Fresh off an underwhelming midterm showing, the GOP is taking a step back to assess what went wrong in 2022 and how they can fix it in time for 2024. But based on the extremist figures they’ve brought on to lead the postmortem, it seems the party is already missing the message voters sent in November. 

Politico reported Tuesday that the Republican National Committee has commissioned a review of the party’s performance in the midterms, which saw them fail to take back the Senate and gain just a narrow House majority, despite all the talk of a “red wave” or “tsunami.” The goal, according to embattled RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, is to evaluate the last election in order to “chart a winning course in the years to come.” But the extremist figures the RNC has tapped to lead that audit are some of the very same losers that have brought the party into its current predicament. Among the supposedly “talented” conservatives tasked with leading the party back to victory: Kellyanne Conway, whose former boss has never won a popular vote and has tanked his own party in three consecutive elections now; Blake Masters, the far-right Peter Thiel-protégé who lost his Arizona Senate race by five points earlier this month; and Tony Perkins, the anti-gay religious extremist who supported Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and who has spent decades practicing the precise brand of hardline social conservatism that voters rejected at the polls this cycle. 

“Our party needs to modernize,” Masters said in a statement. “I look forward to working with Ronna to make sure the party effectively supports our candidates and wins big in 2024.”

The advisory group does include some winning candidates: Katie Britt, Monica De La Cruz, and John James, who were among a small handful of Trump-backed candidates to actually succeed this cycle. But given the panel's inclusion of numerous Trumpian right-wingers, it’s hard to imagine the group charting a path toward “modernization” or “big wins,” as Masters described in his mission statement.

It’s not even clear how the “working with Ronna” part of Masters’ statement will shake out, when the RNC chair could soon be facing serious challenges to her post. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and leading 2020 election denier, says he will run to replace McDaniel as head of the committee. It’s hard, maybe, to imagine such a campaign posing a real threat to McDaniel’s leadership, even though Trump—who has already launched his 2024 White House run—has seemingly expressed support for Lindell’s bid. (Lindell, who is running on an election-denial platform, suggested to Steve Bannon that he may not accept the results if he loses his bid to become RNC chair, setting up a kind of Big Lie Inception: “I would question any election which used a computer,” he told Bannon.)

But a more formidable challenge could come from Lee Zeldin, the New York congressman who lost his gubernatorial bid this year, but performed better than any Republican in the state in two decades. Zeldin has been openly considering a run for McDaniel’s job, and Republican gains in New York races this year have earned him some buzz within the party as a potential future leader. “Even in places where we came up a little bit short like Lee Zeldin’s race for governor in New York, he performed very well compared to Republicans in recent elections, and he probably helped save the House of Representatives by bringing four new Republican congressmen-elect across the finish line in New York,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton said of Zeldin in an appearance on Meet the Press earlier this month. 

But Zeldin, a staunch Trump ally and 2020 election denier himself, would hardly seem to represent a real departure from a GOP that has descended into MAGA madness. He, Lindell, and the team reviewing the 2022 cycle instead seem likely to at best preserve the party’s untenable status quo and at worst double down on it. Ten years ago, after Barack Obama won reelection over GOP challenger Mitt Romney, the party commissioned a similar autopsy, which found that the party needed to foster a “more welcoming form of conservatism” if it wanted to be viable in the long term. Republicans clearly ignored that report, trading their dignity and supposed ideals for whatever short-term gains Trump could provide. But now, as the returns on their investment in the former president diminish, they are reaching another inflection point—and they seem poised to repeat the same cycle.