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It wasnt a particularly surprising response given the partys noteworthy abandonment of policy ambitions. A month earlier,McConnellhad told donors more or less the same thing, insisting that telling voters what Republicans would do if elected was a massive strategic blunder: The best thing to do, he argued, was just to hammer Democrats.

This was, at the time and for much of 2022, a sound strategy. The Democrats were, as is their wont, very much in disarray: Joe Bidens legislative agenda had stalled out, leaving the party with an anemic list of accomplishments on which to campaign. Inflation was bad and getting worse, with no end in sight; many were predicting an imminent recession. A new Covid variant, moreover, had just emerged, causing chaos, hospitalizations, and death across the countryand preventing the Biden administration from saying that it had fulfilled its core 2020 campaign promise, that it would end the pandemic and return the country to normalcy. For the first half of the year, Republicans battered their rivals on all these fronts. And they also used a kind of sleight of hand, obscuring the fact that they had no real solutions to any of these problems, nor any intention to gin any up.

That the Commitment to America exists is evidence that the GOP believes this approach has either failed or is no longer applicable. Indeed, much has changed: After the Dobbs ruling unleashed a litany of unpopular outcomeskicking off a summer in which new revelations about the extent of Donald Trumps efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election seem to hit the front pages on a weekly basisDemocrats rallied with some unexpected legislative accomplishments. The GOP suddenly found itself steadily losing ground, both in the so-called generic ballotwhich tracks which party voters would prefer to have control of Congressand in several key swing-state races.

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Kevin McCarthy's Desperate Bid to Prove the Republican Party Has Ideas - The New Republic