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The GOP’s Culture War Shtick Is Wearing Thin With Voters

One thing I learned from my years in the Republican Party many years ago is that every time right wing Republicans go down in flames in elections, the Christofascists (and white supremacists) blame the defeat on the candidates not being far right and extreme enough.  In the wake of Tuesday's elections we are hearing that same refrain from the usual suspects - both within the GOP and the right wing "news" outlets - who refuse to face the reality that more and more Americans do not want the endless attacks on women controlling their own bodies, book banning, attacks on racial minorities, and efforts to erase LGBT citizens.  I attribute this phenomenon to two things:  the fact that these elements of the GOP that dominate primary elections (i) live in a fantasy world to start with, and (ii) are insistent on forcing their toxic and ignorance embracing beliefs on everyone no matter what.  Ironically, rats can be trained to learn from past experiences, but not so the worse elements of the GOP base.  With luck, the GOP will continue to cling to these increasingly rejected beliefs and hasten its descent into a permanent minority status.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's refusal/inability to grasp that the majority of Americans do not want what it is peddling.  Here are excepts: 

The Republican Party has always leaned on culture war issues to win elections, but for the last three years, since Joe Biden won office in 2020, an aggressive and virulent form of culture war demagoguery has been at the center of Republican political strategy.

If the results of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio tell us anything, however, it’s that this post-Roe form of culture warring is an abject failure, an approach that repels and alienates voters far more than it appeals to or persuades them.

To be fair to Republican strategists, there was a moment, in the fall of 2021, when it looked like the plan was working. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia, ran on a campaign of “parents’ rights” against “critical race theory” and won a narrow victory against Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic governor, sweeping Republicans into power statewide for the first time since 2009. Youngkin shot to national prominence and Republicans made immediate plans to take the strategy to every competitive race in the country.

In 2022, with “parental rights” as their rallying cry, Republican lawmakers unleashed a barrage of legislation targeting transgender rights, and Republican candidates ran explicit campaigns against transgender and other gender nonconforming people. “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the drag queens,” said Kari Lake, an Arizona Republican, during her 2022 campaign for governor. “They took down our flag and replaced it with a rainbow.”

Lake lost her race. Michigan voters successfully amended their state Constitution to protect the right to an abortion. Spanberger won re-election, too. Overall, election night 2022 was a serious disappointment for the Republican Party, which failed to win a Senate majority and barely won control of the House of Representatives. The hoped-for red wave was little more than a puddle. The culture war strategy had fallen flat on its face.

Undaunted, Republicans stepped back up to the plate and took another swing at transgender rights. Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky, the Republican nominee for governor of that state, and his allies spent millions on anti-transgender right ads in his race against the Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear.

Youngkin was not on the ballot in Virginia, but he led the effort to win a Republican trifecta in the state, targeting Democrats once again on parents’ rights and endorsing candidates who ran hard against transgender inclusion in schools. “No more are we going to make parents stand outside of the room,” Youngkin said, to a crowd of Republicans on Monday at a rally in Leesburg. “We are going to put them at the head of the table in charge of our children’s lives.”

One candidate for State Senate Youngkin endorsed, Juan Pablo Segura, told Fox News that he wants to revisit a failed bill that would have required schools to notify parents if there was any hint a child was interested in transgender identity.

Segura lost his race and Youngkin and his fellow Republicans failed to either flip the State Senate or hold on to the House of Delegates. He’ll face a Democratic majority in both chambers of the General Assembly for the rest of his term in office.

Some Ohio Republicans also tried to turn their fight against a reproductive rights initiative into a battle over transgender rights, falsely stating that the wording of the amendment would allow minors to obtain gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent. On Tuesday, Ohio voters backed the initiative, 56 percent to 43 percent.

I can think of three reasons that voters — going back to the 2016 North Carolina governor’s race, fought over the state’s “bathroom bill” — have not responded to Republican efforts to make transgender rights a wedge issue.

There’s the fact that transgender people represent a tiny fraction of the population — they just aren’t all that relevant to the everyday lives of most Americans. There’s also the fact that for all the talk of “parents’ rights,” the harshest anti-trans laws trample on the rights of parents who want to support their transgender children.

Additionally — and ironically, given the Republican Party’s strategic decision to link the two — there’s the chance that when fused together with support for abortion bans, vocal opposition to the rights of transgender people becomes a clear signal for extremist views. The vibe is off, one might say, and voters have responded accordingly.

If the Republican Party were a normal political party that was still capable of strategic adjustment, I’d say to expect some rhetorical moderation ahead of the presidential election. But consider the most recent Republican presidential debate — held on Wednesday — in which candidates continued to emphasize their opposition to the inclusion of transgender people in mainstream American life. “If God made you a man, you play sports against men,” declared Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, at the conclusion of the debate.

So I suppose that when the next election comes around, we should just expect more of the same.

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Lame Duck Youngkin Suddenly Wants to Bipartisanship

I have only met Glenn Youngkin once in person when I was invited by his office to a supposedly pro-LGBT event in Virginia Beach due to my role in founding the local LGBT chamber of commerce. Sadly, the event proved to be anything but as advertised and Youngkin cared little about LGBT issues save erasing us from public education.  But, attending the event did, however, allow me to see Youngkin's very slick disingenuousness up close and personal.  Now, after the Republican drubbing in the elections on Tuesday, Youngkin finds himself a lame duck and his presidential ambitions very much tattered - something underscored by the fact that he is the first Virginia governor in the last 30 years whose party lost control of a chamber of the General Assembly during midterm elections.  Youngkin's response?  More pretense that he is a moderate and claims he seeks to work with Democrats, something he arrogantly refused to do during the first two years of his term. The real Youngkin is the one who as his first act signed an executive order seeking to ban accurate history and to make LGBT Virginians invisible in public schools. Only the Democrat controlled Virginia Senate prevented Youngkin and Virginia Republican extremists from turning Virginia into a warmed over version of DeSantis' Florida.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at Youngkin's much deserved lame duck status.  Here are excerpts:

For all the $190 million spent by both parties, for all the talk of national trends, the results of Virginia’s legislative elections this week prove a predictable truth: Virginia is a closely divided state that leans slightly Democratic.

The new redistricting maps made that plain, carving the state into a large number of red districts and a slightly larger number of blue ones, with just a handful of toss-ups in the middle to fight over. And Tuesday’s results bore that out, with Democrats flipping the House of Delegates to at least a 51-49 advantage (though one race is still too close to call) and protecting their majority in the Senate, 21-19.

The challenge now for Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) — whose two-point win in 2021 he routinely casts as a popular mandate — is that he will have to broker deals with newly empowered Democratic lawmakers to get anything done. And he has spent the past two years poking them with a partisan stick as he cultivated a national Republican profile — railing against critical race theory and racial equity and “woke” policies of the “radical left.”

“He’s had this habit of talking in Virginia as if he wants to work with Democrats to do things in common, then he goes on Fox News in the evening and speaks about how he’s beating the lefties. I don’t think that’ll work anymore now,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond political analyst.

As if to illustrate that point, Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), who is in line to become chairwoman of the Senate’s powerful finance committee, spent Election Day trolling Youngkin on social media with statements like, “Tell Glenn I want him to know it was me” and “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably [is] our soon to be lame duck Governor Glenn Youngkin!”

What’s more, the Democrat who could become the first Black lawmaker to serve as speaker of the House in the General Assembly’s 404-year history — House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) — has been one of Youngkin’s top antagonists, once prompting the governor to trek across the Capitol for an impromptu meetup at Scott’s office after he questioned Youngkin’s religious faith in a floor speech.

Youngkin expended so much money and personal political capital this year on races that failed — such as state Sen. Siobhan S. Dunnavant’s loss in the Henrico County suburbs to Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg by an unexpectedly wide margin — that his status in Richmond could be diminished, Holsworth said.

Still, Youngkin began the work Wednesday of promising bipartisanship and [falsely] emphasizing how close the two sides are.

Youngkin noted that Virginia has a tradition of divided government — which wasn’t true during long periods of the 20th century when Democrats ran the show, but has been true in the past 30 years or so as Republicans rose to power. In that time, Youngkin is the only governor whose party lost control of a chamber during midterm elections.

Youngkin had led Republicans to run on his proposal to ban most abortions after 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Virginia law allows the procedure through the second trimester (about 26 weeks) and into the third if three doctors say it’s necessary.

The GOP strategy didn’t work. Abortion stood out in polling before the election as a strong motivator for Democrats and for women, and it was cited repeatedly by voters during interviews at polling places around the state Tuesday.

“This is a race about reproductive rights,” voter Clint Cyr, 37, said in Newport News on Tuesday after casting his ballot for Democrats. “I’m a moderate libertarian for the government not telling people what to do with their bodies.”

The issue cut against the polarization that otherwise grips Virginia voters, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. “Beyond abortion, there wasn’t a lot that Democrats or Republicans could do to convince somebody on the other side to switch teams for the election,” Farnsworth said.

Yet the decisive districts were not won by razor-thin margins. Democrat Josh Thomas won the western Prince William County House district that put Democrats over the top by three percentage points over Republican John Stirrup. In the Senate, Democrat Danica Roem’s three-point victory in Prince William County and Manassas clinched the blue majority.

Youngkin said Wednesday that he has not yet reached out to Democratic lawmakers, that he is waiting for them to select new leadership in the coming days. But he rattled off a list of priorities — economic development, workforce development, job growth, mental health services and education — where he believes they’ll find common ground.

He did not, however, back down from his stance on abortion or concede that a 15-week ban was rejected by voters.

The 15-week abortion ban “went over like a lump of coal in your sock on Christmas morning,” Swecker said after his remarks. “Voters not only in Virginia but across the country said not only no but hell no.”

With luck, Youngkin's presidential ambitions are now dead and he will be limited in the further harm he can do to Virginians who are not white evangelical/Christofascists.

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Youngkin's GOP Culture War Fizzled

Virginia Republicans are still reeling from Tuesday's election results that returned total control of the state legislature to Democrats. True, each race had its own dynamics, but overall the Republican political ads depicted Democrats as a threat to children through the catch phrase "parents' rights" and soft on crime.  Some of the ads by some GOP candidates in districts with almost no crime made it sound like they were the only bulwark against crime spree that would never even materialize.  Thankfully, culture war memes that Glen Youngkin seemed to legitimize through his election two years ago - I would ague that his dishonest campaign and feigned "moderate" positions were the real root causes of his victory - were rejected by voters who seemingly knew they had been duped by Youngkin in 2021.  One sign of this majority rejection of manufactured culture was tactics is seen in the disastrous defeats of slates of school board candidates backed by the falsely named "Mom's for Liberty," in Northern Virginia (and Pennsylvania and even Iowa).  Indeed, voters recognized that the right wing group is a threat to public education and is motivated by racial animus and evangelical/Christofascist extremists.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Virginia Republicans failure.  Here are excerpts:

The Democrats’ capture of the state legislature in Virginia on Tuesday is nothing short of humiliating for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who staked immense political capital on the races by making them straightforwardly about his ambition to pass a 15-week abortion ban he has championed.

But the GOP governor’s comeuppance isn’t just about the durability of abortion rights as a political winner for Democrats. It also shows that right-wing culture-warring on education — built around a “parents’ rights” agenda limiting school discussion of race and gender — has utterly lost its political potency, allowing Democrats to respond with their own affirmative liberal cultural agenda.

Strikingly, more than $5.5 million was spent on ads about education in the Virginia legislative contests, according to data provided by the tracking firm AdImpact. While it’s unclear what percentage focused on “parents’ rights,” some Republicans modeled their campaigns on the way Youngkin turned that issue into a 2021 victory — an upset that led many pundits to declare education a political loser for Democrats even in blue territory.

Not this time. In Schuyler VanValkenburg’s ouster of Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant in a district near Richmond, “parents’ rights” loomed large because the GOP incumbent sponsored a law, signed by Youngkin, purportedly aimed at sexually explicit materials in schools that facilitated a rash of book removals.

Dunnavant accused her opponent of being willing to expose kids to such materials. But VanValkenburg took this head-on, running ads attacking that law and castigating book bans, while reassuring voters that as a high school teacher, he knows “the difference one book can make for a child.”

That suggests it’s politically potent to elevate the fight into a high-minded debate over the freedom of young minds to inquire, rather than letting Republicans drag it down into a muck of grubby accusations about porn in schools and “grooming” children.

VanValkenburg said he encountered many voters who perceived the right’s culture wars as not just a gratuitous attack on schools, but a broader effort to expand government intrusion into kids’ education. “The reason the book-banning is so visceral is that it hits on both those things,” he told me.

Youngkin’s first act as governor was an attempt to expunge critical race theory in schools, which included a tip line so parents could report offending teachers. Del. Rodney Willett, who won reelection in a swing district outside Richmond, said the tip line and the law facilitating book removals badly resonated with parents who have developed attachments to public schools as centers of community in the suburbs.

“They’re saying, ‘We don’t trust teachers, we’re not going to give them autonomy in the classroom,’ ” Willet said of Youngkin and Republicans, adding that voters regularly told him: “We need to be doing everything we can to keep our teachers.”

Then there’s Danica Roem, a delegate who on Tuesday was chosen by voters as the first openly transgender state senator in the South. She defeated a Republican who campaigned on banning transgender athletes from high school sports.

“She had every trans attack thrown at her, and she still won,” said Heather Williams, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s interim president. “These culture-war issues that Republicans are trying to lead on — they’re not where the country is.”

In a state Senate race in a suburban Loudoun County district, Republican Juan Pablo Segura leaned hard into the school wars, vowing his top priority was to notify parents of any perceived interest in transgender identity by their kids. Yet Democrat Russet Perry prevailed after stressing abortion rights and arguing that Youngkin-style culture-warring is politicizing and destroying education.

That’s instructive, because when Youngkin overperformed in Loudoun County in 2021, pundits gushed that he had cracked the code on how to wrap right-wing culture-warmongering in non-threatening packaging. . . . . After Tuesday night — in which a slate of liberals also won election to the embattled Loudoun school board — that now looks like a serious overreading. While the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned abortion rights undeniably shifted our cultural politics more than anything else, it’s also encouraging voters to be more attuned to GOP radicalism on other fronts.

“Dobbs was the lightbulb for a lot of voters on GOP extremism, making it harder to reach suburban voters with cooked up cultural grievances,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic consultant in Virginia.

Republicans still ran ahead of where they should have in a blue state such as Virginia. But still: The right’s culture-warring fell dramatically short of the promise it held for Youngkin last time around, and the robust liberal mobilization in response shows no signs of going away.

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