The insane feminists with green hair have taken to the streets, fundraising e-mails have been drafted, and the soundbites are out. According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Supreme Court is an extremist right-wing institution that punishes the American people. It’s unclear how allowing Americans to weigh in on contentious issues like abortion through their elected representatives is punishing them. Nor is it clear that Americans will heed President Joe Biden’s advice to vote for Democrats so they can codify the right to kill infants in the womb up to the point of birth. According to Col. Allen West, Democrats overestimate Dobbs’s potential impact on the midterms.
“We’re in the month of June, almost in July, and the election will take place in November. There’s a lot of time, and I think the most prevalent issues for the American people are the kitchen table issues,” West asserted. “When you look at the discussions about gasoline prices, the food and commodity prices, the fact you can’t find baby formula. Even look at what is happening with airline travel with canceled flights.”
In West’s home state of Texas, the illegal immigration issue will be on the ballot. One special election in the state hints that even heavily Hispanic districts want the border addressed and don’t trust Democrats to do it. Mayra Flores, a Republican, won a seat held by Democrats for decades in South Texas. This win followed President Trump winning several traditionally Democrat counties in 2020. West says the border situation transitioned from a problem to an invasion under Biden’s open border policy.
“I think that you have many other things that the American people are going to be focused on. Especially if we continue to see inflation rise and a recession looming,” West predicted. He believes economic issues, including shortages, will be top of mind going into November. He noted we have already seen negative economic growth in the first quarter of 2022, and he expects the second quarter to be similar.
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West also believes Democrats will fail miserably with Hispanic voters if they try to leverage the Dobbs decision to bring them back into the fold. As head of the Texas GOP, he worked diligently to attract Hispanic voters to the party in 2020. In Texas, the Hispanic community is very faith and family-oriented. According to West, running on expanding abortion rights will not be a winning message.
When I asked West about purple states where the issue could motivate Democrat voters, he said this is where Republicans need to do more. According to West, the GOP needs to do two things to leverage a favorable midterm cycle nationally. First, they need a comprehensive message like Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” in 1994. “I don’t want to see Republicans think that they can just run on ‘Don’t vote for the other guys because they’re just bad.’ You have got to give people something to vote for.”
In that message, West thinks Republicans must go on offense with the life issue. “Talk about the history of Planned Parenthood. Talk about who Margaret Sanger was. And talk about how she targeted the black community, especially by referring to them as undesirables and weeds.” West hears the Left spinning up the narrative that the Dobbs decision will hurt minority women. “The Left and their accomplices in Planned Parenthood have harmed the black community immeasurably. Twenty-five million black babies have been murdered in the womb by dismemberment. That is why you have got to have a proactive message,” he emphasized.
I wondered if messaging like that was possible with an establishment GOP who shies away from any topic that touches race. That was when West brought up the second thing Republicans need to do: reclaim the party’s history. “The Republican Party was founded in 1854 on a single issue. That was the abolition of slavery,” West said. The GOP should talk about that history and the progress made.
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“Four S-words define the Democrat Party,” he continued. “They are slavery, secession, segregation, and socialism. And none of those have benefitted the black community.” He said the Republican Party of Texas was founded on Independence Day of 1867 by 150 black men in Houston. “We have to reclaim that history. We have to reclaim our story and our narrative and not be reacting to the words of the other side,” West remarked.
One thing Republicans should stop doing, according to West, is giving themselves any more self-inflicted wounds. “I was very disturbed by the fact you had some 29 to 30 republicans in the House and Senate vote to give federal grants to states that implement red flag laws. Red flag laws are unconstitutional. They are a violation of your 2nd, 4th, and 5th Amendment rights,” West asserted. “Why would Republicans go for something like that?”
Ultimately, West believes Democrats operate on emotion, on what is cool and visual and optic. In a visual age, these tactics work short-term. However, modern Democrat presidents lost their unified government in 1994 and 2010. Presidents Clinton and Obama made a course correction following those losses. It seems inevitable that Joe Biden will lose the House and possibly the Senate in November. West predicts these losses will not force the same policy modifications we have seen before.
“They [the Biden administration] will just double down and blame the American people,” West said. “We saw them lose in Virginia, and, of course, they blamed parents for being domestic terrorists.” He added that in addition to paying the price for not pivoting when Americans clearly demand it, Democrats would suffer electorally for the violence following Dobbs. “The vandalizing of churches. The firebombing of pro-life pregnancy centers. That’s going to turn people against them.”
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