One has to wonder whether the GOP can harness anything else but the culture war. After all, Republicans had arguably the best economic and policy environment in 40 years going into these midterms, and they couldn’t get out of their own way to convert it. The economy likely won’t improve much between now and the 2024 presidential election, but other than the kind of recession no one wants to see or experience, it’s not likely going to be appreciably worse either.

Even the culture war turned out to be fraught in this cycle. Republican fumbling on abortion likely cost them some House races and perhaps a Senate seat or two as well, although it’s hard to distinguish between the punts on abortion and the reliance on 2020-election grievances. On the latter, even when Republican candidates tried to offer more generic criticism of election processes rather than relitigate the previous election, voters appear to have rejected them as “deniers” anyway.

With one big exception, writes Madeline Kearns, or at least the one biggest exception in Florida. Ron DeSantis has spent the past two years or more plowing the social-issue and election-process field, she argues, and provided a roadmap to Republicans across the country for waging the culture war:

A particularly potent force in his campaign has been culture-war issues — battles DeSantis won by going on the offensive. “We fight the woke in the legislature,” he said in his speech. “We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

As with Trump, DeSantis’s political aggressiveness wins him admirers. The tactics that some conservatives consider morally or philosophically dubious appear only to intensify his popularity. …

On transgenderism, DeSantis has been utterly fearless. He stated that, in children, most “dysphoria resolves itself by the time they become adults” and “it’s inappropriate to be doing basically what’s genital mutilation.” While other Republican states have tried to use legislation to stop gender experiments, DeSantis appointed a state medical board that banned doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, hormones, and gender-transition surgeries. This way, his enemies can’t claim that politicians are interfering in the medical profession. Rather, it’s medical professionals keeping politics out of health care.

Abortion was a tricky culture-war issue for Republicans to handle this election cycle. But here, DeSantis made sure to keep his commitment to pro-life principles front and center, while also recognizing the art of the possible. He promised to “expand pro-life protections” and began by signing a law in April that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Taking swift and decisive action on abortion prior to the Dobbs decision allowed him and Florida Republicans to focus on other issues ahead of the midterms.

All of this is true, and read Madeline’s entire essay for more, but perhaps we should take this opportunity to check to see if our exuberance over Florida has become a bit irrational. No one will complain about the results, of course; DeSantis only lost five counties last week, and Marco Rubio only lost a couple of more than that. DeSantis made deep inroads into Hispanic communities and independents, turning what had been a purple state into a stunning and bold shade of red in an otherwise less-than-impressive midterm.

However, let’s not forget a couple of points too. First off, DeSantis was blessed with nearly comical versions of an opposition party and opponent in this cycle. Charlie Crist at times looked more interested in a performance-art piece on losing martyrdom than actually making an argument for votes in Florida. Having Crist at the top of the ballot helped other Republicans win big in the state, just as having Doug Mastriano at the top of the Pennsylvania ticket helped Democrats climb onto Josh Shapiro’s coattails, including John Fetterman.

That’s not to sell DeSantis short, but to have a realistic view of what he accomplished, and how. Most of the work that went into the big Florida win took place over four years, not a single one-year campaign. DeSantis and the Florida Republican Party went deep on voter registration, early voting, and mail-in voting processes rather than ignore or attack those options, as did Republicans in other states. Much of DeSantis’ support was likely tied more to his correct call on pandemic measures and reopening the state immediately rather than culture issues. All of that left DeSantis in a position where culture-war issues could be fought more effectively, after he’d already built up a significant amount of goodwill through good governance of the granular kind.

It took a lot of hard work, battlefield-shaping, and hilariously incompetent opposition before DeSantis could declare his state the place “where woke goes to die,” in other words.

Why does this matter? Because without learning the lesson of doing the hard work of building constituencies, culture-war campaigns will fizzle out. If Republicans learn nothing else from Florida, they should learn this: short cuts don’t work. Neither does 30,000-foot messaging, virtue signaling, or opponent demonization, at least not on their own. There is no substitute for competence and hard work.

Obviously, this is no disqualifier for DeSantis, who actually did the hard work. It also doesn’t mean that other Republicans haven’t, and there may be some very good choices for the GOP presidential primary in 2024 (Glenn Youngkin clearly comes to mind here, and Trump can also point back to substantive policy wins in his term). This lesson goes well beyond the presidential primary, however — it extends to every House and Senate race in the next cycle, too. We need candidates who have built up enough credibility with voters to carry the agenda forward rather than celebrity self-funders and untried activists. We need people who have done the hard work DeSantis and other successful Republicans in this cycle did.

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

• What can we learn from the 2022 midterm results? AJ Kaufman joins me to review what we learned by the end of the week
• Plus, we discuss what we can apply as we move forward into the 2024 election cycle.

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!