Voting reform has been an 80/20 issue—or higher—for decades. But it’s a 1/99 issue in the beltway.

Trump voters are not Republican voters. For several months after November, it seemed that beltway Republicans and even otherwise-smart bloggers chose to ignore this. They seemed to think that Trump’s victory was a new era for Republican dominance. I didn’t understand this. Not only was there no evidence for it, there was a lot of evidence in that election against it.

Now that it’s becoming more obvious that Trump voters are not Republican voters, people are starting to write about it. But they haven’t yet progressed to asking why. Why did voters who do not identify as Republican—and may even disdain Republican politicians—vote for Trump? Because I’m pretty sure that many of the voters who voted for Trump don’t see themselves or Trump as Republicans.

Instead, they blame Trump for not trying hard enough to convince his voters to also vote for Republicans.

And the problem continues to be that Trump attracted a lot of blue collar voters who, unfortunately, are not likely voters and who also do not show up to vote for other Republicans. They like Trump, seeing him as a different kind of Republican who appeals to union hall Democrats, but they do not like other Republicans, and Trump has never been able to convince them to vote for other Republicans.

I don’t think he tries hard enough. I think he has to make the case, in a major national campaign, that it is absolutely necessary for Trump’s personal political fortunes that he doesn’t have a Congress controlled by “lunatic left-wing Democrats” impeaching him every five minutes like he did from 2019-2020.

This is beltway-class advice, not worthy of Ace. Ace misses two very important points in this summation. First, and most importantly, Trump owns no voters. Those voters aren’t his to command. He is theirs. Trump is the voters’ candidate, not the other way around.

The second point follows from that. The politicians who need to “make the case” for voting Republican are Republican lawmakers. If the voters are not Trump’s to command, they must be won. What have Republican lawmakers done to show that they should also be the candidates of those voters who chose Trump? Why should those voters choose to vote Republican?

The Republican Congress has done practically nothing to turn Trump’s executive orders into laws. Every one of those orders can be rescinded if Trump doesn’t win the election in 2028. And since Trump won’t be running in 2028, he won’t be re-elected. Saturday, January, 20, 2029, will see someone other than Trump as president.

This means that everything Trump has done to re-open American businesses and restore American workers, everything he’s done to keep criminals out of the United States, everything he’s done to alleviate the federal behemoth that grinds down people—like the guy who had to pay an illegal alien’s taxes—can go back to beltway normal by Monday, January 22.

This is from a 2017 request for money. Nothing in here about restoring the freedom to buy health insurance.

Republicans haven’t even done anything to show that individual votes matter. They haven’t passed any election integrity laws. They haven’t addressed the corruption uncovered by DOGE.

They’ve done nothing to convince voters that Republicans deserve a vote.

Instead, their solution is what their solution has always been for the last nine years: Trump must alienate his voters by lying to them and betraying them. “Yeah, I know they still hate you and they still hate me and they refuse, after elections, to do what they’ve been promising for years before elections. But you should go ahead and vote for them anyway.”

He’s supposed to lie and tell voters not to believe their lying eyes, their lying paychecks, and their lying grocery bills.

If Republicans lose the midterms it will be the fault of a Republican congress that refused to speak to voters who support Trump. Not because Trump chose not to betray the voters that voted for him.

It really looks like Republicans want to lose the midterms. Not only are they not doing anything to win votes, they’re actively trying to drive votes away.

One of the biggest scare stories of the last four years was the threat of Democrats packing the Supreme Court. The solution is a simple one for a Republican majority: define the size of the Supreme Court in a constitutional amendment to send to the states. But that story dropped off the face of the earth in January. They never meant what they said. And they don’t even try to explain it away. They just stop talking about it.

It’s been ten years now since Republicans gained the White House, the House, and the Senate on the promise that they would restore the ability to buy health insurance that Democrats had taken away from us. Health insurance remains illegal. If Republicans are just going to be the pawl to the Democrat ratchet, they shouldn’t be surprised when people don’t get out to vote for them.

When they do introduce bills, they’re designed to fail. They’re big omnibus bills designed to ensure that they contain things enough congressmen will vote against. In every conservative issue there are 80/20 points that could be passed on their own, clearing the way for 75/25 issues, and so on. But Republican lawmakers don’t bring those easy issues up on their own. They don’t do that because if they did, those bills might pass.

They not only don’t support the issues of voters, they actively oppose them.

Trump cannot convince his voters to vote for Republicans. Only Republican lawmakers can do that. Because they aren’t his voters. He is their candidate. Republican lawmakers must choose to be their candidate, too, if they want those votes. If Republicans don’t want to lose, they need to stop trying to lose.

No candidate is owed a vote. Votes are earned. If the response to a loss, or even to a not-big-enough victory, is to blame the voters for not showing up, that’s a candidate who is only pretending to want to win. It’s failure theater.