The Midterms’ Silver Lining: Conservative Ideas Won Big

There will be oceans of ink spilled in describing the extinction-level event for Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Ruby red states and districts across the nation quickly fell to a Democratic takeover, flipping seat after seat and toppling politicians many thought would die in office.

Though the largest story of the night was understandably the GOP’s apocalyptic results, a less examined part of the story arguably provides far more insight into the true desires of the American people and a more realistic picture of the future.

Voters may have given Republicans the shellacking of a lifetime, but they certainly expressed their love of conservative ideas.

Across the country, conservative ballot measures on everything from election integrity and gender ideology to socialism seemingly passed muster. Though some successful measures passed in Republican majority states, others flourished in deep blue ones.

Indeed, election integrity was the big winner of the night. Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia all passed citizenship requirements for registered voters while Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina approved new voter-ID policies.

In California, a proposed “billionaire tax” seemingly failed to materialize—residents likely realized it would exacerbate the flight of capital and wealth from the state.

Perhaps most shockingly, sapphire blue states Washington and Colorado appear primed to pass ballot measures confirming that biological sex matters.

Heritage Action has spent years pushing many of those policies at both the federal and state levels, from voter ID to citizenship verification and accurate voter rolls. Tuesday’s results suggest the problem was never that these ideas were too conservative for the electorate. When voters were given the policies themselves, stripped of candidates and campaign baggage, they repeatedly chose the conservative position.

It seems unfathomable to conclude anything other than that Republicans themselves, likely on the heels of unaddressed affordability issues and the war in Iran, bear the lion’s share of the blame for Tuesday’s apocalyptic results.

Thus, the strategy for Republicans going forward should be not to retreat on the conservative agenda, but to actually enact the policies the American people sent the GOP to Washington to enact in the first place.

Exit polls indicate one issue where voters showed their conservative views was immigration. Among the 73% of voters who said immigration was “crucial” or “a major factor,” Republicans won 51% to 47%.

Continuing the immigration agenda begun under the Trump administration isn’t simply good policy, but good politics as well.

Though the American people made it clear that they support the agenda, just not the execution, it is deeply troubling that some Republicans have misguidedly signaled they seek to turn away from the Trump-era policies for political redemption.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., told Fox News’ Liz Elkind that “We need to get off the deportation messages, take credit for closing the border and now start finding a path forward for those here illegally obeying the laws. No citizenship, just work visas.”

That is not a winning path forward. The lesson Republicans must take from the midterms is that ideas based in conservative principles are both political winners with the public and effective at solving the nation’s problems.

Trumpeting commonsense election integrity measures and basic biological reality will always be a winner, and even the addled brain of a Californian realizes how disastrous a wealth tax would be.

Heritage Action warned that Republicans needed to more directly address affordability while continuing to advance conservative solutions on the most pressing issues of the day.

Tuesday reinforced both halves of that argument. Republicans got crushed Tuesday. Conservatism didn’t. That distinction should shape everything the party does next.

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