Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Republican officials could hardly contain their excitement. Much of the party, mindful of historical models and polls showing public discontent, was certain there’d be a “red wave.” The question wasn’t whether it’d materialize, it was how dramatic the party’s victory would be.
The expectations made the results even more bitter. The GOP saw its U.S. Senate minority shrink, lost ground in gubernatorial offices, and failed to flip a single state legislative chamber. In the U.S. House, where party leaders boasted about possible gains of 60 or 70 seats, Republicans ended up with a net gain of nine seats for the cycle, leaving them with a small, tough-to-manage majority.
It was arguably the best midterm elections for a first-term Democratic president since FDR.
For a while, GOP leaders had no idea how best to respond to the results. A week after Election Day, for example, Donald Trump published an item to his social media platform declaring, “WE WON! … Big Victory, don’t be stupid. Stand on the rooftops and shout it out loud!” Two days later, the former president wrote a follow-up item, saying it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “fault” that the party “blew the Midterms.”
Trump seemed oblivious to the contradiction.
For its part, the Republican National Committee last fall launched a post-election audit — better known in political circles as an “autopsy” — designed to examine why the party fell so far short. As The Washington Post reported, the RNC’s analysis will ignore the elephant in the room.
A draft Republican Party autopsy report on the 2022 midterm elections examining why the GOP failed to win the U.S. Senate and posted smaller-than-expected gains in the House does not mention Donald Trump or his role as the de facto leader of the party, according to people familiar with its contents.
It was, of course, the former president who helped recruit candidates, secure Republican nominations for his preferred allies, campaign on behalf of his handpicked candidates, and ensure that a chunk of the party’s message was focused on his discredited election conspiracy theories, which tended to repel mainstream voters.
To leave Trump out of the election review is like excluding the role of the iceberg in an analysis of the sinking of the Titanic.
The same Post report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added, “The draft report says abortion hurt the Republicans in the midterm elections, with candidates trying to avoid the issue and alienating some voters while Democrats saw their base’s energy grow, according to the people familiar with the document. It calls on Republicans to talk more about abortion than they did in the midterm elections.” I have a hunch Democratic officials will hope that Republican incumbents and candidates take this advice — since the issue of reproductive rights appears to be working against the GOP in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise. As for the full text of the RNC’s autopsy, we might never know its contents: NBC News, citing two people familiar with the party’s thinking, reported late last week that Republican Party officials “plan to keep private” the findings of the post-election analysis. “I believe that the post-election analysis is meant to be for internal use only; taking the lessons we’ve learned so we can improve,” one RNC member said. “I don’t think it will be made publicly available.” That’s a tough position to defend, though it doesn’t come as a total surprise: Republicans were haunted for a while by their autopsy after the 2012 election. The surest way not to be bothered by the post-2022 analysis is to hide it from the public.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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