In the wake of the midterms, there’s always the after-action report to analyze what worked and what didn’t work. It’ll take some time to be able to draw firm conclusions, because unfortunately, 49 other states have not yet mirrored what Florida does in how they count ballots. We may not know final results until at least Friday in some states, and maybe not for weeks in places like California, which in the year 2022 is beyond ridiculous. But here are some early indicators of takeaways based upon the state of play at the writing of this column.

The Senate currently sits at 49-48 Republicans with three seats yet to be called – Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Barring something extraordinary, Nevada should be called by the end of the week for Adam Laxalt. He’s up by a couple points with about three-quarters of the vote counted. On the other end of the ledger, unless there’s a wave of votes out there for Blake Masters in Arizona, which he is convinced is there, the score will be 50-49 with Georgia headed to a runoff in December. Send lawyers, guns, and money. Send everything to the Peach State…except Donald Trump.

The House is still on track to flip, although instead of gaining 25-40 seats, it’ll be a gain of 10-15 seats, meaning Kevin McCarthy will have to contend with a majority about as thin as the one Nancy Pelosi just had for the last two years. So what to make of the results?

2022 seems to be a tale about the electorate not being happy with either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. The fundamentals that led a lot of candidates across the country to success Tuesday night remain – inflation, crime, immigration, education, and Joe Biden and the Democrats came out on the wrong side of that. At the same time, if you want to look at the biggest underperformers on the Republican side, they were Donald Trump endorsed candidates. They were perceived to be MAGA proxies. Now the votes are still being counted in places, and there will be some exceptions to the rule, but even in Ohio, J.D. Vance, while beating Tim Ryan, did so in a state where his Governor Mike DeWine’s coattails were awfully long. Virtually everywhere else a Trump candidate was on the ballot, the MAGA brand didn’t translate to Election Day turnout. Why?

We know that Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio, along with the Congressional delegation in Florida, did very well with women and Hispanics. We don’t know how those blocs voted across the rest of the country Tuesday night. But what appears to have happened is a combination of factors that led to the loss in 2020 by Donald Trump, and that is Republicans didn’t end up voting on Election Day in nearly the numbers they were predicted to, but at the same time, the MAGA brand embraced by Republicans in several of these races energized the left and generated their own anti-vote as well.

Keep in mind that Donald Trump in 2020 generated a record 73 million votes for him, and for that, he should be congratulated. No one had ever generated that amount of GOP voters. At the same time, he generated 81 million votes against him. Joe Biden and the Democrats really didn’t run a campaign. They just said we’re not Trump, and that was good enough for a lot of people. That seems to have repeated in Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and maybe Georgia.

Republicans are certainly allowed to be discouraged and dispirited after Tuesday night. I certainly am. I expected a lot more than what we got, although if the House does indeed flip, Joe Biden’s legislative agenda is still dead. And if we get a tailwind, and Donald Trump stays out of Georgia’s runoff, there’s still a path to 51 in the Senate. But we have to be able to turn the page, and by turning the page, I really mean turn the page. If there’s one thing voters voted on Tuesday night, is that they’re not fans of campaigning on the past. They want to know what you’re going to do to fix the problems we currently face. Republicans did a tremendous job outlining what the problems are, and they resonated. What they need to do a better job of is what they would do in the future, not just being anti-Democrat.

As for the expected announcement of Donald Trump for president next week, word has it that the former President has decided to scuttle that announcement for a while. He’s recalibrating after not having the ability to spike the ball the way in the way he expected. Whenever he makes his eventual campaign reveal, keep this in mind. He captured lightning in a bottle in 2016. We got three Supreme Court justices out of it. Outside of that, Trump and the MAGA candidates seem to do well in primaries, but not so much in general elections. And Republican primary voters are going to have to take that into account when we do get to the ’24 primary season, and not just for president, but in selection of Senate and House nominees as well.

Perhaps the biggest overall takeaway is to see the two biggest Republican winners over the last 12 months, and that’s Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Two different styles, both worked. And not just with Republican voters. They both had plenty of votes from moderates and some Democrats, and picked up women and minority votes in traditionally Democratic strongholds. Maybe the way forward is to model a presidential campaign on examples like that and not on the former president who has now demonstrated twice in the last two years that he can’t close the deal on Election Day.

So mope away until they finally decide the control of the House and Senate. After that, get back in the game. The battle for 2024 has begun.