Quo Vadis, Republicans?

There is an old story about Peter leaving Rome during Nero’s persecution. Hurrying down the Appian Way, he meets Christ walking the other way and asks, “Quo vadis, Domine?” Where are you going, Lord? The answer is that he’s going back to Rome to be crucified again. Peter understands, turns around and walks back into the city he had been running from.

Republicans woke up Wednesday at a similar crossroads. The question is whether the party keeps going down the road of excuses or turns back toward the voters it just lost.

The Size of the Defeat

No one should sugarcoat it. Democrats won both chambers of Congress, flipping Senate seats in Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina, some of them in states that Republicans have held for generations. Reuters found that Republicans lost ground in 99% of the roughly 2,200 counties it had tallied, and that the party’s vote share fell 8 points below Donald Trump’s 2024 showing. As of Wednesday, Republicans had not won a single House seat in a district Trump carried by less than 11 points.

California was worse. Xavier Becerra beat Steve Hilton roughly 64% to 36%, although Hilton was carrying Placer County, a reminder that the conservative heartland around Roseville is still standing. Under the Prop. 50 map, the state’s Republican House delegation is expected to drop from nine members to four, or perhaps three. David Valadao, who survived for years in a Democratic-leaning Central Valley seat, lost by about two to one to a first-time candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders.

Comfort Is Not a Strategy

Bob Hoge’s post-election piece at RedState is right about the history. Since World War II, the president’s party has gained House seats in a midterm only twice, under Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002. Reagan lost 26 House seats in 1982 and then won 49 states in 1984. Hoge is also right that Democrats will be tempted to overreach. Rep. Robert Garcia’s two-word reaction on election night, “LAWYER UP,” tells you what some of the new majority thinks it was elected to do.

But history can comfort a party into doing nothing. Reagan did not win in 1984 by waiting for Democrats to stumble. His policies worked, and voters could feel the results. The White House’s line that “candidate quality matters” is not a diagnosis either. Voters told us plainly what happened. In the NBC News Exit Poll, 44% said they were worse off than two years ago and just 18% said they were better off. Sixty-two percent held the president responsible for high prices. Even the president conceded that it was “largely true” the Iran war contributed to the losses. And the Wall Street Journal editorial board, hardly a hostile voice, said the party “needs a debate about what it stands for after Donald Trump.”

That debate starts now, and here is where it should go.

Stop Shouting “Socialist”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Republicans and their allies spent more than $70 million on TV ads about socialism and communism this fall, and the theme came up in more than 880 conservative podcast episodes in October alone. It did not work. Gallup now finds 43% of Americans view socialism positively, a record, including 45% of independents and 57% of adults under 35. As one Republican strategist told the Journal, “Attacks that would normally be killshots get a shrug by voters.”

The same Gallup survey contains the answer. Seventy-seven percent of Americans view free enterprise positively, and 95% view small business that way. Voters are not rejecting markets. They are rejecting a party that warns them about socialism while their grocery bill goes up. A label is an issue. A household budget is an interest. The swing voter is not checking a box labeled “socialism.” The swing voter is asking what a policy means for their paycheck, their safety and their kids.

So Republicans should stop calling Democrats names and start showing voters the bill. The Cato Institute estimates that the Democratic Socialists of America platform would cost $71 trillion to $212 trillion over a decade, and that confiscating every billionaire’s fortune and every dollar of corporate profit would still leave it trillions short. That bill lands on the middle class. Put it in terms a family understands: what your taxes, your rent and your electricity would cost. Leave the Cold War vocabulary out of it.

Own Affordability With Markets

The harder truth is that Republicans cannot win on affordability while borrowing the left’s premise that high prices are mostly a matter of corporate greed. Free markets have taken a back seat in the party’s message. They need to come back. In California, that means a clear agenda: more housing built faster, energy that is abundant and cheap rather than rationed by regulators, and a permitting system that lets people build things. The DSA’s agenda of rent control and data-center moratoriums shrinks supply and raises prices. Ours should expand supply and lower them.

In Washington, House and Senate Republicans should introduce kitchen-table bills every week and make the new majorities choose, in public, between lowering costs and issuing subpoenas. The president’s veto pen is a shield. It is not an agenda.

Rebuild the Ground Game

In California, the party’s problem is operational before it is ideological. As of October 19, the Secretary of State counted 5.75 million registered Republicans, 24.69% of the electorate, against 10.46 million Democrats and 5.36 million voters with no party preference. Five million Republicans is not a rounding error. It is a sleeping giant that the party wakes up only in October of election years.

That has to change. We need precinct captains in every target neighborhood, trained to persuade and report back. We need year-round ballot chase so Republican ballots come in during the first week of voting, not on the last day. We need a small-dollar base. If one in 12 California Republicans gave $10, the party would have a permanent field budget of roughly $5 million. And the motto should be simple: we don’t only knock before the election; we stay after.

Because the Prop. 50 map packs Republicans into a handful of seats, the comeback will be built from the bottom up: school boards, city councils, water and utility districts, county supervisors. Recruit veterans, small-business owners and young conservatives for those offices now. They are the 2030 congressional bench.

Go Back to the People We Lost

In 2024, Latino voters proved they were persuadable. In 2026 they proved they are not owned by either party. Republicans won 35% of Latino voters for the House, down from the 46% who backed Trump two years ago. Their top concern was the cost of living, not culture. The party that shows up in Spanish-language media, at church festivals and in barbershops in Fresno, Bakersfield and the Inland Empire every month, not every other October, will earn those voters back.

Test Before You Spend

Finally, stop guessing. Before a dollar of 2028 money goes out, Republicans should run split-sample battleground research that tests issue-based messages against interest-based messages among switch voters, with the Democrats’ attack lines as the control. Find out what actually moves a voter. Then train candidates, canvassers and ad makers to lead with it.

The Answer to Quo Vadis

Democrats now own Congress and, in California, every lever of state government. They have no one left to blame. If prices do not come down, if streets do not get safer and if the next two years turn into investigations, voters will notice. But they will turn back to Republicans only if Republicans have turned back toward them.

Peter did not save anything by escaping Rome. He went back into the city. For Republicans, that city is the Central Valley farm town, the Inland Empire subdivision, the Los Angeles apartment and the young family that can’t afford a starter home. Quo vadis, Republicans? Turn around, and go back to them.