Conservative writer Noah Rothman argues that Republicans are headed for another electoral defeat — and that the party’s only constructive option afterward is to finally reckon with why voters turned away from it. The argument, published in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections, is a case for post-election accountability made from within the right.

In a new column for National Review, Rothman writes that Republicans “are set to endure another defeat. And perhaps this time, they’ll even take a moment to consider why voters turned their backs on the party.” He adds: “That would be a rare thing for the GOP in the Trump years.”

In Rothman’s telling, President Donald Trump “short-circuited” the process by which parties typically come to terms with losing. After his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump refused to concede and persuaded Republican voters and lawmakers that the party had not truly lost. The GOP, he writes, likewise learned nothing from its dismal showing in the 2022 midterm elections.

“With recriminations flying over his abysmal taste in candidates and Ron DeSantis’s star rising, Trump brushed aside Republicans who urged him to take a beat before announcing his return to politics,” Rothman writes. “Within a week of the GOP’s underwhelming performance, Trump was a presidential candidate again, stifling an evaluation of his failures by those best positioned to address them.”

Today, rather than examining where the party has gone wrong, Rothman observes, Republicans are working to sow doubt about the legitimacy of likely Democratic victories. As a result, the GOP “may thus once again cheat itself out of a valuable confrontation with defeat and refuse to incorporate the voters’ verdict into their appeals to the American electorate that should accompany that bitter experience.”

Elections, Rothman argues, are not simply an occasion for voters “to blow off steam.”

“They are a crucial feedback mechanism. They stave off sclerotic government and tunnel vision in its elected officials,” he writes. “They remind complacent administrations who their constituents are by diluting the influence of powerful and moneyed interests. They help systems dispense with incompetent or exhausted officials, and they surface information otherwise invisible to cosseted central authorities.”

Parties that take their losses seriously, he contends, often benefit in the long run. Rothman points to the Democratic Party’s failures in 1988, which he says shifted it away from the “flaccid, enervated leftism that had allowed America’s cities to crumble and its welfare rolls to balloon.” That reassessment was followed by Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win. He offers a similar account of Britain’s Labour Party, which used its years in the electoral wilderness under Margaret Thatcher to reposition itself, giving Tony Blair the opportunity to move the party away from the “nationalization of industry” as “crime spiraled, wages stagnated, and public spending ballooned.” Labour returned to government under Blair in 1997.

Nor does Republican self-assessment need to be especially searching, according to Rothman, because the party’s missteps are plain to see.

“The voters wanted 2019 back when they went to the polls in November 2024,” he writes. “What they got was an administration besotted with protectionist schemes that increased consumer costs, a war … for which their support was never solicited, an unscrupulous campaign of retribution and abuse targeting Trump’s critics, and a cast of … figures who don’t even seem self-conscious about working the levers of government to line their own pockets.”

If the party is defeated next week, Rothman concludes, it will be because “the voters are telling the party something.” Whether the GOP then devotes its post-election accounting to the self-examination he prescribes, or to disputing the results, is the question his column leaves hanging.

“Those who care about its future would be wise to listen,” he writes.