Thread by @ezraklein

A consistent dynamic right now is Democrats lose elections and obsess about why they lost, and how they could change, and Republicans lose elections and...don't.

But the California recall should really be a moment of reflection for them.

One problem with the way narrativize elections is we focus on the flowers, not the soil. That is to say: We look at candidates as independent of the voters that choose them. But they’re not.

And Elder really, really wasn’t.

He wasn’t endorsed by the CA GOP. He didn't have institutional backing.

He had name recognition, and his Trumpy approach reflected what the CA Republican base wanted.

And that terrified the rest of California, and led to a complete collapse in recall support.

The weird geographic skew of the electoral college and the Senate are keeping Republicans in the game nationally, but this is a pretty broad dynamic, and a bad one for them. They really aren't able to talk their base into making strategic choices.

I'm not saying Republicans were ever likely to win the recall. But when they had the chance to beat Davis, they united behind the moderate Schwarzenegger, and they won.

In 2020, Democrats did something similar with Biden, and won.

A party that routinely can't do this, for whatever reason, is going to lose a lot of close elections it would otherwise win. And Republicans have gotten bad at it, both nationally and in key states.

Trump's legacy is particularly poisonous here. He's made it that much easier for Republicans who lose to promote conspiracies about how the election was stolen from them, rather than how they screwed it up.

Elder went right to that playbook. washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

A party that mistrusts polls, the entire mainstream media, and all negative election results is not going to be a party that's good at learning from loss.