Democrats Can Win the Culture War

With the 2022 mid-term elections now in the rear view mirror and GOP jockeying underway for the 2024 presidential nomination, Republicns like Ron DeSantis - who I view as just as amoral as Donald Trump, if not more so since he should know better - are doubling down on culture war issues,  particularly fanning anti-LGBT hatred and pandering to white supremacists.   They believe this will cinch them the GOP nomination yet they ignore the reality that a large majority of Americans find right wing culture war postions abhorent.  On same sex marriage, 71% of Americans support it even as the hold over GOP platform seeks to end and pushes for a near total ban on abortions despite the fact that this postion is opposed by a significant majority of voters.  How people like DeSantis think taking such extreme positions will help them in the general election is baffling unless they believe voters are too stupid to remember their past actions and demagoguery (this may be true of much of the GOP's uneducated base, but not the general public, particularly college educated suburban voters).  Indeed, as a column in the Washington Post points out, eightDemocrat candidates won in 2022 by directly confronting the Republican rivals on culture war issues (only one candidate lost of the group who faced a perhaps impossible task given the reactionary nature of her redrawn district).  With all out batshit craziness likely to be on display in the House over the next two years, this strategy may beeven more powerful in 2024.  Here are column excerpts:

Ahead of the midterm elections, Democrats debated internally about whether to engage with the MAGA crowd’s attacks on crime and cultural issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights or change the topic and focus on economic issues.

The former, as it turned out, was the right tactic, as a recent postelection memo shows.

The report comes from Shield PAC, a new soft money group of moderate Democrats that, as its memo explains, is designed to respond to “the Republican pledge to use the ideas and rhetoric of the far left to paint moderate, at-risk Democrats as radicals (‘woke socialists’) on culture war issues like crime and immigration.”

After Democrats lost House seats in 2020, Shield PAC interviewed 150 candidates and campaigns to find out why they thought they had lost. The answer was clear: “the GOP’s success in tying Democrats to toxic far-left ideas like ‘Defund the Police.’ ” This hurt Democrats, especially in swing suburban districts. The main Democratic response in 2020 had been to attack Republicans without defending their own side.

So for 2022, Shield PAC focused resources on nine competitive House races — each featuring a female Democratic candidate — with an emphasis on combating the $68.5 million the GOP spent on crime and immigration-related ads. This included Virginia’s 7th Congressional District (where Rep. Abigail Spanberger was the Democratic candidate), Virginia’s 2nd (Elaine Luria), Michigan’s 8th (Elissa Slotkin), Pennsylvania’s 6th (Chrissy Houlahan), New Jersey’s 11th (Mikie Sherrill), Kansas’s 3rd (Sharice Davids), Minnesota’s 2nd (Angie Craig), Washington’s 8th (Kim Schrier) and Nevada’s 3rd (Susie Lee). Democrats won all of them except Virginia’s 2nd.

After the election, Shield PAC assessed the effectiveness of its ads and found that a high percentage of voters recalled the ads. Moreover, the ads actually changed voters’ impressions of the candidates. The group reports:

In [Virginia’s 7th Congressional District], in the initial poll we did in the spring, 37% of voters believed that Spanberger was “soft on crime.” But after Shield PAC’s advertising, that number dropped to 32%. Additionally, in our original poll, 33% rejected the idea that Spanberger was “soft on crime”; after our advertising, that number shot up to 50%. In [Kansas’s 3rd District] and [Washington’s 8th District], Shield PAC helped hold the line on the share of voters who perceive Davids and Schrier as “very liberal.” 

The percentage of voters who shifted as a result of Shield PAC’s push was not enormous, but in a close election, victory happens at the margins. It’s hard to deny that one reason all those anti-crime ads did not work is because the candidates refuted them directly.

I interviewed four of the nine women promoted by Shield PAC: Spanberger, Schrier, Lee and Craig. Each of them raised two other issues with me that might have contributed to their wins. First, they all leaned heavily into the abortion issue, painting their opponents as out of touch with their districts’ voters. They also emphasized the series of legislative wins in the past two years (e.g., the PACT Act, Inflation Reduction Act, gun safety reforms). Showing they had delivered for their district was a big part of their final push.

What does all this mean? No single thing contributed to Democrats’ surprising success in holding down midterm losses. All of these women were top-flight, engaging campaigners. All worked extremely hard. All stressed abortion and economic deliverables. And yes, they had a response to the “soft-on-crime” attacks.

Another reason for many of these Democrats’ successes was their national security backgrounds. Spanberger, Slotkin, Houlahan and Sherrill served in either the military or the intelligence community. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) endorsed Slotkin and Spanberger because of their national security bona fides.

Democrats in tough districts going forward would do well to follow an all-of-the-above approach. The party should find capable candidates who are strong on national security, lean into abortion rights, have a record of achievement to point to and don’t allow Republicans free rein to pelt them with culture attacks.