Most people learn that fire is hot the first time they move close to it.
So many of our political leaders, though, need to be burned again and again and again before they learn that lesson—if they ever learn it at all.
The results of the special election to replace disgraced and expelled former U.S. Rep. George Santos, R-New York, provide the latest example of this learning disability.
Republicans thought they had a good shot at holding onto the seat, even though Santos had done a thorough job of sullying the GOP brand. The public polls and their own internal surveys had Republican candidate Mazi Pilip running either neck-and-neck or just slightly behind Democrat Tom Suozzi as election day approached.
When the voters cast their ballots, though, Suozzi cruised to victory by a comfortable eight-point margin. Given that Santos had won the district by eight points in two years, that meant the GOP was on the wrong side of a 16-point swing in less than two years.
This has become a pattern.
In 2022, soaring inflation and traditional historical trends offered Republicans a chance to rack up an impressive triumph. The projections were that the GOP would regain control of the U.S. Senate and claim the U.S. House of Representatives by an impressive margin when a huge red wave rolled in.
Instead, Democrats held onto the Senate and Republicans won the House by such a slender margin that everyone in the chamber but the janitorial crew can exert leverage on the speaker.
The red wave became a purple trickle.
What accounts for these surprising turns that really shouldn’t be surprising?
One answer is logistical.
Polls have become less accurate in an age in which more and more Americans live without landlines. Having phones tethered to homes and neighborhoods made it much easier for pollsters to secure representative samples for their surveys. Now that people with Indiana area codes for their cell phones live in Massachusetts and vice versa, the work of getting responses that reflect the voting populace has become a more sophisticated and challenging task.
But the problem of conducting an accurate poll confronts both political parties, so it doesn’t speak to the question of why Republicans’ expectations so often have been confounded.
The answer is that they deny an obvious truth.
Republicans are losing races they should win because they’re determined to lose.
That’s because they keep following former President Donald Trump.
The why of this devotion is a mystery to detached observers.
Trump has demonstrated, over and over, that he can find ways to lose races even to weak candidates, but he has yet to show that he can win.
The one supposed victory on his record—the 2016 Electoral College triumph—was a fluke.
Even though he was running against the most vulnerable major-party nominee in a half-century, Trump still managed to come up 3 million short of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s popular vote total. If two votes per precinct in three states had switched, Clinton would have gone to the White House instead of him.
And to win that squeaker Trump needed a late assist from former FBI Director James Comey, who somehow thought it was fair just before the election to announce that Clinton was under investigation but not mention that Trump also was.
Since then, the Trump-led GOP repeatedly has seized defeat from the jaws of victory.
When Trump came up 7 million popular votes shy of Democrat Joe Biden’s total in 2020, he railed that there was no way Biden could have beat him.
In one ironic sense, Trump was right.
Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 presidential election.
Trump lost it.
Many people who cast their ballots for Biden in 2020 didn’t do so because they loved the Democratic candidate.
No, they voted for Biden because they were tired to their bones of Trump’s constant inanities and insanities.
Trump’s dubious magic was again at work in the New York special election.
When he demanded that Republicans withdraw support from a bill that would have given them everything they ever wanted regarding U.S. border security just so he could continue complaining about undocumented immigration, he destroyed the Republican candidate’s chances.
Trump said it wasn’t his fault.
Losers never want to accept responsibility for their failures.
Nor do they ever seem to learn that fire is hot.
FOOTNOTE: Â John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
