Some conservatives think a 2016 loss will lead to victories in 2018 — they’re wrong

OPINION:

There’s a line of thinking going on in conservative circles that if the GOP loses the 2016 presidential election, it positions the Republican Party as stronger in the 2018 and 2020 contests.

This is especially popular among the #NeverTrump crowd, where they view Mr. Trump’s rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as poisonous in the general election as well, and they are chalking up what they consider an inevitable defeat as a rallying cry in future contests.

“There is a positive way to look at losing the White House this year,” Sam Geduldig, a Washington lobbyist and Republican fundraiser, told Bloomberg News when asked about polls showing Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz losing to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“In 2008, we were dead-to-rights, but made up ground in 2010, and now we have the largest House majority since Herbert Hoover. We can make up a lot of ground running against Hillary Clinton in 2018,” he said.

He’s wrong. Here’s why.

First, the 2016 election has been a pivotal one, unlike others in history, where many have flocked to the Republican Party for the first time to voice their frustration with establishment politics and back an outsider, businessman Donald Trump.

Pat Buchanan believes Mr. Trump has ignited a new populist movement — one that’s not going away even if Mr. Trump doesn’t succeed in winning the GOP nomination. It’s a movement the Republican Party won’t be able to ignore, or take for granted, come future elections.

“If, through rules changes, subterfuge and faithless delegates, party elites swindle him [Trump] out of the nomination, do they think that the millions who came out to vote for Trump will go home and say: We lost it fair and square?” Mr. Buchanan wrote in his column. “Whatever happens to Trump, the country has spoken. And if the establishment refuses to heed its voice, and returns to the policies the people have repudiated, it should take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning: ’Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.’ “

There’s no way to know if Mr. Buchanan’s prediction is true, but I do believe Mr. Trump is the recipient of a movement that was already underway within the Republican Party — one that wants to return to nationalism, jobs, wants America to project strength in foreign relations, and values the protection of its borders. Mr. Trump was simply its vessel.

If Mr. Trump doesn’t succeed in this election, surely this group of people will find another voice come future contests — and it won’t be in the Republican Party.

Secondly, conservatives need to stand for something, not simply be against everything Democrats propose. Running as the anti-Obama or the anti-Clinton can only get the party so far — it needs to inspire and motivate its base with its causes. Educate them.

I was at a conservative rallying event this past weekend, and they cited one of their great accomplishments as stopping the expansion of Obamacare in Congress — it’s the first time in history that an entitlement program hasn’t grown in size and scope since being passed.

I’m sorry, but that’s simply not good enough. Had Republicans been doing their job in the first place, issuing the right messages to the American people with a valid alternative, the bill would’ve never passed. Now, we have a $1.38 trillion juggernaut that will be all but impossible to repeal.

You see, with every passing day under liberal policies and ideas, they become more entrenched in the fabric of our great nation — they become the status quo and are much harder to argue against or disrupt.

Yes, by the time 2020 rolls around, Mrs. Clinton may be extremely unpopular as the next sitting president, just because she is so now. There will also, undoubtedly, be Democratic exhaustion after the party has served three terms in office.

But who knows what state our country will be in. Liberal justices will rule the court, and Democratic ideas will rule the minds of our youth.

And the Republican Party will not have evolved. It will not have changed. It will not have listened to the cares, concerns and worries of Mr. Trump’s voters, and instead just sat around and waited for this exhaustion to set in.

By then, it will have been too late.