The Republicans see the Bear in the woods. Even if most won’t poke it yet.

Nancy Mace, Mario Diaz-Balart, Drew Ferguson, Ken Calvert, Mark Amodei and James Comer on how to learn from 2022 in 2024.

You get an all-knowing look when you pose the question to almost any Republican in Washington, which is why I carefully framed it the way I did – intentionally open – allowing the receiver to run with it on the field wherever they’d like.

What did you learn from the 2022 election results that the party can apply to 2024?

I did not lead with Trump or even incorporate the former president into my initial query.

But they know. 

They know, evidenced by their perspicacious gaze.

Or their extended pause.

Trey Hollingsworth, the just-retired Republican congressman from Indiana, took a full 30 seconds to process the question. Even chuckled at first. Because he knows.

“Give me a second,” he asked.

Hollingsworth, who retired this year making good on a self-imposed four-term limit, provided two answers.

“I think the first answer is generic environments do not elect candidates. There was a lot of wind at Republicans back, a lot of discontent with the administration and a Democrat controlled Washington. But that doesn’t elect candidates … And I think there were many places where Republican candidates failed to reflect voter – or harness – voter frustration and instead said and did things that were against what voters were most concerned about.”

You know, by now, who those candidates are. Their foibles have been chronicled at length.

Let’s take arguably the most spectacular flop of the last cycle: Herschel Walker, the NFL star who fumbled his way through allegations of subsidized abortions, family turmoil, breezy biographical fabrication and unabashed cluelessness after earning the early imprimatur of Donald J. Trump. 

When I asked GOP Rep. Drew Ferguson of Georgia, whether there was a lesson to be taken from Walker’s 99,000 vote Senate runoff defeat, he sidestepped to more favorable terrain.

"I think the more important question is to ask what America should learn from our governor's race,” Ferguson told me.

There’s no introspection on the Senate race, or the candidate selected by the party, I volleyed back? 

"We won the governor's race, we didn't win the Senate race. I'm going to learn a lot more from what we did right. We want to emulate that,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson knows too.

Rep. Nancy Mace, the increasingly compelling 45-year-old second-term Republican from Charleston, South Carolina, provided some of the most direct answers among the dozen interviews I conducted with GOP lawmakers over the past two months.

"Our party as a whole learned very few lessons,” she told me, with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. “People want to double down on the past and that is not the future of the Republican Party… We have to look forward, we have to be positive, we have to unify people."

"There are not enough Republicans speaking up about the issues that really resonate with those that are going to decide the next election. And that's why we didn't win as many seats as we could have,” she said, referring to the unexceptional 9 seat GOP gain in the lower chamber.

Mace, Ferguson and Hollingsworth illustrate the three broad approaches being taken by Republicans who understand their party has been debilitated by Trump and Trumpism over (at least) the past four years and are now coping with how to best navigate yet another presidential cycle without being swallowed up by him or his movement.

There’s Ferguson’s approach: Refusing to acknowledge the Bear or downplaying the Bear by focusing on the party’s areas of success. There’s Hollingsworth’s approach: Acknowledge the problems – candidate, messaging – without intentionally poking the Bear. And then there’s Mace: Admitting systemic problems, with a creeping urge to slap the Bear in order to save the cubs.

(Freshman Long Island Rep. Anthony D’Esposito told me flatly Trump would not be helpful to run with in 2024. Listen to my conversation with him HERE.)

Oh, and of course, there’s the anonymous approach, only crossing the Bear under the cloak of darkness. And even that is petrifying.

But even Republicans who aren’t ready to take on Trump directly are starting to chip at his armor.

Even as Trump has remained the chief ringleader of the campaign against voting by mail and early voting – YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS — NEVER, NEVER, NEVER,” he wrote on Truth Social even after the election last year – some lawmakers are breaking with him.

Rep. Ken Calvert, a Republican who won re-election to his Palm Springs, California seat by 5 points, said he believes the GOP’s reliance on Election Day voting probably cost the party key races in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona.

 “Reality sometimes kind of hits you in the head. The people who worked the absentee ballots won. Those who didn’t, didn’t,” Calvert said, correlating the victories of California House Republican incumbents with the strength of their absentee programs.

“You look at Mike Garcia, he worked that absentee ballot fairly well, so did David Valadeo. And they were both very successful. And we have to do that in all races. That’s why we were succeeding in California. We had ballot harvesting in California. I don’t like it, wished it wasn’t around. But if they’re going to do it, we’re going to do it and we did,” Calvert said.

Rep. Mark Amodei in neighboring Nevada – where Republicans targeted three seats and flipped none of them – echoed Calvert’s point.