Election 2024 /

WSJ: How America Wins This November Down-ballot Republicans should expose Harris’s failures and stay their own conservative course.

  |   By Polling+ Staff

(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

How America Wins This November

Down-ballot Republicans should expose Harris’s failures and stay their own conservative course.

Mike Pence’s formula for victory.  The former VP writes:

“Republicans have an opportunity to deliver a decisive victory this November—not only for their party, but for the entire country.

The key lies in doing two things: exposing the undeniable failures of Kamala Harris and the Democrats, and promoting the conservative policies that made the prior administration the most successful in generations. While I have pledged to stay out of the presidential campaign, I firmly believe that the path to victory for Republicans down ballot—whether running for the House, Senate, governorships or state legislatures—depends on keeping these two objectives at the center of the campaign. 

Kamala Harris – WSJ Spotlight Coverage, Recent News

Kamala Harris is the vice president of the U.S. under President Biden. On July 21, 2024, Harris said she would s…

The 2024 election is unusual in that both candidates have a record in the White House. It’s the first election in which both candidates are running away from those records.

It’s understandable that Democrats would want to distance themselves from Ms. Harris’s record of failure. As border czar, she has overseen the worst border crisis in American history and allowed more than 10 million illegal immigrants to enter our country. On her watch, inflation soared to a 40-year high, housing is the least affordable it has ever been since the 1980s, and Americans have racked up more than $1 trillion in credit-card debt—an all-time record. She bragged about convincing President Biden to order the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which embarrassed our nation on the world stage and emboldened our enemies. 

Meanwhile Republicans running for office at all levels of government have no reason to retreat from successful conservative policies. The previous administration cut taxes, which fueled wage gains for American workers and created millions of new jobs. We secured the southern border and reduced illegal immigration to historic lows, bringing security back to our communities. We embraced America’s role as the leader of the free world. We invested trillions to rebuild our military, restoring America’s strength. And our administration was proudly pro-life.

These policies didn’t just work. They resonated powerfully with the American people and fueled the historic Republican victory in 2016. Four years later, those policies helped attract 10 million additional votes. That was no accident. It was a testament to the strength of a conservative agenda that was unabashedly pro-jobs, pro-family, pro-life and pro-American.

From both an ideological and a pragmatic perspective, the wise choice for Republican candidates would be to stay on the course we began in 2017. As down-ballot Republicans approach the homestretch of this election, they should promise to deliver peace through strength, not isolationism and the abandonment of American leadership. Republicans should pledge to deliver better trade deals that increase prosperity, not protectionist tariffs that make products more expensive.

Republicans should commit to tackling the growing debt that threatens to bankrupt the nation, pledging to adopt responsible budgets that fix America’s broken entitlement programs before they collapse. Republicans should unashamedly recommit to the pro-life cause, which remains the great moral calling of our era and the issue that has animated the party for over half a century.

Finally, at a time when the leaders in the Democratic Party routinely seek to rewrite our Constitution, redefining the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights, some leading Republicans are increasingly willing to put short-term political gain over a commitment to the nation’s founding principles. The party’s candidates should make clear that they will faithfully preserve and protect the Constitution. If they don’t, no one else will. America needs the Republican Party to be the party of the Constitution.

Republicans will win by embracing traditional conservative priorities. If the party abandons these positions, it will fail to motivate our voters. Worse, it will demoralize them, undermining Republicans’ chances of victory.

We don’t want to win simply for the sake of victory. We want to win with a mandate—a mandate to lead, govern and restore the promise of this great nation.

By holding Ms. Harris and Democrats responsible for their record of failure, and by embracing the conservative policies that have delivered success in the past—this is how to ensure a more peaceful and more prosperous future. This is how Republicans win. This is how America wins.”

As was said in Reagan days – and it still applies – “stay the course.” Pence gets it.