The Republican Party just had itself a very good election cycle.

Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win statewide (commonwealthwide?) office in Virginia in over a decade, the New Jersey gubernatorial race was far closer than it should have been, and Joe Biden's favorables sank further underwater.

Just a year ago, Biden won Virginia by nearly 10 points and New Jersey by 16 points. Well, Virginia just elected a Republican governor, and while the GOP ultimately fell short in New Jersey, the race was too close to call on election night.

This must have come as a serious shock to Jesse Kelly’s Twitter followers, to Blaze Media listeners, to the Claremont Institute’s readership.

Had your exclusive source for understanding the political moment been the typical right-wing fever swamps, you would've never imagined the GOP could still enjoy a week this good. You would’ve been convinced that electoral politics, post-November 2020, were now a permanent dead-end.

But responsible conservatives—as opposed to Trumpian populists, national divorce fetishists, neoreactionary basement dwellers, illiberal integralists, 1/6 apologists, and so many others on the deranged right—always understood that the American political system remained fully operational.

After Biden won, antidemocratic doomism packaged as solemn patriotic lamentation dominated these spaces. You couldn’t go five seconds without hearing that “conservative values are no longer welcome,” “the right would never be allowed to win again,” and “all that was left was formalizing our break-up,” and so on.