AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
Over the past few years, politic-watchers have heard endless theories on how the two parties should go about appealing to the mythical “suburban woman” who was allegedly key to Joe Biden’s electoral coalition and was ostensibly an Achilles’ Heel for Donald Trump.
Now heading into the midterm year, soccer moms and housewives promise to be critical once again. But as Democrats try to hold on to this key demographic, they may be running up against an uncomfortable reality: over the past year, Democrats’ policies have made these women’s lives worse, not better, on every front. Consider the life of the prototypical Suburban Mom in 2022.
Inflation is driving the price of everything from a gallon of milk to a new car through the roof
Under President Biden and the Democratic Congress, ordinary American families who saw record wage gains and a historically strong economy under President Trump have now suddenly had their financial security ripped out from under them by an anemic economic recovery from the pandemic and soaring inflation thanks to reckless government spending.
Suburban moms were promised an economic rebound; instead, it costs twice as much to fill up their minivans, and the mainstream media told them to ditch the Thanksgiving turkey last year to save money on skyrocketing grocery bills. Not only is mom paying more at the grocery store, but she also wasn’t able to get her kids the latest gaming console this Christmas because of supply chain problems that the Biden administration seems disinterested in solving.
New moms looking to upgrade from their beat-up sedan to a much safer SUV have also likely received a shock – prices for new cars are up nearly 10 percent, while prices for used cars are up nearly 40%. Both aren’t expected to decrease anytime soon. And they can forget about that half-acre lot on the corner – housing prices rose nearly 20% between March of 2020 and October of 2021, the largest such increase in 45 years and a trend that is only likely to accelerate in 2022.
The pandemic has gotten worse, not better, and now schools are threatening to close once again
Joe Biden ran for president on a simple promise: to end the pandemic, put the “adults” back in charge, and orchestrate a “return to normalcy.” The reality has been anything but, with more deaths from COVID-19 in 2021 than all of 2020. The country is now seeing nearly a million new cases a day, and public trust in the nation’s public health infrastructure is at an all-time low.
For suburban moms, this means that they are watching helplessly as not only their kids’ childhoods but their futures are being taken from them. Already forced to wear masks in school and eat lunch on the floor or in the rain due to “social distancing” rules, now kids may once again be forced to endure “online learning.” For an administration that was handed three vaccines, dozens of therapeutics, and the most robust testing infrastructure in the world from the previous administration, such a colossal failure is unlikely to sit well with the Moderate Suburban Mom.
The Left’s radical social agenda is turning children against one another
Another central promise of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign was an easing of racial tensions after the violence that rocked the nation’s cities that summer.
Instead, Suburban Women are now seeing their children taught that “Whiteness” is a contract with the devil, America was founded to promote slavery, and that everything from Halloween to advanced math classes are examples of “systemic racism.”
For girl moms, their daughters’ sporting careers are now also being threatened by radical gender policy that allows biological males to compete against females on the same field. And forget about your daughter making the swim team at UPenn.
To top it all off, President Biden has weaponized the FBI against parents who dare to defy this new woke curriculum in schools. The left’s message to parents who push back? Stay out of our way, or we will blacklist you and your children and harass you at your home.
Rampant crime is making once-safe neighborhoods more dangerous
Suburban moms who were tired of seeing scenes of horrifying violence on the evening news were promised a great national healing under Democratic rule. Instead, violent crime, carjackings, and organized looting have soared across America. Shopping centers across America are being struck with the newest crime fad – “mass lootings” – just the latest devastating result of Democrats’ “reimagined” criminal justice policies. Joe Biden’s Open Borders policies don’t help either—as hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens with criminal records crossed our borders last year.
But the real worry for many a Suburban Mom is that crime has now made its way to once quiet suburbs, making the streets unsafe for their children. Carjackings and drive-by shootings are skyrocketing in suburban Chicago, while one suburban New York police chief said last year that “I’ve never seen the gun violence like it is.” Many suburban moms fled cities to escape exactly this sort of violence—but increasingly, there is nowhere else to go.
If Democrats do not rein in their extremists, they may soon find that many of the same Suburban Moms who helped put them in power will be the ones most eager to see them go in 2022.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.