For the past week, we have been inundated with stories about how abortion has energized a new army of voters against the Republican Party for the 2022 midterm elections. The Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer, was the catalyst. Still, liberals hoping to put wind in the sails of Democrats forget that the GOP has had the voter registration advantage for the past 18 months. The new voters lining up already live in Democratic Party bastions, and not all these people will show up on Election Day. Both sides overestimate the importance of voter registration drives; it’s whom you get to the polls on that critical day that matter most. Yet, as Democrats are gambling heavily on abortion saving them, they seem to forget that their illiberal hard left-wing antics on cultural issues continue to gash them in the suburbs.
For every voter they gain with issues like abortion, they lose two or maybe three over their abject loss for common sense. The New York Post spoke with several defectors who said the Left’s culture war agenda has gone off the rails. In a volatile economic situation like the one we’re in now, voters care about inflation, the price of gas, and the so-called “kitchen table” issues. Democrats aren’t talking about that—they rather juice up the hysterics about how half the country are enemies of the state for not supporting Joe Biden (via NY Post):
After living half of his life as a registered Democrat, Justin Roth, 42, re-registered in 2016 as an Independent — and then switched sides entirely to become a Republican in 2020.
“The reason I registered as a Republican has more to do with the Democrats than it does with Republicans,” said Roth, a single Staten Islander who teaches English as a second language. “I still consider myself liberal in a lot of ways, but I’m no longer a registered Democrat. They’ve just really gone off the rails for the past several years.”
As he’s watched the left wage cancel-culture wars and push for extreme political correctness, Roth said the Democrats have turned their backs on the issues that matter most to him.
“My top priorities right now are actually kitchen-table issues — inflation, the price of housing, food and gas. As a voter I really care about things that affect my life personally and the lives of my family members more than any of this culture war stuff.”
[…]
Holden Culotta, a 20-year-old bartender and college freshman from Connecticut said he’s put off by the current Democratic Party. After watching the 2016 election unfold as a teenager, he switched his registration from Democrat to Independent.
[…]
“I think a lot of the cultural things the left is talking about today are really alienating,” Culotta said. “If we’re only talking about pronouns, we’re not really solving issues or moving the country forward.”
Another former Democrat, Michael Lee re-registered as a Libertarian in January 2021 and then as a Republican to vote in open primaries. Of today’s Democratic party, the 33-year-old software engineer based in West Chester, Penn., said: “There definitely are those who are too woke and too left in my taste and are alienating to centrists like myself.”
[…]
Christina Buttons, a 33-year-old artist and writer based in Tennessee, changed her voter registration from Democrat to Independent in 2020. One major issue that tipped the scales for her was Democrats’ unquestioning support of gender ideology, including the belief that transgender children should be allowed to undergo irreversible medical transitions as minors.
Buttons now calls herself a “reformed social justice warrior.”
“I was very much of the opinion that Republicans were, for a lack of a better word, evil,” Buttons said. “But I sought out some Republicans to speak to them and find out what they are actually like. Lo and behold, I found out that they are not actually evil. They just have different ideas about how the country would be run best. Demonizing the 50% of the country who are Republicans just doesn’t sit well with me.”
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It's a damning list of grievances, but nothing that we haven’t heard in past reports about how going woke makes you go broke. And once again, the Left is fixated on issues of no great importance: they have no working people in their ranks. They used to have tens of millions, but those were white working-class voters whom the Democrats have eschewed for the urban-based, college-educated professionals who can afford to dither, look up at the sky, and whine about most issues that most of us don’t have the time even to ponder. We have to work, pay bills, and can’t waste countless hours about the constructs of pronouns and whether there are vestiges of white supremacy that lie beneath.
The turnaround could be earth-shattering, as all Democrats have to do is reject the ‘woke’ Left’s action items and get back to talking about job creation, better trade deals, and not being overall snobs. White working-class voters drifted to the GOP due to the Left’s hatred of them, not because they’ve been overly impressed with the Republican agenda. Yet, re-focusing voter outreach efforts to white, less-educated Americans is anathema to the institutional Left, so don’t bank on this happening, but white working-class voters have voted often for Democrats in the past.
And even among the college-educated, it seems things have become way too kooky for them on some issues. I don’t blame them—how many times have you heard friends admit that a political opinion made sense but had to clam up out of fear of being canceled?
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