The importance of Republicans competing in and winning every possible election cannot be overstated. You need only look at Wisconsin and Virginia to see the stakes.

Wisconsin’s state legislature is controlled by Republicans in both chambers. Those Republicans recently passed bills that would ban doctors from permanently disfiguring children with sex change surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones and ban boys and men from girls’ and women’s sports. Two good, necessary bills to protect children from irreversible medical damage from transgender ideology and to ensure female athletes get fair chances to compete in sports.

But both bills will amount to nothing under Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI), a Democrat who already vowed to veto both. The difference between protecting children and female athletes and failing to do so was the GOP losses in the 2018 and 2022 governor’s elections unless Assembly Republicans can peel off two Democrats to override the veto.

That takes us to Virginia, where Republicans pulled off a massive victory in 2021. The GOP won the executive trifecta, and the state now has a GOP governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. Now, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) is looking to flip the state Senate and expand the GOP margin in the House of Delegates. The difference between winning and losing here is the difference between Youngkin and Virginia Republicans repealing an electric vehicle mandate, passing a 15-week abortion ban, and further empowering parents in schools, or getting nothing.

That is why winning is important. Republicans can’t afford to embrace, as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) calls it, the “culture of losing” in which retread losers and unelectable conspiracy theorists are elevated as GOP nominees and lose to Democrats who are so often in liberal lockstep with their agenda. That is how you end up, for example, with President Joe Biden in the White House, a Democratic Senate majority, and a narrow GOP House majority that fights itself more than it fights Democrats.

That is the lesson Republicans need to learn and have thus far continued to prove they won’t. Nominating former President Donald Trump for his old job or Arizona loser Kari Lake for Senate set the stage for critical losses the GOP can’t afford, and yet that is the path Republicans are continuing to walk down. The only winners here are the Democrats like Evers who can snuff out GOP policies as a result of all the losing.