AMAC Exclusive by David P. Deaval
Don’t get cocky, GOP. The wind is at their back at the moment—or at least blowing in the other guy’s face. The disastrous Biden presidency is mired in approval ratings in the upper-30s. In the House, 29 Democrats are not running for reelection (21 of whom are retiring). Even CNN analysts are saying that it’s unlikely the Republicans will lose any Senate seats while Josh Krashaar of National Journal observes that they could pick up four. A Harvard/Harris poll shows major realignments possible in the electorate with Republican approval/disapproval at 48/52 (-4) and Democrats at 40/60 (-20). But whether Republicans will use this wind to make progress will depend on whether they do something more than watch the Democrats implode and their base shrivel a bit. They must make the case to independents and disaffected liberals that they actually will do something about the problems that are making Biden and the Dems only slightly more popular than head lice. They must make the case to people who are currently Republican-curious not only that they want their votes but that they have ideas and a will to enact them.
It’s important to note from the beginning that the answer is not to betray traditional GOP principles in order to appeal to people on the left. There are still traditional Democrats who have not gone left to satisfy national party leaders and who still hold traditional American values. In November 2021 Texas State Representative Ryan Guillen switched from the Democrats to the Republicans because, as he said, “many of us are waking up to the fact that the values of those in Washington, D.C., are not our values, not the values of most Texans.” He cited the movements to defund the police, the destruction of the oil and gas industry, and the policy-driven chaos at the southern border.It’s also noteworthy that Guillen had a strong Second Amendment and pro-life voting record, something that in the past might have been tolerated in the Democratic party but is no longer despite the fact that a new Marist poll shows that even 49% of Democrats (71% of all Americans) want abortion limited to the first three months of pregnancy at most.
All this economic and social destruction, combined with an insistence on moral positions directly in conflict with what many Catholic and Evangelical Hispanics believe, is part of why Hispanic voters in South Texas and around the country—Glenn Youngkin won them in Virginia—are shifting and why A. B. Stoddard has written of the “brutal reckoning” Democrats facewith regard to this demographic.
What is true of South Texas and the Hispanic vote is true elsewhere and with others. North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, another pro-life, pro-gun Democrat, just announced that he too was migrating to the Republican Party. After 25 years he is leaving—not just because of two issues, but because he sees the Democrats as no longer even remotely concerned with ordinary people. “The working class, or working men and women of this country, and also the small business owners are not a part of the conversation anymore,” he said, referring to his old party. “It all has to do with the elitists and it has to do with the socialists. That is not the agenda that I have in mind for this country of the future.”
No doubt crime is a part of this, as Democrat support for defunding police and for district attorneys with rather novel theories of law enforcement has resulted in massive increases in violent crime. Republican law-and-order is a potent tool for gaining back ordinary suburbanites who have seen crime spreading from the cities.
But it is concern especially for parents that is driving and can drive a reconsideration of voting for the Grand Old Party. It propelled Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s office in Virginia and is moving a number of moms to rethink their liberal or progressive politics. Youngkin’s win was based on his willingness to stand up to the educational blob on both the level of curriculum and the bare willingness to open schools and fight the mask mandates that are now admitted as both unnecessary and bad for children. Rebecca Bodenheimer caused a stir earlier in January when the “self-described progressive” admitted that pandemic policy and school-reopening debates have “thrown me into an ideological mid-life crisis, questioning all my prior political assumptions.” She’s not ready to vote Republican yet, though the Californian sounds pretty bullish on Glenn Youngkin and pretty angry that her call to open schools got her labeled as a “racist.”
Writer Bethany Mandel recorded her conversations with other lefty moms like Bodenheimer in an article that savvily noted that the place on the chart where party identification started to favor the Republicans was in the third quarter of 2021—when kids went back to school. She tells the story of Tracy Compton, a life-long Democrat in Fairfax County who wanted the schools to be fully reopened. When she started a recall petition for school board members determined to keep the schools’ doors closed, she was yelled at by local Democratic party officials and welcomed by Republicans. Compton and her friend Bethany Wagner won’t say they are Republicans just yet. . .but have both begun to question their own political worldviews and foresee voting for the GOP in the near term.
Economic, social, and law-and-order issues, along with a basic attention to what parents want in terms of schools that respond to what parents think proper Covid risks are and provide education that is not simply indoctrination, provide a solid basis for Republicans to court the large number of independents and disaffected liberals and progressives. One final connected issue is important, however. That is the freedom to speak.
Long-time leftist Naomi Wolf has been blasting what she calls the “Nazification of public discourse” around issues of Covid policy. She’s not alone in this regard. Because corporate media outlets now restrict speech and even news that does not hew to a preferred political narrative, a whole gang of people on the political left have become fellow travelers of Republicans at the very least. Bari Weiss of the New York Times, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept are just three of the biggest names who have left corporate media and begun to write on the easily-monetized blogging platform Substack. Other figures such as podcasters Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, and Dave Rubin have developed large followings across political lines for their courageous refusal to speak the Democratic Party’s lines and their willingness to speak their own minds.
That freedom is something that is appealing not just to Republicans but to Democrats. A 2020 poll done by the libertarian Cato Institute showed that not just Republicans (77%) but Independents (59%) and Democrats (52%) fear sharing their political opinions. A Republican Party that holds to its own principles but is willing to defend the free speech of Americans of all political stripes against the titans of big tech and woke corporate HR offices and is willing to argue its case forcefully has a chance of actually keeping a number of demographics that right now simply hate the destruction wrought by the party beginning with D. A party that shows it is open to talking to onetime Bernie bro Joe Rogan and ready to read Bari Weiss or Glenn Greenwald’s clear-eyed reporting and applaud is the party that will show that it is interested in the unity of the country and the freedom of its people.
Realignments can be temporary. Convincing somebody that the other side are the bad guys won’t put them in your camp for long if you don’t convince them that you are the good guy. Republicans shouldn’t interrupt their opponents while they are making mistakes. They should, however, be listening to their opponents’ voters carefully so that they can govern with an eye to showing them which party is pitching real progress and which party is setting them back and explaining, “Shut up.” Republicans should be the party that really does explain their positions and embraces disaffected Democrats as part of one United States.
David P. Deavel is editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, co-director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy, and a visiting professor at the University of St. Thomas (MN). He is the co-host of the Deep Down Things podcast.