It was Trump and unpopular MAGA candidates. It was poor candidate quality. It was mail-in ballots. It was election fraud. Low turnout. Redistricting. That blizzard of opinions you are hearing about the still-unresolved US mid-term elections, widely expected to deliver a red wave of congressional control, masks genuine puzzlement about what happened and why. Rarely have so many pundits been reduced to saying they have little or no explanation for the GOP’s failure to capitalise on the Biden regime’s unpopularity.

The top issues mostly favoured the GOP: inflation, crime, the economy, immigration, and polls suggested a 5 to 6 per cent generic advantage, leading to egg-on-face forecasts of 30 to 40 House seat pickups. At the time of writing the GOP looks like narrowly winning the House but likely losing the Senate. Abortion was the only issue favouring Democrats – which they capitalised on with an early ad splurge timed for the opening of early voting.

Yet the right has so far won the popular vote by 5 per cent, with 51.7 per cent (52.1 million votes) to 46.7 per cent (47 million), without achieving the touted seat gains. Turnout looks to be around 10 million votes lower overall than the 2018 mid-terms. So what went wrong?

In the disappointment of the early results, the anti-Trump brigade raced out of the blocks to blame their favorite bugbear, and the Murdoch media piled on. Establishment mouthpiece Karl Rove blamed candidate quality, ‘knuckleheads with strange beliefs… many of whom came courtesy of Trump.’ The problem with this argument is embodied by the brain-damaged stroke victim John Fetterman, who opened his single campaign debate by saying, ‘Hi. Good night, everybody’. And spoke about Thankscoming rather than Thanksgiving. If Fetterman, like basement dweller Joe Biden, won his Senate race in a canter, candidate quality can’t matter too much, unless you argue that GOP voters care about candidate quality and Democrat voters don’t. Moreover, the GOP fielded many talented candidates, such as New York’s Lee Zeldin and Michigan’s Tudor Dixon, both of whom bested their adversaries in debate, but ultimately lost. Inconveniently, 216 Trump-endorsed candidates have so far won their races, while a mere 19 lost.

Latterly, a new explanation is emerging, that the GOP leadership team of careerists Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy thought they had it in the bag, and so played venal politics to maximise their personal caucus votes, rather than seats. They directed funds to weaken MAGA and Trump, and shore up their own positions. GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is also in the firing line for a string of election failures. Outrageously, a political action committee linked to the widely despised McConnell axed $9 million from the close Senate race in Arizona, to give to his Alaskan pal Lisa Murkowski, fighting only a MAGA Republican. This seat became the Democrats’ critical 50th Senate win. Masters has blasted McConnell, saying he has to go. Many others have also sounded off against the McLeadership. Ohio House candidate J.R. Majewski, a MAGA Republican, said the GOP, not Trump, ‘left (his) campaign to die’. Losing California GOP primary candidate David Giglio said McCarthy spent $1 million undermining his campaign. Former Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs tweeted a furious attack on GOP Senate funding in battleground states, and no wonder: Masters in Arizona spent $9m to his opponent’s $73m, Laxalt in Nevada, $12m to $47m, New Hampshire’s Bolduc $2m to $36m, and so on. Such disparities are fatal. Pollster Richard Baris also blamed triumphalism and complacency: ‘The cold hard truth is that GOP Leader McCarthy and Leader McConnell thought they had seats to spare. Arrogance and overconfidence.’ The satirical Babylon Bee captured the moment with the headline: ‘Republican Party staves off Red Wave’, over a photo of a grinning McConnell.

Trump has not helped his case by attacking colleagues, but he is being scapegoated for failures better sheeted home elsewhere. It wasn’t Trump who dealt with GOP research and messaging, advertising, candidate staffing and support, voter turnout operations, funding and other election tasks, but the McLeadership, now looking increasingly unfit for purpose. Moreover, Democrats – ‘the Crooked Party’ – are past masters of the art of politics and election machinery, while the GOP – ‘the Stupid Party’ – seems always to be fighting the last war. This time, Democrats again focussed on securing those early mail-in ballots still being sprayed recklessly, Covid-style, around many states, while the GOP fought for election integrity and relied on traditional tools such as debates, rallies, and election day turnout. One party hunted ballots, the other, votes. By election day 40 per cent and higher proportions of mail-in ballots had already been banked by some Democrat candidates, while Republicans, distrustful of election processes, were yet to vote. Any stuff-ups or malfeasance or breakdowns on election day disproportionately hurt the GOP, becoming a form of voter suppression.

As in 2020, the full cavalcade of election failures was again in evidence. There were widespread electronic machinery malfunctions in critical districts, (30 per cent in Arizona’s notorious Maricopa County) printer failures, tabulation failures, livestream cameras going dark in Nevada, 4 to 5 hour queues, voters told they had already voted, voters who couldn’t get machines to accept their votes and so had to dump them in unsecured piles, and so much more. New York Senate candidate Diane Sare tweeted screen shots showing her election night tally of 50,000 votes mysteriously reducing the next day to 29,000.

The complexity and obscurity of electronic voting are a big part of the problem, creating opportunities for fraud and the appearance of it as well. Ridiculous procedures such as ballot curing, aka verifying faulty ballots, create needless delays. A Tucker Carlson review of delayed poll counts found that 80 per cent fell the Democrats’ way. A first-time poll worker in Maricopa remarked, ‘My career in large real time information systems implementations tells me that this mess of shiite data cleansing, process chaos has to be the way it is for a reason – a bad reason.’ Oh for the simplicity and clarity of voter ID, paper ballots and one election day.

As the dust settles we will know more, but the picture of GOP failure is undeniable. One bright spot was the result in Florida, where Governor de Santis adopted election integrity measures, including an election police force, and turned what was until recently a swing state reliably dark red, an R+20 state. This is what scares Democrats; honest elections that let red waves arrive.