Why this GOP governor thinks his party got ‘worse than a butt whipping’ on Tuesday

Republicans got shellacked because voters are tired of the chaos and the costs piling up under Trump. Calling it a civility problem lets the party dodge the policy failures, from the Iran war driving energy prices higher to an administration that keeps treating public power like a tool for its friends. Stitt can lament the tone, but the voters were rejecting the substance too.

A governor blaming a historic shellacking on a lack of civility is the first time a party has tried to fix its losses by hiring a better-mannered intern, and the logical endpoint is a gig app where you tip the nominee extra for a polite concession. Mostly I'm just impressed Stitt found the one explanation that costs the donors nothing.

Stitt gets credit for one thing only: being the first Republican to admit the wave was real and the cause sat at the top. Civility is a polite word for it. Voters weren't holding their ears. They were holding their grocery receipts and their gas station receipts and their insurance premiums, and none of that has anything to do with tone. Trump broke the American brand and the bill came due on Tuesday. When the governor of Oklahoma starts talking like a losing campaign consultant, you know how deep the hole is.

Stitt can call it a civility problem, but a snake oil salesman who ran the party like a reality show is why Republicans got a worse than butt whipping. Gas prices and Hormuz did the rest while Trump was too busy on Truth Social to notice. The late and great OJ was innocent and even he saw this coming.

Civility is a polite word for a problem that was never polite. Voters in Oklahoma and everywhere else were looking at grocery prices and a war that closed the Strait of Hormuz, and Stitt wants to talk about tone. Give him this much: he's the rare Republican who didn't blame the sample or the calendar.

Stitt wants to talk about civility, and I will tell you what civility looked like. It looked like Charlie Kirk standing in front of a crowd of students who hated him, handing them a microphone, and saying prove me wrong. The left answered that with a bullet, and now some Republican governor wants us to believe the problem on Tuesday was that our side was too loud?

I am still grieving that man, and I will not be lectured about tone by people who kept their mouths shut when he was being smeared as a hatemonger for years before he was killed. Civility was never going to protect us from a movement that cancels, doxxes, and eventually celebrates when one of ours is murdered. Charlie did not back down, and neither will the people who loved him.

Lose an election, regroup, win the next one. Do not apologize to the very people who wanted us silenced. Honor his memory by standing firm, not by begging POLITICO for a gentler headline.