Emily Jashinsky of the Federalist explores responses to this week’s election returns.

It’s both amusing and infuriating to ingest this second round of soul searches given that Democrats and the corporate media spent four years breathlessly chasing the conspiracy of Russian collusion, pursuing a thin impeachment case, bizarrely arguing the legacy outlets’ alleged commitment to neutrality amounted to pro-Trump bias, burrowing deeper into cancel culture, and generally sprinting in the wrong direction.

If only the host of Celebrity Apprentice had defeated the former secretary of state in a presidential election and shocked the political class out of its bubble! Why is former Sen. Claire McCaskill spending the morning of Nov. 4 on “Morning Joe” calling for Democrats to take a “gut check” four years later?

Now, as Tucker Carlson emphasized before Election Day, emotional, eye-popping crowds of Trump fans still rallied around him in numbers that virtually blurred the horizon in places like Butler, Pennsylvania. A lot of decent Americans love Donald Trump. A lot of decent Americans prefer him to the Democratic Party. The latter is an incredible indictment of the left.

What’s worse is that Democrats and journalists utterly blew their opportunity to spend the last four years “soul searching.” They convinced themselves the “deplorables” diagnosis was apt, that Republicans were committing political suicide on a daily basis by backing the president. Meanwhile, he seems to have been making gains, to a degree we don’t yet know, with Hispanic voters. He doesn’t appear to have been poison in down ballot races, particularly in the Senate. He also managed to run a tight race despite a pandemic, a pandemic economy, the entire media and cultural machine mobilizing in opposition to him, and meddling from Silicon Valley. …

… The political class should have given them a fair hearing in 2016. They said they would. They did the opposite. They will continue to do the opposite. It is failing them and failing the country dramatically.