Some quarters of the GOP establishment, along with the Never Trumpers, and the liberal media are trying to shame or scapegoat former President Trump for the lackluster performance by Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.

Like Trump or not, and at times he’s his ego or outsized personality is off-putting, the decisive issue was, instead, the ground game.

That is, mail-in ballots from outdated voter rolls handed out like Halloween candy with no chain of custody or even minimal signature checks after they arrive, along with ballot harvesting of same by very crafty and organized Democrat operatives.

The Election Day, in-person vote by Republicans and Republican leaners was insufficient to overcome the Dems’ advantage in banking ballots in certain battleground states.

According to Jack Gleason of American Thinker:

Anyone who floats the idea that the Republican red wave disappeared because of poor GOP tactics, or inadequate candidates, is either stupid or part of this conspiracy.  In fact, it’s an excellent “RINO detector”!

Any “conservative” news organization that is not focusing 100 percent on the corruption that has been unearthed in Maricopa County is complicit…

Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake claims that the in-person vote was sabotaged.

As long as sketchy ballot harvesting remains legal in various jurisdictions, the GOP has to respond with their own field collection efforts.

Moreover, the only way to bring rationality back to the voting process is to get elected in the first place.

As historian Victor Davis Hanson observed:

[]Are we not in the midst of the greatest political revolution of our age? Election Day voting in most states has been reduced to about 30% of the electorate. What replaced it is an utter mess of early balloting, absentee balloting, mail-in balloting, ranked voting, run-off voting, and endless counting.

The Left saw winning advantages with these radical changes, many made under the pretext of the COVID-19 lockdowns. And it has mastered them to such a degree that most Republicans with small leads at the end of Election Day now expect to lose over the subsequent days and weeks.

Yet, the Republicans already got burned in 2020 by these ongoing radical changes. Did they not have ample time to avoid their recurrence?

Is the the “fossilized Republican hierarchy,” as VDH described it, listening?

Note: The mention of knives or guns in the above is metaphorical.