On the 2026 U.S. Mid Term elections

The good guys lost, the bad guys won - big time. So now what?

I live in a university dominated district in sunny Lethbridge Alberta where the left now always wins in large part because the conservatives keep putting up utter nitwits as candidates - people so bad at politics it's embarrassing.

This area had been solidly conservative for many decades prior to about 2008 when the last real conservative to hold office here retired and was succeeded by someone who, in my opinion, was a left wing opportunist pretending to be a conservative because, at the time, that's where the power was. As a result it seemed to me that he spent his time in office carefully avoiding any semblance of independent thought regardless of his responsibilities to both the voter and the future of his party and throughly deserved to lose to the left wing candidate in 2015.

I suspect many of the recently defeated GOP house candidates across the U.S. deserved to lose for many of the same reasons: they either didn't do the job as incumbents or were newly minted candidates whose focus on was on money and access rather than role and responsibility.

Certainly it seems clear, at least from the outside, that neither the house nor the senate acted, over the last two years, on key elements of the 2023/24 GOP agenda and so deserved to lose. Unfortunately it's a winner take all world and so America, and thus the world, loses with them.

So now what?

Job one is startlingly obvious: turn the lame ducks into raging eagles: get the members, especially the losers, back - pass the save America act, pass longer term budgets, codify many of the executive orders, approve most of the pending presidential appointments. Then establish a joint commission of the house and senate to study the role of fraud in Amerian elections since 2012 and recommend appropriate changes and/or prosecutions - and put Ron deSantis in charge of it.

Job two is much less obvious and more difficult because lots of people already want to do something, but hardly anyone agrees with anyone else on the how: fix district and state level GOP organizations so they genuinely represent the conflicting views that make up their communities, nominate candidates whose views and character represent those communities, and hold them to their commitments - to the constituency organization, to the voters, and to the country.

In that context I think that Gingrich's Contract with America points the way: legally enforceable contracts between constituency organizations and candidates are a solution the country needs - because faux conservatives installed in office who would otherwise just join the fat and happy legions in Washington could be forced to either resign or act like they meant their campaign commitments. Bottom line: it's all a matter of incentives because, in the end, we don't actually care if the opinions are real, just as long as the member acts as if they were.

To see why this works, consider the recently elected democrats: they all ran on some combination of affordability; greenness; social justice; and peace on earth through love, law, order, and goodwill at home - and every single one of them lied about all of it. In the entire history of the left anywhere and everywhere on earth not a single one of these commitments has ever worked out for the voters because the real agenda is always very much the opposite: to the left governance is about hate and the power to punish, to elevate themselves above the mass, and, above all, to stay in power.

Enforceable contracts would end that for the GOP first and the democrats eventually.