Amid efforts to blame former President Donald Trump for GOP election losses in the midterms, J.D. Vance, Ohio’s newest senator-elect, said that such acts are a distraction and will backfire against the party itself.
“Any effort to pin blame on Trump, and not on money and turnout, isn’t just wrong. It distracts from the actual issues we need to solve as a party over the long term,” Vance wrote in a Monday op-ed for “The America Conservatives.”
“Blaming Trump isn’t just wrong on the facts, it is counterproductive,” he added.
The elected senator attributed two factors to the underperformance of the Republican party during the midterm elections: low voter turnout and meager fundraising efforts.
“Any effort to blame Trump—or McConnell for that matter—ignores a major structural advantage for Democrats: money,” Vance wrote in the article titled “Don’t blame Trump.” “Money is how candidates fund the all-important advertising that reaches swing voters, and it’s how candidates fund turnout operations. And in every marquee national race, Republicans got crushed financially.”
Vance pointed to Act Blue, a nonprofit founded in 2004, which provides an online fundraising platform for Democrat candidates.
He made note of the fact that the platform enabled Pennsylvania Democrat candidate for Senate John Fetterman to outraise his Republican contender Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Fetterman fended off Oz with 50.3 percent of the vote last week while Oz gained 47.3 percent.
Vance characterized Republican small-dollar fundraising efforts as “paltry” compared to that of the Democratic party.
“Every person blaming Donald Trump, or bad candidates endorsed by Trump, ought to show a single national marquee race where a non-incumbent beat a well-funded opponent,” he contended.
To settle the low voter turnout in the upcoming elections, the incoming senator suggested that his party lean on their key weapon: former president Trump to build a “turnout machine.”
“Our party has one major asset, contra conventional wisdom, to rally these voters: President Donald Trump. Now, more than ever, our party needs President Trump’s leadership to turn these voters out and suffers for his absence from the stage,” he said.
He further called for the GOP to work on reforming election processes in the short term.
Vance laid out a comprehensive reforming plan including “running clean, fair elections: establishing fair but appropriately narrow windows to return ballots; implementing signature verification; conducting all pre-election work necessary to facilitate rapid tabulation of early votes when polls close; and implementing national photo ID requirements to ensure elections are secure.”
“Any autopsy of Republican underperformance ought to focus on how to close the national money gap, and how to turn out less engaged Republicans during midterm elections. These are the problems we have, and rather than blaming everyone else, it’s time for party leaders to admit we have these problems and work to solve them,” he said.
