March 29, 2026

  The Work Is Never Done.  Why Republican Fire Must Never Cool Between Elections. Let’s begin with a fact that deserves honest attention from every Republican who cares about what comes next. The Enthusiasm Gap — Why Less-Committed Republicans Must Wake Up Now.Here is something worth understanding before we go any further. Every political party, Republican or Democrat, faces the same human reality after a big win. Enthusiasm drops. It is not a character flaw — it is simply how people are wired. Throwing stones is easy. Complaining is easy. When you are under attack, motivation comes naturally because the threat is visible and the stakes feel immediate. But when your side is winning, when the policies are moving in the right direction and the other party is in retreat, it becomes genuinely difficult to sustain that same fire. Most people are employees and not employers for exactly this reason. Building something, maintaining something, growing something — that takes a different kind of discipline than fighting back does. Politics is no different. The Republican Party today, across its base from the grassroots level all the way up to national leadership, is wrestling with this exact challenge. Victory in twenty twenty four was real. But victory has a way of making people feel like the work is done — and in politics, the work is never done.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Republican National Committee and state party organizations across the country are raising an alarm that does not get enough attention. It is not the die-hard base that worries party strategists. Those voters show up. They knock doors. They vote in primaries. The concern is the broader group of Republicans who lean right on principle but whose commitment has quietly cooled. In off-year and special elections, Democrats have been outperforming expectations by double digits in some races — not because they are right, but because they are showing up. That is a problem every Republican needs to take personally.Moving along to the second part of this picture — what this pattern actually looks like on the ground.Across social media and in private conversations, a familiar pattern keeps repeating. A Republican sees something outrageous in the news, fires off a passionate post, feels the satisfaction of having said something, and then does nothing further. Meanwhile, local races go uncontested, phone banks go unstaffed, and special elections go sideways in districts that should have been safe. Florida is a good example. Despite a Republican voter registration advantage of over one million, early twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six contests have seen pockets where Democratic turnout outpaced Republican turnout and flipped seats that had no business flipping. The RNC and state parties see it clearly. Online passion that does not translate into offline action is not activism. It is theater.  Our next segment is about memory — specifically, what happens when Republicans forget the recent past.Too many less-committed Republicans today treat the Obama and Biden administrations as distant history rather than as recent chapters with real consequences that are still being felt. During the Obama years, gross domestic product growth averaged under two percent annually in the later term. Unemployment stayed above eight percent for much of the first term. The Affordable Care Act drove premiums higher for millions of families while expanding government reach into personal health decisions. Foreign policy retreats left allies uncertain and adversaries emboldened. These were not abstract policy debates. They were kitchen-table realities for American families.And speaking of forgetting — consider what the Obama administration did with one point seven billion dollars of American taxpayer money. In twenty sixteen, the Obama White House secretly loaded wooden pallets stacked with foreign currency — Swiss francs, euros, and other bills — onto an unmarked cargo plane and flew it directly to Iran in the dead of night. Four hundred million dollars in that first unmarked flight, with one point three billion more to follow in subsequent shipments. The administration claimed it was settling a decades-old dispute. Critics, including Republican senators and members of Congress, called it what it looked like — ransom. That money went to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated just days ago, many of the Iranian military factories and bases that American forces are now systematically destroying were built and paid for with those pallets of American cash. Weapons funded by American taxpayers have been used against American servicemen and women. Where is the outrage? Where is the fury that Republicans rightly felt when this happened? That anger was legitimate then. It is still legitimate now. Forgetting it is not a luxury the country can afford.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Next up, the Biden years — because those consequences are even more recent and even less remembered than they should be.Inflation peaked near nine percent in twenty twenty two. Groceries, housing, and fuel costs outpaced wages for ordinary working Americans month after month. The southern border saw record crossing numbers, straining communities and enabling fentanyl trafficking that has cost American lives. The withdrawal from Afghanistan in twenty twenty one broadcast weakness to every adversary watching. Energy independence was traded away on the first days of the administration through executive action. These were not partisan talking points. They were lived experiences. The fact that a Republican who went through all of that can now sit on the sidelines because things feel a little better is not just puzzling — it is a failure of civic memory that has real consequences.What is equally stunning is how quickly the genuine disgust with the Biden administration has faded from memory. This was not a close call. This was not a matter of policy disagreement. Joe Biden was never fit to serve as president of the United States, and the people around him knew it. Unelected staffers and political operatives ran the country while the man in the Oval Office stared blankly at cameras, lost his place mid-sentence, and signed documents with an auto pen because those around him had quietly taken the wheel. Nobody talks about that anymore. Instead it has been reduced to memes and name-calling, and in doing so, the real danger of those four years has been scrubbed clean from the conversation. We spent four years at genuine risk — domestically, economically, and on the world stage — because a sitting president was not in command of his own administration. That is not hyperbole. That is what happened. And if Republicans allow that memory to go soft, if the fire that came from watching that play out in real time is allowed to cool into casual jokes, it will happen again. Get fired up. Remember what you saw with your own eyes.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Let’s now turn to what may be the most uncomfortable part of this conversation — the role that personal comfort plays in political disengagement.At the heart of the enthusiasm gap is something that deserves to be named plainly. It is a higher degree of selfishness than the times call for. When things feel stable, it becomes tempting to reason that someone else will handle the precinct work or the voter registration drive or the phone-banking shift. The logic goes, I voted in twenty twenty four. The country is moving in the right direction. Why drag myself to a local party meeting on a Tuesday night? That reasoning, however understandable, ignores how American governance actually works. Power is contested at every level, every cycle. A Democratic majority in Congress or a state legislature can reverse tax relief, energy policy, and border security gains in a matter...