Anger and hate didn’t work, Trump couldn’t hang it all on Sleepy Joe

HALIFAX—The way Pierre Poilievre tells it, everything in Canada is broken. And Justin Trudeau is to blame. As a political strategy, that might work with members of the Flat Earth Society, or those who think Elvis is still in the building. Regular people know that when a politician tells them the sky is falling, particularly in a country as blessed as this one, it just means he is tired of being in opposition, and would rather have the Big Office. Understood. Losing is no fun, especially in politics. And the Conservative Party of Canada has had its share of losing in the last three elections. But Poilievre’s modus operandi amounts to the same simple-minded schtick that Donald Trump resorted to in the run-up to the U.S. mid-term elections; and for that matter, when he ran for president back in 2016. The new CPC leader should reflect on the results. In pre-election rallies, Trump told his cabal of Kool-Aid drinkers that America was going to hell. He said they wouldn’t have a country unless a “giant red wave” of Republicans swept the evil Democrats from power. He even described U.S. President Joe Biden as cognitively impaired and an “enemy of the state.” Standard stuff from the guy who has never admitted that he got waxed in the 2020 election, and who once boasted that he was the “only one” who could fix things. Only a man who was having an affair with a porn star while his wife was nursing his baby could say something like that. So what happened? With inflation running high, an unpopular incumbent president, and the U.S. staring down a potential recession in 2023, Trump’s “giant red wave” turned into something resembling the trickle of the dried up Mississippi River. The politics of anger and hate, which were to have punched the GOP’s ticket to a rout of the Democrats, deprived the party of a major victory over a vulnerable opponent. It also made the host-provocateurs over at Fox News, who had been predicting a landslide for the GOP, look like the horses’ asses they are. It turned out that the electorate was too sophisticated for Trump’s two-ingredient magic elixir. Not even Dr. Oz could sell that snake-oil in Pennsylvania, going down to defeat, despite being a TV star like Trump and facing an opponent still recovering from a stroke. Partisans politics aside, good on John Fetterman for the raw courage of that. So if Trump’s empty iconoclasm wasn’t on voters' minds, what was? It turns out that young people voted because they were worried about the environment, a doughnut hole in current Republican thinking and policy. It turns out women cast their ballots because of their constitutional right to an abortion after Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Trump-stacked Supreme Court. It turns out that seniors voted because they wanted to protect their social security and medicare from future GOP cuts. They remembered that 54 per cent of the benefits from Trump’s much-vaunted tax cut when he was president went to the wealthiest five per cent of Americans. And it turns out that a lot of average Americans, who for months have been watching the United States House Select Committee on Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol lay out how Team Trump tried to stage a coup after losing to Biden in 2020, were worried about their democracy. In other words, anger and hate didn’t work. Trump couldn’t hang it all on Sleepy Joe. The calculus of who won and who lost the midterm elections won’t be complete until Dec. 6, when the results of the Senate run-off election in Georgia are known. For now, it looks like the Republicans have taken back the House of Representatives. But not with the 60-seat majority House Minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy had been boasting about just a few months ago. It was more in the order of a third of that number. Although the Democrats lost the House, they have a fighting chance to retain the Senate, and, against all odds, won several gubernatorial and secretary of state races. Unbelievably, Biden lost fewer seats in the midterms than several presidents before him, including Barack Obama. The one person who undeniably lost big on Nov. 8 was Trump. After hijacking the party and turning it into a personality cult, he imposed so many poor-quality candidates on the GOP, including a slew of election deniers, that what should have been a cake-walk for Republicans in the midterms turned into a face plant. If Trump’s other handpicked candidate, ex-football star Herschel Walker, fake police badge and all, should lose to Senator Raphael Warnock come December, the debacle will be complete. Here’s how Marc Thiessen, former speech writer for president George W. Bush, put it on Fox News in the wake of the GOP’s underwhelming performance: “The Republican Party needs to do a really deep introspection in the mirror right now because this is an absolute disaster.” Worse could be on the horizon. Now that Team Trump has bombed at the box-office, Republicans are looking at a new kid on the block for the 2024 presidential nomination. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis retained his office in a landslide victory, winning by 20 points over hapless Charlie Crist. That earned the winner a newspaper headline that read “Ron DeFuture.” It also earned him a nickname from the Orange One, “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Everyone knows that Trump does not play well with others. As a child, he would have needed his own room at daycare. Curdling Trump’s frustrated narcissism even more, DeSantis was once a protegé of the former president. If Trump follows through on his broad hint that he will announce a second run for the presidency on Nov. 15, the Republican Party will be heading to the slaughterhouse, not the White House. By the time Trump and DeSantis finish beating each other to a pulp in The Octagon of their towering ambition, the GOP will resemble some poor creature that fell off the back of a truck. Poilievre can imitate Trumpian politics to his heart’s content. He can try to turn the Freedom Convoy into a moderate “Canadian” event. He can beat the dead horse that vaccine mandates were somehow an attack on civil liberties, rather than a life-saving public policy. He can ignore and demonize the national press. He can defy medical experts on how to handle a resurgence of the pandemic. And he can even claim that everything will be better if only Canadians dump the cause all the distress and dysfunction—Justin Trudeau. That is old, tired, and empty politics. It is contemptuous of thinking people. It didn’t work in the U.S. and it won’t work here. Canadians would rather have something to vote for, not just against. And on that score, Poilievre’s proposals sound like a recording from Harper times. The GOP is not the only political party that needs to take a good hard look in the mirror. Michael Harris is an award-winning journalist and author. The Hill Times