Surveying the wreckage of the disappointing Republican midterms, voters were left scratching their heads, trying to figure out what went wrong.  With the fundamentals being as bad as they were this year, Republicans underperformed expectations, and it was fairly obvious that they would experience no red wave by early in the evening on Election Night.

While I've seen plenty of postmortems already, the single biggest issue that wrecked the wave was mail-in voting combined with ballot-harvesting, which all but eliminated Republican hopes in states where Democrats control the voting rules.  This is why Senate polls were so wrong in these states. 

The two states where the impact was most obvious were Pennsylvania and Michigan, but it snuffed out real Republican chances all over the map in states where the Democrats control voting laws.  Pennsylvania literally elected a dead man, and I'm not even talking about the pro-crime radical with such severe brain damage that he can't form a coherent sentence. 

With two of our kids having gone to college in Michigan, we spend a fair amount of time visiting there.  As near as I can tell, the only Michigan residents who actually like Gretchen Whitmer are in her immediate family.  And yet she easily beat an impressive Republican candidate.  In a fair election, Tudor Dixon wins that race easily.  But that's the point.  These aren't fair elections.  They are rigged.  And even great candidates taking on miserable ones go down in flames.  The lone bright spot out of Michigan was John James winning Michigan-10.

James Carville said his party would have lost 57 seats but was saved by Donald Trump.  Nonsense.  They were saved by mass mail-in voting and ballot-harvesting.  That is the fundamental difference between today and 2010, when Republicans won 63 seats during Obama's first midterm.

The other narrative that is being tossed around is that Republicans had poor candidates.  Again, this is to be expected, since many people are using the election to attack former President Trump.  But it's a foolish take.  You will never have perfect candidates in every race.  But, across the board, Republican candidates were far superior to those the Democrats put up, with only a couple of exceptions.  

I'm even skeptical of the claim I'm seeing bandied about that David McCormick would have won the Senate seat in Pennsylvania.  Perhaps.  But, considering that there were enough ballots flooding the zone to elect the worst candidate in recent memory, I doubt it.  The Democrats built a ballot-collecting machine in Pennsylvania that spit out a radical ogre who can't articulate a single intelligent thought.

The Democrat media like to label Republican politicians as election-deniers and ask for them to swear fealty oaths declaring that they believe that all elections are fair and legitimate.  But I'd be hard pressed to find a single Republican who still believes that elections are fair since the lack of logic and common sense needed to believe such a proposition would likely make them either ostriches or Democrats.  That's a crisis in and of itself, the kind of crisis that can lead to a horrible unraveling that nobody should want.

Republicans used to joke about needing to win above the margin of fraud, which was generally accepted to be relatively small.  But now that Democrats can flood the zone with ballots that they can collect over the course of weeks, that is now far too steep a hill to climb in all but the reddest areas.  Every ballot they send out is easy to convert into a vote.

It has taken states off the competitive map.  Democrat officials mail out massive numbers of ballots to people who would never bother to vote, and their operatives collect those ballots and run up the score.  It effectively eliminates the concept of the low-propensity voter, since operatives see to it that all the ballots are requested and rounded up.

Within these ballot collection systems, there are no effective checks in place to stop voter fraud, and Democrats resist any attempt to apply any form of ID requirement.

That's a feature of the system.  It is meant to open the door to massive fraud that is virtually undetectable.  Considering how fast Pennsylvania was called, does anyone really think they were validating the mail-in ballots?  Throw them all into together and count them, both the good and the bad.  That's the name of the game, and in close states, it is nearly foolproof.

It is going to be very hard for Republicans to win back the White House with key states now being blocked.

President Donald Trump shocked the world in 2016 by picking off Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.  Using COVID as the excuse, Democrats have successfully rigged the system in those states so that it never happens again.  I don't care who run as Republicans in 2024 — he will be hard pressed to overcome the ballot-harvesting in these states.

The red wave crashed on Florida because this is not allowed.  How many of the votes in Miami-Dade would have flipped had operatives pressured residents to hand over ballots?  Democrats are angry that they couldn't effectively manipulate the Florida elections.  Ana Navarro made that clear enough when she accused DeSantis of gaming the system and creating an unlevel playing field, which, in liberalese, means that he shut down the cheating.

The Republican state party in the ballot-collecting blue states will need to adjust to this new environment and start ballot-collecting itself.  Entering Election Day staring out of a pit is not a winning strategy.  But that's not enough.  They will never be able to out-Democrat the Democrats, who are unbound from ethical considerations. 

Republicans need to go scorched earth in trying to overturn this grotesque practice, which is more reminiscent of authoritarian regimes that want to maintain the appearance of democracy.  This brings back memories of the hapless Dan Rather listening as Saddam Hussein told him he got 100% of the vote, with no pushback from the godfather of fake news.

At the time, Hussein's top deputy, Izzat Ibrahim, commented, "This is a unique manifestation of democracy that is superior to all other forms of democracies."

That's what power-mad Democrats have created in key states: a "unique manifestation" of democracy that produces results not much more believable than a Mideast dictator winning 100 percent of the votes, where winning is the only thing that matters.

Republicans need to get mass mail-in ballots and ballot-harvesting before the Supreme Court as part of a voter disenfranchisement case.  That should be their endgame because that is the heart of the issue.  If Fetterman can win in Pennsylvania and Whitmer can win in Michigan, actual voters don't matter that much more in those states than they did in Iraq.

Now is the time to go all-in on a legal strategy.  If Republicans wait until the start of the 2024 cycle, it will be too late.

They should also hold hearings on voter integrity and flash a blazing light on the issue.  This is also why it is so important that Kari Lake wins in Arizona.  The Republicans desperately need smart and fearless communicators who can lead the charge on this issue and blast through the media's demagogic spin.

While Republicans need to redouble efforts in opposing the Democrat's America-last globalist agenda, they need to focus significant effort on voting integrity.  That means they need to go to war through every legal means possible to end mass mail-in voting, while seeking to completely outlaw ballot-harvesting.  If they don't, history will keep repeating itself until America collapses under the weight of Democrat corruption.

 Fletch Daniels can be reached on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.

Image: Tom Arthur via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.