The postmortem autopsy and recriminations for Tuesday’s incomplete red wave began in earnest early Wednesday morning. Veteran political analyst Jim Geraghty was one of the first to weigh in with sound analysis.

No excuses, Republicans. Everyone thought you had just about the ideal issue environment for a midterm election, and the exit polls verified it. Seven in ten voters said they were “dissatisfied” or “angry” with the state of the country. Around three-quarters of voters nationally characterized the state of the economy as “poor” or “not good,” and the same amount said that inflation has caused them severe or moderate hardship. About two-thirds said that gas prices have been causing them hardship. You had parents livid about the learning loss in schools because of the long closures for Covid-19 and inappropriate materials in the curriculum. You had an unpopular president, who was such a liability that Democrats couldn’t let him go anywhere near a swing state.

And the nation, deeply dissatisfied with the way the Democrats were running things, looked at what the GOP offered as the alternative and concluded, “Nope, I’ll stick with what the Democrats are giving me” in a lot of key places.

If you can’t elect a lot of Republicans in an environment like this, when can you?

I don’t ever want to hear another Republican claim he stands for the silent majority. As I warned in September, if your silent majority doesn’t show up to vote in large numbers, it doesn’t have that much say in how this country is governed. We could even argue that a silent majority that doesn’t vote might as well not exist at all.

The one major bright spot, of course, was Florida. But there were numerous duds or near-misses, and a lot of that had to do with subpar candidate quality or campaigning.

Somewhere out there, there’s an alternate universe where Republican primary electorates nominated clean-cut, articulate state legislators and state attorneys general who knew a lot about the issues and had some governing accomplishments to point to — you know, normal candidates — instead of daytime-talk-show hosts, football stars, and tech investors, based upon whoever proclaimed their absolute loyalty to Trump the loudest. I would love to see how that batch of candidates did. Considering how candidates such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp, Ohio governor Mike DeWine, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu all romped to victory, there’s a good chance that a bunch of normal GOP candidates would have performed considerably better. Normal works. Normal wins. Normal gets stuff done.

Maybe it’s long overdue that Republican primary voters recognized the value of normalcy.

Geraghty goes through many of the losers, picking apart the flaws and missteps of individual candidates before concluding with serious food for thought:

My takeaway from all this is that Americans are tired of the circus, the freakshow, the in-your-face, all-controversy-is-good, Trump-influenced wannabes. The country’s got real problems, and they won’t be solved by table-pounding pop-culture celebrities who want to emote populist rage on Hannity. Maybe that schtick can win you a primary, and if you’re in a sufficiently Republican-leaning district or state, you’ll be okay. But the country is full of purple and light-blue states that the GOP needs to win if it wants to steer the ship of state.

Donald Trump wants to announce he’s running for president later this month? Why? What’s he got to offer?

Inflation is at 8.2 percent, the average price of gas nationwide is $3.80 a gallon, crime is rising, the waves of migrants at the border continue, and the learning loss among kids at school is real. Democrats deserved comeuppance for the way they’ve run the country for the past two years, and by and large, they didn’t get it in the 2022 midterms. Don’t let anyone tell you this was a “good enough” performance by Republican candidates. Opportunities like this year don’t come along very often in politics, and the GOP largely fumbled it away.

Read the whole thing here.