Sometimes, it seems like Republicans don’t want to win.

Republicans won a sweeping victory across the Commonwealth in 2024. Not every race was a blowout, but they were successful in each statewide race and held their majority in the state senate. Even in state house races, Republicans overall polled nearly 300,000 votes more than Democrats for the third straight election — they lost the majority by one seat only because of the Democrat-friendly district lines drawn in the last redistricting cycle.

Donald Trump promised in 2016 that “we’re gonna win so much you’re gonna get tired of winning.” In Delco, too many Republicans — or at least the online provocateurs among them — seem to have taken the second half of this promise to heart. They now are doing everything they can to forget the wins of 2024 and resign themselves to being an ideologically pure party — and one that will never win again.

After the fractious primaries and non-endorsements of 2022, the state party apparatus started acting like a party in 2024. Strong candidates like Dave McCormick and Dave Sunday joined successful incumbents Stacy Garrity and Tim DeFoor on a ticket that sailed through the primaries and swept the general election along with Trump. The diligent efforts of an army of volunteers, in partnership with local GOP committees pushed the Republican share of voter registrations to the highest in decades.

You would expect the Democrats to be at each other’s throats after such a loss — and they are. What you wouldn’t necessarily predict is that Pennsylvania Republicans seem determined to do the same thing. 

After Delco Democrats on the county council spent themselves into an entirely foreseeable “fiscal crisis” over the past few years, their “fix” was to impose a 24 percent tax hike. As Broad + Liberty has consistently reported, Democrats will likely raise taxes by more than 50 percent in just three short years. It looked for all the world like the kind of failure that would give Republicans a chance to elect some members to the council, which they had led with much greater fiscal prudence until 2020. The county party endorsed two candidates — Brian Burke and Tasliym Morales — from Democratic regions of the county (Upper Darby and Chester, respectively) — people who understood how to win in places where Republicans typically lose. 

So of course the hard-core fringe of the party immediately tried to drive them from the race.

Morales decided to drop out of the race after a wave of online attacks. And, let’s be clear, party activists are always going to have their disagreements with the hierarchy — that’s true in any big organization. But the nature of their criticism was wrongheaded, misinformed, and at times cruel. Was Morales elected to the Chester-Upland school board as a Democrat? Yes — because school board candidates almost always try to win both parties’ endorsement, a thing that is extremely common and explicitly allowed by state law. It’s the only way a Republican will ever win a school board race in a deeply Democratic district in the city of Chester. 

Anyone who had any experience in state politics or did a minute of research could have learned that.

Did Morales, who works as an HR professional, have any contact with DEI initiatives? Yes, just like anyone who worked in government or for a major corporation during the Biden era. But she has often and publicly disagreed with those policies and has endorsed Trump’s efforts to repeal them and return to traditional antidiscrimination law.

It is also ominous that people questioned Morales’s loyalty to the Republican Party and not Burke’s, when she is a longtime Republican and he is a former Democrat. Could it be because she is a black woman from the city of Chester? We don’t want to be like the progressives and accuse everyone who disagrees with us of racism, but it sure looks bad that some Republicans’ immediate reaction to a black female Republican is to call her a secret Democrat.

But even leaving that aside, the insistence on ideological purity is self-defeating. A minority party must moderate to win when the electoral deck is stacked against them. It is an analysis that requires only the most basic arithmetic skills. 

A similar position played out in the statewide judicial nominations: two candidates who said they would abide by the results of the party endorsement process did an about-face when they were not the ones chosen. Now, Republicans are forced to fight an expensive contested primary instead of saving their resources for defeating the Democrats. But sure, who wouldn’t want judges whose first acts after not securing the endorsement are to break their word?

There are better ways to handle things, and there’s no better example of that than in Donald Trump’s own triumphant 2024 win. 

Trump himself is not a lifelong Republican, nor is he an ideological conservative, though he certainly holds many conservative positions. The first time around, Republicans swallowed all of this as a bitter pill. Maybe pro-lifers didn’t think Trump was really one of them — but he did more for the pro-life cause than any president in history. On taxes, on the Second Amendment, on foreign policy, and a host of other policy areas, the non-ideological Trump delivered at least some of what his ideological supporters wanted. Conservatives can be disappointed in what we didn’t get, but while doing so we should keep in mind that we would have gotten absolutely nothing from a President Hillary Clinton. 

The choice is between pretty good and terrible. Perfection was never an option — and it never will be in this life.

Eight years later, Trump returned to office with the support of ideological conservatives as well as many in his coalition who do not fit that description. Indeed, that is the only way anyone can win. Conservatives do not make up a majority of this state or this nation — and neither do progressives. Independent voters, non-voters, third-party voters, voters who are not particularly ideological or partisan at all and others are needed to tip the balance. 

Against a progressive movement that insisted that everyone agree on every issue all the time, Trump built a big tent and welcomed in everyone who was opposed to that. Notably, this included many former Democrats. Two of them, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, now sit in Trump’s cabinet. He doesn’t slander them as former Democrats, he welcomes them as converts to the cause and new members of the team. 

That is not to say that we should abandon our principles, only that we should work with people who mostly agree, partly agree, even occasionally agree, in pursuit of the higher vision of conservative governance. That’s how to build a majority coalition and a winning team.

Trump’s 2024 win was a comeback for the ages. If Pennsylvania Republicans want to continue the streak, they should take a page from the president’s book.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.