It’s understandable for conservatives to be a bit disappointed about the outcome of the 2022 midterms. The “red tsunami” didn’t exactly pan out as predicted, and the last few weeks of extreme hype from the media elevated expectations to nothing less than a total wipeout of Democrats in both the House and Senate.
But here we are, a few days out from Election Day, and the dust is finally settling. Aside from an embarrassing situation in Maricopa County, Arizona, where ballots are still being counted, along with a couple of outstanding razor-thin races in other parts of the country, Republican voters do have a few stats for which they can be proud.
As Breitbart noted, as of Thursday morning, Republicans garnered the lion’s share of the popular vote, which is something our side isn’t used to. The numbers are impressive.
According to the Cook Political Report, as of Thursday morning, Republicans took 52.3 percent of the popular vote in the 2022 midterms, compared to the Democrats’ 46.2 percent.
The 2022 @CookPolitical House Vote Tracker is now live! The craziest thing: Republicans are winning the House popular vote by 6.4% so far but just scraping by in the race for control. https://t.co/YOAzUtsM9F pic.twitter.com/pGICoSCNv9
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 9, 2022
It seems clear, especially looking at the map in the tweet above, that the national sentiment heavily leaned red, even though it didn’t result in as many seats as Republicans would have liked to secure.
Massive. GOP made huge inroads in deep blue territory with Hispanic voters, especially on immigration, adding immensely to its popular vote tally. Don’t let Democrats’ mastery of mail harvesting obscure the realignment. GOP has a clear path to dominance should it wish to take it. https://t.co/pq7TcTmSDm
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) November 10, 2022
“Massive. GOP made huge inroads in deep blue territory with Hispanic voters, especially on immigration, adding immensely to its popular vote tally. Don’t let Democrats’ mastery of mail harvesting obscure the realignment. GOP has a clear path to dominance should it wish to take it,” tweeted Stephen Miller, a former senior Trump adviser.
Still, a majority in the House is a majority, and even if the Senate isn’t won by the Republicans this time around, President Joe Biden’s radical legislative agenda will be all but dead for the remainder of his term. That’s huge.
Additionally, according to RealClearPolitics, in the days leading up to Election Day, Republicans had a 2.5 percent lead on the “generic ballot.” Republicans beat Democrats by slightly over 6 percent in the popular vote, meaning GOP candidates impressively outperformed the 2.5 percent number.
Breitbart’s Joel Pollak argued that one of the reasons the “red wave” never came to fruition, even though the Republicans’ numbers were looking nearly as good as they did in 2010 when the “Tea Party” movement stormed the polls, could be a result of “the polarized nature of congressional maps.”
Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report explained in a tweet how much of a profound impact congressional redistricting played in the 2022 midterms.
“Republicans wouldn’t be slight favorites to win House control right now if they hadn’t been able to gerrymander far more states than Dems. And, Dems wouldn’t hold the slight majority today if courts hadn’t struck down GOP gerrymanders in FL, NC, PA and VA in the last 7 years,” Wasserman tweeted.
Republicans wouldn’t be slight favorites to win House control right now if they hadn’t been able to gerrymander far more states than Dems.
And, Dems wouldn’t hold the slight majority today if courts hadn’t struck down GOP gerrymanders in FL, NC, PA and VA in the last 7 years.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 9, 2022
Pollak also suggested, “that Democrats ran a more effective campaign, concentrating resources where they were needed to defend their vulnerable positions.”
Remember, early on, winning the House was the primary goal. The Senate was merely icing on the cake. The media’s 11th-hour “red wave” hype might have given even the most skeptical among us a sense of false optimism, leading to finger-pointing and playing the blame game on Tuesday night when it became clear that no such wave was going to form.
It felt like if we didn’t win everything, then we must have lost.
The country knows the Democratic Party is a disaster, but the left is ridiculously good at mobilizing in voting against something or someone and not for candidates and causes — like Republican voters typically do. They proved that once again on Election Day and used that power, which came mostly in the form of misinformation on subjects like abortion and social security, to mitigate their losses.
Undoubtedly, there will be many lessons learned by Republicans after this insanely popular and high-profile midterm election cycle. We might not have taken the number of seats for which we had hoped, but it’s important to remember that there is cause for celebration if/when Republicans assume majority control in January.
Hey, at the very least, it means no more House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, right? That’s the best Christmas present of 2022.
Hopefully, we can roll whatever lessons are learned from this midterm election into the 2024 general election, which will determine the fate of this great nation.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
