The Good The Bad And The Ugly: “Everybody Lost”

Less than two weeks from the midterm elections, Republicans are still grappling with a sweeping loss – a nationwide bloodbath that hasn’t been experienced in decades, snaring candidates across the quality spectrum. It seems everyone from armchair quarterback podcasters to campaign consultants and longtime political insiders has a take on what, exactly, went down. But do we really need more ego-soothing explanations or narratives that conform to certain slices of the political party, or are wound-licking Republicans better served by a cold, hard dose of the truth?

Ben Domenech talks with Curt Anderson, who worked at the White House under Ronald Reagan and served as political director for the Republican National Committee before founding the political consulting firm OnMessage. In this weekend’s Punch interview, the two discuss if candidate quality really matters, how messaging makes or breaks campaigns, the surprising issue that no one saw coming, and what comes next in 2028.

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Ben Domenech: I was in Nashville doing the Daily Wire evening coverage, and I went into it as one of the more pessimistic members of their cohort. I quickly found out I was actually the most pessimistic, which surprised me because I thought Republicans could achieve a 50-50 Senate on a very good night. I quickly found out everyone else had much more optimism in terms of their expectations and were much more surprised by the outcome. Were you at all surprised by the outcome?

Curt Anderson: I thought going into it, it was going to either be bad or really bad, and it was really bad. I would say in the Senate, 44 seats; I thought the floor was 46. So I’m not surprised we lost in the House and the Senate. It was a skosh worse than I thought, so not terribly surprised.

BD: When it comes to the conversation around this, very quickly and early in the evening, us dumb pundits start turning to the concept of candidate quality. So we start talking about Darline Graham, about Vivek Ramaswamy, and about Ken Paxton. But it seemed like the way that this whole sweep happened, the candidate quality was completely secondary.

CA: I’ll get to that. One more thing on your previous question. Forget the pundits, but among people who work in politics and work in elections and campaigns, people who were shocked — and I know that there was a bunch of them — by the results should consider reevaluating what they’re doing.

BD: What line of work would you recommend them going into instead, Curt?

CA: Food service. Landscaping’s okay; it just depends on the climate you’re in. I’ve done landscaping. I can’t do it. I’m too old for it, so that’s going to be a problem.

BD: It’s honorable work.

CA: When you have an election like this, I would say it this way: the good, the bad, and the ugly candidates all lost. And I would say John James was a really good candidate. Vivek Ramaswamy was a really bad candidate. Ken Paxton was an ugly candidate. They all lost. And so it hides candidate quality. It’s totally hidden in an election like this. All of a sudden, it doesn’t matter. I do think we did, at least on balance in the big races in the Senate, we had not very good candidates. We just didn’t. Who was a good candidate? Ashley Hinson in Iowa was a pretty good candidate. And I think Mike Rogers is a bad candidate.

BD: Mike Rogers is a bad candidate. That was something that I actually felt like I was arguing up a hill when I was saying that, but he’s especially a bad candidate given who he was facing.

CA: And then you get these people who like to get into this argument about, well, if Trump hadn’t anointed Paxton, would Cornyn have won? Well, no, probably not.

BD: No, and I’ll say this as an ex-Cornyn staffer, one of the first conversations I had with a fellow ex-Cornyn staffer was that John would’ve lost. In this climate, John would’ve lost. It would’ve been less expensive and less distracting, but he still would’ve lost.

CA: Yes, he would’ve lost by half as much or even better. But losing’s losing. Candidate quality is relevant in most elections, but when you have a big wave like this, it’s not.

BD: When you’re looking back at this election, there was this idea that was implanted in people’s brains in, I would say, early September, that there were a couple of things that mattered. One was that the House is gone; it’s lost. That’s built in; it’s just baked. But it could be a narrow loss, maybe even single digits, which puts the screws to Hakeem Jeffries and keeps it possible to win it back in a cycle or two. If you have President Trump really fully engaged and if you have a ton of money come off the shelves to run a bunch of ads and to boost up Republicans across the country, just given the fact that even if the House is lost, even if the historical trends prevail, you could have these two factors kind of come in to change the direction of the wind and make it harder for Democrats to form a firm majority.

Why did that not happen?

CA: I think you can find the answer in a phrase you just used, which is “change the direction of the wind.” That doesn’t happen. It’s almost like we’ve forgotten basic math. Now this is a long answer, but I want to look at this election as it really is, not through the lens of my ideology, somebody else’s ideology, or emotions, or trying to score points against one wing of the party. Let’s just look at what is empirically fact-based, no opinions, what happened. First of all, anytime a president — and the president is the leader of the party, Republican or Democrat — has almost two-thirds of the public holding an unfavorable view of him, his party is going to get smoked. And that’s not an opinion; that’s just a fact. It’s an empirical fact. And we can pretend otherwise, but that’s not reality. And it’s like we’re not good at math all of a sudden, and there’s no way around it. It’s like the law of gravity. You can’t cheat it. It doesn’t matter which party.

The second thing I would say, along the lines of that, if you’re losing the message war, you’re losing. And there are people who think, oh, well, okay, it’s true that 60% to 65% of the public has an unfavorable view of the president, but we’ve got a bunch of money, and we’ve got tactics and modeling and all this other stuff, and we’ll MacGyver our way through this. And that’s just not true, and it’s never true. You can’t tactic your way out of losing the message war. You can’t pay your way out of it. And we tried both in this election. Money, turnout schemes — we’re going to get the people who secretly like us and don’t usually vote. No. If you’re losing the message war, you’re losing the election.

I don’t fault people for trying their best, but that’s just the facts. I’m not even pointing fingers. I’m just saying this is reality. Now you can argue that the public is wrong, that their assessment of the presidency is wrong, that they should be happy…

BD: Let me interject something there. One of the most infuriating stats I saw in the weeks before the election was that people actually had a lower opinion of the economy and lower expectations for economic growth than they did in the midst of the financial crisis. Now, I don’t want to tell people that voters are stupid, but those voters are stupid. If you feel like that’s the state of the economy today, you are a freaking idiot. I just don’t know what else to say to you. This is why I’m never going to be a political candidate, but the point is that if you think that things are as bad — to the point where people were losing their homes on a daily basis, and we were bailing out massive companies to the tune of trillions of dollars that our grandchildren will be paying off — you are nuts compared to this economy.

So how do you deal with the situation where the voters feel a certain way that is not completely accurate? By the way, things are expensive; the cost of living is too high. I completely get it. Gas is too high, et cetera. It is not the same as a financial crisis that could have doomed our economy if things turned out differently.

CA: I would say to you that telling the voters that they’re wrong is always your prerogative. I feel your pain is a better strategy. And so I’m not going to try to second-guess all that. I’m just saying that the people who were pretending that it’s the middle of September and people don’t think the economy’s good, so we’ll go on talk shows and tell them it’s good. What in the world? The world doesn’t work that way.

BD: As someone who goes on and has this conversation with Larry Kudlow about once a week, I completely hear you.

When you look at the campaigns and how they handled this situation, whether they won or not, is there someone who got it right? A candidate or a campaign. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the candidate. It could be their ads or their message. Is there somebody who got it right?

CA: In 2006, we made some incredible ads for some candidates, and they were really good. And the candidates lost because it was 2006 and everybody lost. And then you go around in future years and you say, “Look at this ad and look how cool this is.” And then the person you’re pitching says, “Did they win?” “No.” Oh, okay. So forget those ads; they’re gone. What I would rather say is this, and [OnMessage, Inc. founding partner] Wes Anderson was onto this, but because he said it a month before the election, he goes, “Well, here’s what’s going to happen. Some of our people are going to lose and they don’t even know they’re in a race.” Okay? That’s how bad it was. And that certainly happened in the House.

BD: It definitely happened to the chair of the NRCC.

CA: Right. And so that’s when you know you’re really in the middle of it. And so your question about who got it right, I’m going to ask somebody else that. I don’t know. Nobody.

But the problem is there’s nothing you can do. Let’s just take the John James race [for Michigan governor]. We had great ads, we had good strategy, we had everything. But if you’re running against this kind of a wave and voters have decided they don’t like the economy, they don’t like… It’s not just the war, but the economy, everything. They don’t like all these things, and they’re going to take it out on your party, and you can go and decide to attack your party. That doesn’t work. I mean, you run out of things. And so I don’t like saying that because I always like to think, well, we’re smart enough to do anything. Well, not really. I mean, no, we’re not. And that’s the funny thing about —

BD: The follow-on question that I have is, did the president get it right?

CA: Did the president get it right? See, this is where you’re trying to get me into a moment.

BD: Well, let me advance my argument. I think that the president, despite several of his missteps, especially when it came to his comments about the price of gas, et cetera, actually got it more right than a lot of the Republicans when it came to talking about this stuff. And maybe that’s just my opinion, but I think that he was trying to be a cheerleader, pointing out the good aspects of the economy to an audience that was not going to be receptive to it, but he was accurate in terms of what he was saying.

CA: Yes. And you can’t say that he didn’t give maximum effort either.

BD: Yes, he was deadpooling to the max when it came to that.

CA: If you go back to the setup I started with — in 2024, he got a majority of voters, and then two years later, 16%, at least, were not a fan of what was going on. And so they took it out on his party. So it’s less about how you campaign and more about just the reality of what people saw. Now, so we lost; that’s my answer to your question. And I’m fascinated by this question where people say, “Well, why did we lose?” Well, the real answer is the other guys got more votes than they did. But I look at that from this standpoint: not what did somebody write in an article or what did somebody say on Fox, I don’t care about that. Look at the advertising the Democrats ran against us. That shows you what the issues were that worked.

BD: I want to ask you about one ad that I saw.

CA: I’ve got six of them.

BD: Okay, go.

CA: Gas prices, obviously. Overall economy, whether or not the voters are right or not, the Democrats use that on us. They use the war, although less in advertising than you think. They use the excessive immigration enforcement — Kristi Noem foolishness — against us. They use corruption. And the last one that I haven’t seen written about very much, but in the last three weeks was everywhere, was Epstein.

BD: That perfectly cues up the question that I have because I saw an ad against Roger Marshall on the Epstein thing.

CA: It was everywhere.

BD: It blew me away. It was like, oh my gosh, if I’m a low-information, mid-information voter, I think this guy is the worst person in the world. And as soon as I saw him, it was: oh no, they’re going to use that.

CA: And that wasn’t unique to Marshall. And the funny thing about it, and I don’t know what the intention here is, is that they didn’t launch those in September. It was like the last three weeks, and there were tons of them everywhere. A lot of 15-second ads online. Roger Marshall protects pedophiles and perverts like Epstein and doesn’t care about young girls. I mean, it’s just rough, but it was everywhere.

BD: Curt, I had to fly out of Nashville the day after the election. It’s Wednesday night, and three people recognized me. Which is pretty typical for an airport for me. I was recognized by the guy who checked my bag for Southwest, PJ, a very nice guy. Two people at the bar I was sitting at while my flight was delayed recognized me. All three of them brought up Epstein. And PJ said they really needed to handle that Epstein thing. And the other people said, “Well, the problem is that they didn’t deliver on that Epstein thing.” That is bizarre to me as kind of an issue that… Everyone was talking about how ICE is going to make us lose Latino votes when, by the way, it’s suburban white ladies, but whatever.

CA: It hurt us with Hispanics too.

BD: Yes, but my point is simply that there was this frame going into the election of, “Oh, we’re going to lose votes on these predictable things.” Republicans weren’t regularly talking about Epstein. It was kind of a sideshow kind of thing. Why did this sneak up on them?

CA: Well, it’s almost like the Democrats did a really good job of playing possum. They stopped talking about it, and then, boom, the last literally 20 days, without a lot of fanfare. It wasn’t like they did a press release. They just started, boom, everywhere: Republicans — they protect sexual perverts, pedophile freaks, and they don’t care about young women. It was amazing. So I have to say tactically, it was kind of brilliant on their part. My response, of course, was The Dow is at 50,000; what do you care? But most people didn’t go for that.

BD: When you look forward from this election, you’ve seen the 2006 experience; you’ve lived through this sort of disappointing midterm experiences for Republicans that has happened. What should Republicans do now to avoid ending up in a situation like 2008, 2009, et cetera, where you’ve got 60 votes in the Senate, and you can do whatever your next Obamacare is?

CA: I look at this in two separate frames — two different things that can happen to us. We could repeat the 2006, ’08 thing, which you double down on losing, or it could be like the Democrats from 1994 to ’96.

Well, first of all, I have to get one more thing off my chest. I do think Kristi Noem is one of the Democrat MVPs in this cycle. I really do. I think her stupid, overwrought enforcement, her being ICE Barbie, parading around on a horse, spending a quarter billion dollars of taxpayer money, all that stuff. Two days ago — this is after the election, and you live in this television market, NBC4, the first five minutes of their newscast were devoted to a lady who’s in school at the University of Maryland, who was valedictorian last year at her high school, who she and her mom had just been sent to Louisiana for processing to deport them. They’ve been here nine years. And look, I don’t know the details of the case and everything, but what I can tell you is 80% of the people watching are like, “This is terrible.” And to your point, I do think it hurt us with Hispanics, but suburban women — that’s just like a boom. So that is a part of this mess.

Now, I would say this: the way I look at this is I worked for my old mentor, Haley Barbour, at the RNC. I was his political director. And in 1994, we won everything. We won races nobody thought we’d win. Democrats who didn’t know they had races, lost. We picked up 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate. It was the first time in 40 years that we’d won the House. We didn’t know where the Speaker’s balcony was or how to get to it.

The Clinton numbers that year were terrible, so his party got crushed, and Democrats were jumping out of second-story windows, and two years later, Clinton easily beat Bob Dole. And in November of 1994, after the election, you couldn’t have convinced anybody in D.C. that that was going to happen. They thought, “Oh man, this is the beginning of the end for us.” I am optimistic about the next cycle. None of us knows what’s going to happen, but I hear all these people saying, “Oh, we’re doing what we can.” That’s stupid. That’s not historically… I mean, it could; it depends on who the candidates are, how they purport themselves, everything else. But this idea that we can’t win in 2028, yes, it could be, as you say, ’06 to ’08, or it could be ’94 to ’96. It’d be up to us.

BD: What is the biggest factor from your perspective in making it ’94 to ’96?

CA: Well, probably we’d like to think differently, but probably who our standard bearer is. We can pretend otherwise, but that’s really what it comes down to.

BD: The obvious takeaway for useless people like me, pundits, is that this election made it far more competitive for the vice president of the United States when it came to the nomination for the next Republican standard bearer. Do you agree with that?

CA: Massively different. Yes. It changed the whole equation, and all of a sudden you could have a big field.

BD: My own bet has been that the field will be closer to 10 than three. What do you think?

CA: I think that’s right. I think that’s right.

BD: One thing that I think is going to be interesting about this is, of course, figuring out how you navigate a situation where you are the vice president for an unpopular president. Vice presidents, historically, are not particularly the most popular politicians. They are people who have, time and again, sort of failed to achieve the presidency, even if the guy who was on top was more popular. I think you can look at Al Gore, you can look at Kamala Harris, you can look at Mike Pence, you can look at Dan Quayle, et cetera. Is there something from your perspective that would make the vice president able to create some kind of distance from the president and navigate this, or is that too hard a hill to climb?

CA: I think it’s pretty hard. I really do. I think it’s tough. Remember, if Mike Pence had done his job —

BD: If he had had the courage.

CA: Right. So I think that’s a tough hill. I don’t know how you navigate that.

BD: Last question for you. When is Josh Hawley going to run for president?

CA: Do you remember this quote? This is all I’ve thought about since the election. There was a guy in the 1960s named Dick Tuck; he was a California politician and consultant/candidate. And after he lost an election, he said, “The people have spoken, the bastards.” And to me, that’s kind of where we are. That somehow seems relevant to me.