In a night when the big election dramas were taking place in Virginia and New Jersey, the stunning Democrat defeats in New York were overlooked because they were extremely local. And yet they show off the different ways that Republicans ran successfully against the regime.

While there’s been a great deal of focus on the role of CRT and education in Virginia, those weren’t really the issues in the Tri-State Area.

New York Republicans got back to their reliable Guliani and Pataki era roots by running against Dem pro-crime policies. And it worked.

Across the country, Democrats witnessed an intense backlash on Election Day, as the party suffered major losses in Virginia and in many suburban communities like Nassau County, where Democratic leaders were swept from office by Republicans — even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 100,000…

The Democratic county executive, Laura Curran, trailed her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, by more than four percentage points; Mr. Blakeman has declared victory, but Ms. Curran has not conceded.

The race for district attorney, a post that has been held by a Democrat since 2006, was won by the Republican Anne Donnelly, a 32-year veteran of the district attorney’s office with little prior political experience. She coasted to a 20-point win over Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic state senator and former federal prosecutor. And the race to replace the outgoing Democratic county comptroller went to a Republican, Elaine Phillips.

While there were a variety of facts including dislike of Biden, vaccine mandates, Afghanistan, and Israel, the key was crime…

In conversations with more than a dozen Nassau County voters this week, they cited their overall disapproval of the president, their distaste for vaccine mandates and a fear of funds being diverted from the police as factors in their decision to vote Republican. Concerns over Mr. Biden’s handling of Israel also arose several times.

Republicans ran on an unapologetic pushback to Dem pro-crime policies. Here’s what that looks like.

In one ad, the Donnelly campaign recruited the mother of a shooting victim from Syracuse. “Senator Todd Kaminsky helped write the law that set my daughter’s killer free,” says the mother, Jennifer Payne, who also appeared in a 2020 ad for Representative John Katko, a Republican from central New York.

In another Donnelly ad, viewers were met by ominous music and the mustachioed visage of John Wighaus, the president of the Nassau County Detectives Association, who held Mr. Kaminsky responsible for the release of “killers, rapists and violent thugs.”

This is the kind of blunt, unapologetic, and direct language we need. 

The problem is that too many Republicans became complicit in “criminal justice reform” programs to help criminals the way that an earlier generation had become tied up with amnesty for illegal aliens leaving them unable and unwilling to pursue muscular messaging.

Too many law enforcement associations fighting Soros DAs have been on their own with no larger assistance from the GOP. And even locally, few Republicans will call these programs what they are, pro-crime policies, instead using language like “overreach” or “unsafe”.

Likewise on taxes, Republicans cut to the chase.

Ms. Curran’s opponent, Mr. Blakeman, focused his campaign almost exclusively on county taxes, even incorporating “cut Nassau taxes” into the URL for his campaign website.

For eight years before Ms. Curran’s ascension to county executive in 2018, her predecessor had frozen property assessments for tax purposes. Upon taking office, Ms. Curran began a process to rework a tax system she called “corrupt.” But after the reassessments, 65 percent of Nassau County homeowners saw higher taxes, according to a report in Newsday, and Ms. Curran’s opponents seized on anger about those tax increases.

“There’s some terrible news coming in the mail: It’s your school tax bill,” Mr. Blakeman said in one ad. “Laura Curran’s reassessment has caused property taxes to soar two years in a row. Curran’s tax hikes will continue for three more years, unless we stop her.”

It doesn’t get more direct than that. So why is it so hard for Republicans to grasp the message and hit hard?