, the nonstop violent protests, the dangerous nullification threats from blue-city officials, and the slanted media coverage worked like proverbial propaganda to reduce ICE to “the Gestapo.”
Too many of the public believed that “Nazis” were hounding only law-abiding housekeepers and landscapers, who have been here for decades and only by accident forgot to make their de facto Americanness official.
Or so the successful Big Lie went — and went unchallenged.
The administration and MAGA do not talk enough about positive news of GDP growth, tolerable inflation, massive foreign investment, a calmer Middle East, or numerous miraculous ceasefires around the globe.
Instead, when there is a vacuum in self-praise, it is more easily replaced by the sensationalism of Trump’s “revenge tour” in hounding the boy scout James Comey and poor Letitia James, of taking a wrecking ball to the revered White House, or of insulting for no reason our blameless, “nice,” and gentle Canadian neighbors. The economy, not culs-de-sac, wins elections.
4) Much of the Trump agenda, other than spectacular military recruitment and a secure border, is more long-term than instantly gratifying.
The multitrillion-dollar foreign investments may take a year or two to create jobs and spark the economy.
The deportations will take time to switch more jobs to U.S. citizens.
New gas, oil, and nuclear energy production, trimming the federal workforce, deregulating, and greenlighting AI and other new technologies will not be felt immediately.
After the summer 1984 convention, even Ronald Reagan trailed the anemic Walter Mondale in a few polls. Then the first three quarters of GDP — cumulatively over 7% growth — were digested, as the economy took off and buried Mondale by the November elections.
5) There is no longer a Democratic Party. It is now an unapologetically neo-socialist Jacobin movement. So traditional negative advertising designed to incur scandal and shame simply does not always work. All that matters is the hard-leftist fides of a candidate — period!
Threaten a political opponent with assassination? Brag about killing his kids?
Tattoo the 3rd Panzer SS Division death’s-head insignia on your chest?
Promise to arrest a foreign head of state when he visits your city?
Boast about grabbing the “means of production.”
So what?
To the new left, this is just proof that their new candidates and voters “mean business.” They cannot be shamed — not even by mocking Charlie Kirk’s wound or hoping Trump is not so lucky a third time.
There is plenty of time for Republicans to digest these results, especially the strategy and dangerous nature of the new left, along with the mercurial moods of the swing voters — and the need to stick to the economy.
But the clock is ticking.
(Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)
