“Is killing their babies that important to the younger generation? Wow! Says a lot about them and it is not positive” – The current top comment on the TownHall.com Friday article “The WSJ Gives Republicans a ‘Five-Alarm Warning’ About 2024,” about Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Left Wins Big in Midwest Elections: The GOP’s decline in Wisconsin’s suburbs is a warning for 2024.”
The evergreen Simpsons meme of Springfield Elementary School Principal Skinner asking himself “Am I out of touch?” before quickly concluding “No, it’s the children who are wrong” comes immediately to mind here. We’ve covered this ground before, but it bears repeating: There is no surer sound of a political death spiral than that of someone blaming voters after a bad loss.
Compare this to the mini-Red Wave of November 2021: It’s true that the “Critical Race Theory” scam was an insulting lie cooked up by the Claremont Institute circlejerkers, it’s true that Democrats didn’t have an answer for it that Virginia and New Jersey voters liked, and it’s true that at least some voices on the left called them racist dumbasses for buying into that garbage.
The problem fixed itself because the CRT hype was masking legitimate frustration with COVID school closures that voters took out on Dems, an issue that was moot the next November. But before that was clear there was definitely some finger-wagging, like from Daily Beast Never-Trumper conservative columnist Matt Lewis who dickishly wrote “Screaming at persuadable voters (whom you just failed to persuade) that they are racist is not a winning campaign strategy. Neither is mocking working-class voters who can’t properly define Critical Race Theory.” As smarmy and exaggerated as he was, it wasn’t a bad point. Again Dems misread the situation and overestimated the potency of Critical Race Theory, but there was certainly that dimension to it of you can only trash a belief system so much before you end up trashing the believers too.
Abortion isn’t some passing fad like Critical Race Theory because it wasn’t manufactured. It’s not going away as an issue. There’s no tuning this out. That the notoriously reactionary Wall Street Journal op-ed board writes “Republicans had better get their abortion position straight, and more in line with where voters are or they will face another disappointment in 2024” without actually specifying where “in line” is just underscores how impossible this situation is becoming. Well that and the fact that the top comment on some dogshit MAGA news site is blaming voters.