The blank slate election

Last week’s election results in Pennsylvania were described by many as a “stunner” and a “blue wave.” In Bucks County, this wave crashed hard, sweeping experienced public servants — like District Attorney Jennifer Schorn and Sheriff Fred Harran — out of office and flipping school boards and borough councils from north to south. Nationally, we saw similar results, with Democrats winning gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, and various statewide races in Georgia and elsewhere.

In the aftermath, the victory laps from Democratic operatives and a compliant media have been predictable. Due to the nature of the wins (often by ten points or more), they are busy vision-casting a grand, sweeping mandate onto what is, in reality, a blank slate.

We are told this was a wholesale rejection of the Republican agenda at the national level. We are told it was a specific referendum on local issues. We are told, as former Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy wrote, that it was an embrace of Democratic policies on “affordability” and “healthcare.”

There is no through line here — no single, coherent policy idea — just whatever the candidates or chattering class wants to install. The reality is, 2025 was a perfect storm of three distinct factors: unbridled Democratic motivation, Republican base apathy, and the classic “party-in-power-malaise.” Simply put, this was a “base election,” and one base didn’t show up.

Here’s what we can take away:

1) The Democratic base was galvanized by pure, unadulterated anger. With Donald Trump in the White House, the Left’s institutional get-out-the-vote machine was fully funded and operational. The recent federal government shutdown was a crisis manufactured by the Democratic minority in the Senate, who held the country hostage for weeks over partisan demands. It provided a tangible, immediate grievance to further mobilize left-leaning voters. (And what are we to make of the timing? This “crisis” — which shuttered services and threatened food aid — miraculously found a path to resolution just days after the polls closed and Democrats had secured their votes from an angry public.) As we’ve discussed, “No Kings” rallies, organized weeks before the election, were not spontaneous gatherings of the undecided; they were well-planned mobilization efforts for a base that has been enraged for twelve months.

2) While the Democratic base was furious, the Republican base was quiet. The hard truth for the GOP is that our voters are motivated by a fight, and that fight is personified by Donald Trump. When he is not on the ballot, that energy dissipates. We saw this in 2018, and we saw it again last week. This election was not a test of persuasion; it was a test of turnout. Experienced, effective candidates like Harran and Schorn didn’t suddenly become unpopular. Their voters simply stayed home, assuming, as is common in off-year elections — especially in the era of Trump — that their vote wasn’t critical. The party will need to figure out this test in short order as the name “Donald Trump” will not appear on ballots again.

3) The historic malaise of the party in power is real. As Patrick Murphy himself noted in his own op-ed, his 2008 victory was followed by a 2009 “red tsunami” that cost him his seat in 2010. Voters often use off-year elections to give the party in the White House a black eye. This is a historical norm, not a revolutionary mandate.

These factors, combined with the Democrats’ full-scale voting effort, show the Left’s victory is as much a testament to their logistical superiority in ballot harvesting and early voting as it is to any popular support for their ideas.

This is why Democrats are all too eager to fill in the blank canvas. They are now attempting to write their preferred agenda onto last week’s results. Even Bucks County Democratic Chairman and State Senator Steve Santarsiero got in on the act in the days after the election, painting the outcome as inevitable thanks to his party’s focus on “affordability,” though the only plan anyone has seen put forward by the Left is new NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vision of making buses “free” and collectivizing grocery stores.

Democrats won the election but they did not win the battle of ideas. They won the battle of motivation and mechanics.

The danger for Republicans is to believe the spin — to believe we must fundamentally change principles on law enforcement, economic security, and immigration. This would be a catastrophic misreading of the results and one that would irreparably harm congressional midterm messaging efforts.

While there are always lessons in defeat and conversations that need to be had in the wake of a rout, the takeaway from 2025 must not be that our ideas are wrong. It is that in the modern political era, an unmotivated base is a losing one. The GOP’s challenge is not to capitulate to the Left’s agenda, but to solve the off-year turnout problem. But identifying apathy is a diagnosis, not a cure. We must find a way to motivate our voters to show up or build an apparatus that forces the issue like the Democrats. The 2026 midterms begin today, and we cannot afford to play defense for the next twelve months, allowing Democrats to define the narrative.

This requires a unified party focus. It means reclaiming the offensive on the issues that matter to Americans, not just the ones Democrats are telegraphing as “theirs.” We must relentlessly drive home the message on the economy — where voters consistently trust Republicans more — and on law and order. 

The work to stop the next “blue wave” starts by building our own red wall, one voter at a time.

Publius Pax is a tenth-generation Bucks Countian, political consultant, and author.