Internal Democratic Party polling is showing that Republican attacks on CRT, police funding, and other “culture war” issues are “alarmingly potent,” and the party is scrambling to find a way to respond.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is conducting a series of presentations to House members on how to counteract Republican attacks, and what their own research shows is that voters think the party is “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars.”
In the 2020 contest, Democratic candidates largely ignored the GOP’s charge that Democrats want to defund the police. As a result, the party was clobbered in key House districts despite winning the presidency. The DCCC is showing Democrats how best to respond to the attacks.
If Democrats don’t answer Republican hits, the party operatives warned, the GOP’s lead on the generic ballot balloons to 14 points from 4 points — a dismal prediction for Democrats when the GOP only needs to win five seats to seize back the majority. But when voters heard a Democratic response to that hit, Republicans’ edge narrowed back down to 6 points, giving candidates more of a fighting chance, especially since those numbers don’t factor in Democrats going on the offensive.
The Republican attacks are most effective with center-left voters, independents, and Hispanics. Not surprisingly, these are the very same groups that Democrats lost ground with in 2020.
The fact is, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Democrats are becoming a party of the hard-left and scattered interest groups like blacks, teachers, college professors, and single women.
The solution does not lie in policy proposals, the pollsters found, because voters are not generally opposed to Democratic policies. “Rather, Democrats need to demonstrate they fully understand and care about stressors in people’s lives” and focus on the issues “without stoking divisive cultural debates,” one of the slides said.
Summarizing the party’s midterm problems bluntly, the presentation notes that voters think Democrats “are not making good use of their majority.”
Democrats can’t help but stoke “divisive cultural debates” because that’s what their party is all about. They are all about destroying tradition and undermining the values of the majority of the country. It’s who they are. It’s what they do.
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Those “alarmingly potent” attacks on culture by Republicans are responses to Democrats. It’s lunacy to suggest that Republicans are stoking the fires of the culture war. There wouldn’t be a culture war if Democrats didn’t seek to undermine traditional values at every turn.
This cycle, however, Democratic officials are working to arm their incumbents with what they believe are the most solid defense to the Republican attacks. Rather than delivering a counterpunch or pivoting away from the issue, Democrats are urged to “correct the record” because “changing the subject risks confirming suspicions.”
“Correcting the record” is going to look damn suspicious too when the “corrections” turn out to be hysterically exaggerated mischaracterizations of GOP positions. All Republicans have to do is quote Democrats on defunding the police or critical race theory to prove their point.
Vulnerable Democrats are already refusing to run this midterm in near-record numbers rather than make the long, uphill climb to try to overcome their growing disadvantages. Meanwhile, the party is refusing to address its biggest problem: its disconnect from the American people on a wide variety of issues.
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