As Americans go to the polls tomorrow the hopes of the Sun lie with a red wave. The race is too close in the key contests to make confident predictions in respect of the outcome, but it’s not too close to say that we have rarely if ever seen a mid-term contest in which the relative virtues of the Republican principles — particularly sound money, constitutional government, equal justice, and fiscal restraint — are in such sharp relief.

We understand the bitterness of the Democrats, whose liberal project was stunned in 2016. It was defeated by an electorate in which a quarter of the voters were seen by what used to be the party of Andrew Jackson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and JFK as a “basket of deplorables.” It has reacted by moving ever further left and is now in thrall of an angry, socialist faction that is every bit as offensive to the GOP as the angry GOP fringe is to it.

Yet we make no apologies for our sentiments for the GOP.  The big issues, though others beckon,  are inflation — meaning, sound money — crime, the Constitution, and a vibrant foreign policy. In the contests we’ve been covering, it’s hard to think of a candidate the Democrats have stood up whom we’d choose over the Republican. We liked the Democrats years ago, but the party long since left us. It’s grown more hostile with each passing election.

For the generation now flying the flag of the Sun, this goes back to at least Vietnam. There the Democrats took us to war only to start, in the face of communist guns, waffling, eventually betraying our wartime ally. A generation later, the Democrats abandoned our ally in Iraq and recently, in a particularly shocking default, the most democratic government in the history of Afghanistan. They want to do the same with Israel.

As the Democrats have grown more radical, we sense a discomfort with the Constitution. The basic redlines are ignored, most blatantly in this season by the Democrats’ January 6 Committee. It proved willing to use against President Trump a forbidden tactic — attainder, meaning, as the Supreme Court once put it, trial by legislature. We carry no brief for Mr. Trump, but are shocked by the attempt to run him out of politics by forbidden means. 

The same nihilism is on display in, say, New York, where the Democrats are defying the Supreme Court’s long-overdue decision to strike down the state’s de facto — nay, de jure —  handgun ban as an affront to the Second Amendment. It has led to the Democrats being compared to the racial segregationists in the Jim Crow South who sought to defy the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. When did the Democrats become like that? 

Concerns over crime, dismissed by liberals as fear mongering, are bolstering the Republican cause this year, as voters recoil from the Democrats’ hostility to the police and laxity on public safety. Bowing to the far left, New York’s failed attempt at “bail reform” turned courthouses into revolving doors for repeat offenders. Congressman Lee Zeldin is near the end of what could be — let us not get ahead of our skis — a historic run for governor.

For all this, it is the economy that is the most important issue in this election — and the key issue is inflation. It would be wrong to lay entirely to the Democrats the debasement of the dollar. The power to regulate the value of our money is given in the Constitution to Congress. It is clear, though, that if any effort is eventually to be made to reconsider our national experiment with fiat money, it is likely to come from the Republicans. 

Inflation isn’t the only issue; it follows, after all, from overspending and over borrowing. All, though, are issues on which the GOP is more likely to lead a reform. Which is why the Sun favors a vote for the GOP in the House and Senate. If the Republicans are successful in either house, it will give us a period of divided government and test, among other things, whether the Democrats will credit our democracy as graciously President Clinton did in 1994.