Republicans Don't Need to Choose Between Reagan and MAGA. They Need to Win the Kitchen Table.

After Tuesday's wipeout, the pundits want a party civil war. Voters who send the bills to the mailbox want lower gas, cheaper groceries and a GOP that still puts America first.

By Clara Hughes

Republicans aren't holding back, the Associated Press reported Saturday. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called this week's elections an "extinction-level event" for the party. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz likened it to a "Watergate-level repudiation." Former Vice President Mike Pence called it a "reckoning." All true enough as descriptions of the damage. But the AP's own framing of the fight now underway inside the party should worry every conservative who sat at a kitchen table this fall and did the math on a grocery receipt: return to "the bedrock fiscal and national security conservatism" of the Reagan years, or lean "even further" into Trump's brand. That is a false choice. And if Republicans spend the next two years fighting it, Democrats will keep the gavels they just won. Keep reading with Altas Premium. Below: what the GOP's own strategists admitted about cost of living months before Tuesday, what the AP Voter Poll says about younger Republicans, why "Reaganite vs. MAGA" misses the point,