Bloodbath: Why Conservatives Must Plant Mustard Seeds, Not Just Win Elections

Nov 4, 2026

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Washington, D.C.

Call It What It Was

There is no gentler word, so Lucid will not hunt for one. Tuesday was a bloodbath. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. In the Senate they flipped seven Republican-held seats, leaving the chamber at 54 to 44 with races in Mississippi and Alaska still uncalled as of Wednesday morning. In the House, Fox News counted more than two dozen districts flipped, and Speaker Mike Johnson told his staff Wednesday he will not stay on as Republican leader.

The map reads like a dare. Adam Hamilton, a longtime pastor, beat Sen. Roger Marshall to become Kansas’s first Democratic senator since 1932. Susan Collins, who survived every wave for three decades, lost to Troy Jackson in Maine. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas, Roy Cooper took North Carolina, Sherrod Brown returned in Ohio, Annie Andrews won South Carolina and Josh Turek won Iowa, per the roll of flipped seats. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed beat Mike Rogers. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa unseated Gov. Greg Abbott, 52.8 percent to 45.7.

On the ballot measures, Missouri voters rejected Amendment 3, which would have restored broad abortion limits, by 55.5 percent; Virginia and Nevada wrote abortion rights into their constitutions. Only Idaho went the other way and kept its ban.

The president offered a diagnosis. “I don’t think it’s the war, Bret, I think it’s the gasoline price,” he told Fox News. He may be partly right. But a movement that explains a rout by the price of gas has confessed it was only ever as deep as a tank.

The Problem Is Not Tuesday

Here is the paradox conservatives keep relearning. You can win an election and lose a country. For forty years the right has treated politics like a harvest that comes every second November, and treated everything else, the schools, the universities, the newsrooms, the studios, the seminaries, the school boards, as weather. Then it is shocked when the weather wins.

Elections are downstream. They measure what a people already love, fear and believe, and those things are taught long before anyone enters a booth: at a kitchen table, in a classroom, from a pulpit, on a screen. A party can borrow a majority for two years. It cannot borrow a culture.

The left understood this. In the 1960s the German student radical Rudi Dutschke spoke of a “long march through the institutions,” and his heirs marched. They did not storm the faculty lounge. They got doctorates, took the jobs nobody wanted, sat on the boards and waited. It was patient, lawful and devastatingly effective. Conservatives complained about the result for half a century instead of copying the method.

The Mustard Seed

Christ gave a better strategy than any consultant. The kingdom of heaven, He said, is like a grain of mustard seed, “the smallest of all seeds,” which grows until “the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matthew 13:31–32; see also Mark 4:30–32). Notice what the parable does not say. It does not say the seed wins on the first Tuesday. It says it grows, slowly, underground, then all at once.

History is full of minorities that won this way. The early church had no army, no vote and, for long stretches, no legal standing. The sociologist Rodney Stark estimated in The Rise of Christianity that it grew about 40 percent a decade for three centuries, mostly by raising families, caring for the sick in plagues and out-loving its neighbors, until the empire that had fed it to lions was baptized. Tertullian told the persecutors that the blood of Christians was seed. That is the only kind of bloodbath the faith has ever trusted.

Monks copied books through the collapse of Rome and kept Western learning alive. William Wilberforce and his friends spent some twenty years, defeat after defeat, before Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807. None of them won quickly. All of them won.

What the Long Game Asks

First, children. A civilization that stops having children has quietly stopped believing it has anything worth passing on. America’s birth rate has sat below replacement for years. Bigger families are not a policy plank; they are the plank everything else rests on. Marry, have children, and build parishes and neighborhoods where having them is ordinary and welcome.

Second, institutions, earned the old-fashioned way. Not seized, not coerced, but built, founded and served until leadership is the natural result. Found schools and classical academies. Teach in the public ones. Earn the doctorate and take the tenure line. Start the newspaper, the podcast, the publishing house, the film company. Run for the school board and the library board, then show up for the dull meetings. Clerk for judges, become one. Plant churches. Build businesses that keep their word. Write the novel, paint the mural, compose the hymn. Persuade, and keep persuading, under the rules of a free republic.

Third, patience. The man who plants an oak does not sit in its shade, and the man who plants a mustard seed does not get to watch the birds move in by Thanksgiving. The work is generational. That is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of joy, because it means every christening, every lesson plan and every honest day of work counts.

After the Flood

There is an irony worth sitting with. The Democrats won Kansas with a pastor who, the Guardian reported, turned his victory party into a congregation and recited the parable of the Good Samaritan. Conservatives who think faith belongs to them by deed should take the hint. Nothing belongs to anyone by deed. It belongs to whoever shows up, serves and stays.

Lose the tears. Tuesday was a bloodbath, and bloodbaths are clarifying. The next majority worth having will not be borrowed from a bad gas month. It will be grown, a seed at a time, by people who intend to be here in fifty years and plan to bring their grandchildren.

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