On the Beach

The failure of the so-called Red Wave is a moment to listen to the voters and try to discern their rationale. We always do this in the aftermath of an election, but it’s at a particular premium in a mid-term, when the presidency is not being decided and neither party has found a candidate to manage — the way, say, Newt Gingrich managed to do in 1994 via his Contract With America — to make a local or legislative race resonate with broad strategy.Here in New York, Congressman Lee Zeldin’s loss to Governor Hochul strikes us as a particularly discouraging defeat, particularly because he ran such a fine campaign. He featured Democratic fecklessness on soaring crime, the educational crisis, the politicization of our prosecutorial bodies, and the flight of both residents and capital from the Empire State. The only thing Ms. Hochul could come up with was liberal abortion policies — and her effort to link him to President Trump. Her effort included an assist from the January 6 committee, which reportedly leaked to the press a text exchange Mr. Zeldin had with Mr. Trump’s chief of staff relating to electoral fraud concerns over the 2020 election. That led Ms. Hochul to brand her opponent an “election denier.”There’s no denying, though, it was not a good night for Mr. Trump, who in recent days has been teasing a major announcement for mid-November. He has been running a campaign of grievance rather than vision, and it’s noteworthy that such major endorsees as Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Tudor Dixon in Michigan, went down to defeat. It was actually Senator McConnell who steered the cash that led to the victory in Ohio of J.D. Vance.Mr. McConnell is the Republican Mr. Trump likes the least, an irony well marked by the Wall Street Journal this morning. The message for Mr. Trump from his most eloquent and learned fan, Conrad Black, is that, even if he could win, it’s time to consider the option of standing aside in 2024 and devoting himself to “encouraging the careers of the many very capable younger Republican officeholders and office seekers who are policy allies.”Much is being made of the stunning victory of Governor DeSantis in Florida, where the Republican won reelection by such a wide margin — 59 percent to 40 percent — over a former Democratic governor that some suggest Florida is no longer a swing state. It puts the spotlight on a new generation of Republican leaders to try to seize the van for the primaries in 2024. There are others (Governor Youngkin, say), but Mr. DeSantis is in a strong position.By our lights, though, no one has marked the strategic issues — not on foreign policy, the way, say, Reagan and the neo-Conservatives did in the years leading up to our Cold War victory, or the way Boris Johnson did, if fleetingly, in the run up to the Brexit referendum of 2016 and the 2019 general election. And not on the economy, where GOP candidates are clearly ahead on the fiscal and regulatory side but have yet to make an issue of the failure of our 50-year experiment with fiat money.That’s an issue waiting to be seized, lurking as it does amid a historic inflation that the Democrats seem actually to favor. It’s a moment to remember what happened the last time we had a real monetary debate in a presidential election. That was 1896, when the Democrats put up William Jennings Bryan on a pro-inflation ticket (he vowed not to be crucified on a cross of gold). He was schmeissed by William McKinley, who went on to sign the Gold Standard Act of 1900.

On the Beach

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