September 4, 2022 at 2:49 p.m.
Sounding the warning against conservative complacency
Sounding the warning against conservative complacency
The media, Gingrich assured us, simply refuses to see the Republican wave that is coming in November. And part of the ploy of the narrative is to stoke turn-out enthusiasm among the Democrats, he writes.
Unfortunately, Gingrich's piece represents just the kind of thinking that will get Republicans beat this fall.
Not that much of what he says isn't true. It is. The national media is most certainly trying to construct a fictional house in which resides the rising fortunes of Democrats. In this world, voters care about abortion and climate change and gender identity but not so much about inflation, education, crime, or the stampede of government authoritarianism into our lives.
Look! Biden's job approval ticked up two points, the media blares. We're saved!
Yeah, well, he may have ticked up by two points, but he's still deeply underwater. The new media narrative is akin to saying that you're going to drown if you're trapped under 10 feet of water, but if you can just float up two feet so you are only trapped in eight feet of water, you're fine.
Democratic incumbents are also facing an electorate in which 74 percent view the nation as heading in the wrong direction. Given that Democrats completely control government, whom do you think those voters are going to blame?
What's more, as Gingrich points out, the party in power historically takes a drubbing in the midterms of a first-term president.
But Gingrich is peddling a little misinformation of his own, and it needs to be called out. In this column, Gingrich points to the just-held special election in New York's 19th congressional district, in which the Democrat won a narrow two-point victory over the Republican.
The Democrats and their media lapdogs point to that district as a bellwether and to their victory there as a sign of things to come. But, Gingrich writes, that's all bogus because the 19th district is "reliably blue," and won that district in 2020 by 11.6 points.
So, Gingrich concludes, a two-point victory should make Democrats nervous.
The truth is, yes, the Democrats won by 11.6 points in 2020, and they also won in 2018, but the Republicans won there in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016 - all by hefty margins.
To be fair to Gingrich, redistributing did shift the district north and west and elevate Democratic population, but the datahouse 538 still gives the district a Republican partisan lean of +1. It is hardly reliably blue.
Rather, the district turned in the 2018 mid-terms when Trump was in the White House and Republicans controlled Congress - the GOP's own run-in with that mid-term history. And here's another uncomfortable truth: Much of that district was and is suburban.
The year 2018 was when suburban defections - particularly suburban women - became significant, and it showed big-time in New York's 19th. It repeated itself in 2020, when Trump significantly underperformed in suburban districts nationwide.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, however, the suburbs have been flocking back to the GOP, fed up with Democrats over inflation, lockdowns and school closings, crime, the teaching of radical curricula in public education, and more. Suburban parents have been demonized by Democrats as domestic terrorists and by the Left generally as racists.
So enter this year with history on the GOP's side and dissatisfaction with Democrats at nearly a record high and you would expect a Republican to win a competitive race in a swing suburban district with room to spare. It did not happen.
Polls show the gap between the parties has narrowed, and, in some cases, the Democrats have pulled even. Conservatives correctly do not trust most polls, but this is the case even in polls conducted by those accused of being biased toward conservatives, such as Rasmussen. With less than 70 days to election day, Rasmussen Reports has Republicans ahead 47-42, but the gap has been steadily narrowing since mid-July.
What is driving the shrinking lead is a widening gender gap with women increasingly pulling away from the GOP. Translated, that tells you that those suburban women who bolted the party in 2018 but returned to the fold after 2020 are once again reconsidering.
If the Republicans are going to win in November, they are going to have to win those suburbs and those women, and to hammer away at issues close to middle America's hearts.
Just last November, Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia in an upset, bringing those suburban voters home enthusiastically. He showed the GOP the way. He decried Democratic support for lockdowns, school closings and ruthless control over personal life; he called for school choice and vowed to kick the radical agenda out of schools; he focused on cost-of-living issues, and offered specific proposals for cutting taxes.
And he emphasized fighting crime and promised bold reforms that would stop the release of violent offenders.
They say a week in politics is an eternity, and 2021 sure seems like 100 years ago. But look at Republican campaigns around the land and it seems like Republicans have forgotten how Youngkin won.
The Democrats bid to shred the constitution and the incalculable damage the lockdowns and school closures did to families are nowhere to be found on the campaign trail, except in a few notable instances. Neither is a heads-on challenge to leftist dogma in education curricula. School choice is supported, when asked, but leading contenders never make it a central theme.
In other words, Republicans are ignoring the very issues that animated independents and motivated suburbanites to leave the Democrats and take another look at the GOP.
But so far what they are seeing on that second look isn't very promising. Suburban voters want to hear about how Republicans are going to lower the cost of living; what they get instead is a diatribe about how the last election was stolen. It's the last think suburban voters want to talk about.
Sure, election integrity is important. But win this election first, and then fix the system. You won't have the chance if you lose.
And that brings up another problem. Even when Republican candidates do talk about important issues, they have nothing to say other than they are not Joe Biden or Tony Evers. Republicans have become the new Dr. No. They oppose all of Joe Biden's spending sprees, saying they are inflationary - all of which is true - but somehow we never hear what the Republicans are going to do instead.
In Wisconsin, Tim Michels assures us he is for cutting taxes and for tax reform but he hasn't told us how or what. Would he repeal the income tax. He says he will look at it. Would he temporarily suspend the gas tax? He says he will look at it.
If he keeps campaigning this way, he's probably going to have a lot of time on his hands to look at these things.
To be sure, all is not lost. As Gingrich pointed out, history is on the GOP's side, just as it was on the Democrats' side in 2018 in the Trump midterms. But since the pandemic began we have been living in anomalous times, and anomalous events and outcomes are taking place in all walks of life every day. Politics is no different.
To win, Republicans need to be specific and bold. They need to tell us how they are going to cut taxes and tame inflation. They need to lock onto to universal school choice as a core issue and tell us how they are going to root out leftist dogma from the classrooms. We need candidates who, in the wake of an unprecedented assault on our civil liberties, will tell us how they will reform government and reduce its size and power.
We need a little less talk about eliminating the state elections commission and a lot more talk about we are going to overhaul and tame the Department of Health Services and the Department of Natural Resources.
We live in a perilous age in which Democrats have assaulted liberty, threatened our standard of living, infiltrated our schools with propaganda to control our children's minds, as well as unleashed a withering and brazen censorship campaign to shut down anyone opposed to that agenda.
Republican candidates everywhere best not assume a red wave is coming but assume that it is instead vital to stand up and confront that agenda head on and specifically. That's how the GOP wins the midterms.
They need to be bold and relevant, and to be so now.
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