In the wake of the Red Wave That Wasn’t, the consensus became pretty clear pretty quickly: Republicans needed to play catch-up.

The GOP needed to do a better job of what the Democrats had apparently already mastered: voting early, harvesting ballots, wringing every last vote out of every last neighborhood and precinct.

“Republicans need to have an early vote strategy,” argued conservative publisher and podcaster Ben Domenech. “These COVID-based policies of early voting that essentially create months-long periods where people are voting in Pennsylvania for 50 days are things that we can gripe about, and we can complain about, and we know [are] wrong, but they’re not going away. And I think that, unfortunately, Republicans are going to have to have strategies where they target the early voting.”

Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in the wake of his spectacular electoral victory, said as much: “You can’t just let [Democrats] do it. Whatever the rules are, take advantage of it.”

We’ve been muttering the same sort of thing in our humble shop. After all, the Republicans attracted around three million more votes in this midterm cycle than the Democrats, and yet still couldn’t do more than lose one net Senate seat and barely retake the House.

This sentiment hasn’t gone away, hasn’t subsided. Fox News’s Sean Hannity ended a segment last night by blurting out that same knee-jerk admonition: “Republicans have got to overcome their resistance to voting early and voting by mail.”

But is that really the case? Do Republicans really need to capitulate on how we vote, even though we’ve voted on Election Day throughout our nation’s modern history? Even though we know that the Democrats’ alternative leads to scummier, sleazier elections, to bulk-mail ballot fraud and social pressure from both strangers and neighbors and family members, and to paid campaign operations shaking down retirement homes for votes?

That’s a nice absentee ballot you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to you.

“Thirty-one states specifically allow a person other than the voter who filled out the ballot to return it,” reports the Washington Examiner. “[Sixteen] states allow virtually anyone to return a ballot for someone else, and only nine states cap the number of ballots a third party can return. Alabama is the only state in the nation that requires a voter to drop off his or her own ballot.”

Deroy Murdock articulates an alternative strategy.

Murdock, a conservative author and columnist, acknowledges that the Constitution grants plenty of power to the states to conduct their own elections. But does that mean Election Day has to become Election Season?

Murdock thinks not. “Rather than switch, Republicans should fight,” he writes. “They have nothing less than federal law and the U.S. Constitution on their side. The GOP should litigate this matter all the way to the Supreme Court before ever yielding to Democrats’ rabid vision of how Americans should vote.”

He then lends some legal teeth to the argument: “According to 2 U.S. Code § 7, ‘the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year’ is the date for electing members of Congress and, quadrenially, per 3 U.S. Code § 1, presidential delegates to the Electoral College. These laws specify November — not October, much less September.”

Are we certain that the Democrats’ “emergency” COVID-19 measures can be made permanent and pass constitutional muster? After all, conservatives have a 6-3 — okay, 5-3-1 — majority on the Supreme Court.

Speaking of the Constitution, Murdock also makes an equal-protection argument. “A Pennsylvania ballot for U.S. Senate,” he writes, “can sit around for 53 days, all the while vulnerable to willful sabotage, unwitting misplacement, or destruction due to floods, fires, or other mishaps. A Connecticut ballot for Senate faces those risks for one day.”

Still another argument is to look at the deplorable mess of Pennsylvania, where the utterly ill-equipped John Fetterman somehow won a Senate seat despite the most painfully pathetic debate performance in American electoral history.

How did he do it? “Early voting resembles a jury deliberating before hearing all the evidence,” Murdock writes. “In Pennsylvania, 635,428 voters mailed in their ballots before Democrat John Fetterman’s disastrous debate against Republican Mehmet Oz. Some voted as early as 39 days before Fetterman struggled to speak — a key senatorial skill.”

Ultimately, Murdock argues, our conservative-majority Supreme Court should ponder a simple question: “What part of ‘the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November’ is unclear?” And they should ponder it with respect to the two above-cited federal statutes and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

“If such litigation prevails,” Murdock concludes, “the Democrats’ infernal, increasingly permanent, ‘temporary’ measures will go the way of masks, social distancing, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. And if such litigation fails, then — and only then — should Republicans discuss beating Democrats at the filthy, illegal electoral practices that they have sicced on America’s voters.”

This isn’t an effort to “suppress” the votes of Democrats, though they will most certainly call it that and convince many Americans. It is instead the reality described by Founding Father Samuel Adams: When a citizen casts his vote, “he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.”