Crying ‘socialism!’ isn’t a strategy — at least not a winning one

Tuesday night’s results should force a serious reckoning inside the Republican Party. Not just with candidates who underperformed, and not just about the political environment, but with the consulting class that spent this election cycle insisting to donors and candidates they could win by just drumming up their base — “Socialism!” — and turning out their own.They were wrong. And the consequences are now impossible to ignore.For too much of this cycle, the prevailing Republican strategy was built around a seductive theory: The party had millions of low-propensity voters sitting on the sidelines, and the key to victory was simply finding a way to mobilize them. Spend less time worrying about swing voters. Stop chasing suburban voters who might never vote Republican anyway. Turn out the base, expand the electorate, and let enthusiasm do the rest. It was a theory that sounded clever in a strategy meeting. It was not a strategy for winning a general election.The fundamental mistake was confusing the existence of a Republican base with the ability to turn that base into a winning coalition. Low-propensity voters are low-propensity for a reason. They are difficult to identify, difficult to motivate, and notoriously difficult to get to the polls. Building an entire electoral strategy around the assumption that they would suddenly materialize was an enormous gamble.Meanwhile, the voters Republicans actually needed were being abandoned.The suburbs are not some peripheral constituency. They are the center of the modern battleground. They are home to women, independents, professionals, parents, and millions of voters who are not permanently attached to either political party. They are persuadable. But getting them to consider what you’re saying requires showing up, making an argument, understanding their concerns, and giving them a reason to choose you.Republicans had ample warning. A Hofstra University-SSRS poll released just weeks before Election Day found Democrats leading Republicans 50%–42% among suburban voters nationally. Even more troubling, suburban Democrats were considerably more motivated to vote than suburban Republicans, 84%–66%. The warning signs were there. The Republican consulting class simply chose to ignore them.Of course, candidate quality matters. It matters enormously. Candidates who cannot communicate, who are poorly vetted, or who mistake personal loyalty for broad political appeal will struggle in competitive states and districts. We should not pretend that every Republican nominee gave voters a compelling reason to vote for them.But candidate quality and electoral strategy are not competing explanations. They compound each other. Even a strong candidate needs a strategy that recognizes the electorate as it actually exists.And that is where the Republican consulting class failed.The lesson is not that Republicans should abandon their base. It is that a base is the foundation of a winning coalition, not a substitute for one. You cannot build a durable majority by writing off the voters in the middle and hoping a new crop of unlikely voters will rescue you.YES, JD VANCE: LOSING THE MIDTERMS WAS ‘WORTH IT’ TO PREVENT A NUCLEAR IRANRepublicans need to return to the fundamentals: understand what voters care about, develop messages that speak to their lives, recruit candidates who can connect beyond their political comfort zones, and invest in persuading people who have not yet made up their minds.Winning elections requires winning voters. That should never have been a controversial conclusion. Today, it should be an unavoidable one.Heather R. Higgins is the founder of Suasion Insights and the CEO of Independent Women’s Voice.