A Building Backlash Against GOP Hate

As I mentioned previously, following the news these days can be depressing. For me, one of the drivers has been to wake up every day to the escalating hate coming from right wingers. To combat all of that, I decided to take a deeper look into whether the right wing's anti-wokeness agenda is working. 

A poll from Navigator asked a series of questions about the right wing obsession with book banning. Here's what they found:

As you may or may not know, there has been a growing push to remove certain books from schools across the country that local groups deem too problematic because they include content about race, gender, or sexuality. Knowing this, do you support or oppose banning certain books from public schools?

Support - 25%
Oppose - 65%

The results of a CBS/YouGov poll were even more dramatic.

Similarly, PPRI surveyed 5,000 respondents and found that “More than three quarters (76%) of Americans both agreed that teaching children about the history of racism in America will help our country move toward a healthier future and disagreed that is would hold our country back from making progress.” More Democrats than Republicans share this sentiment, but even among the latter, a significant majority (57 percent) is not inclined to whitewash (literally) the nation’s history of racism.

Perhaps all of that is why Rep. Jamie Raskin will hold a hearing this Thursday on politically motivated efforts to ban books and censor free speech in schools and public libraries. Witnesses include Ruby Bridges, who is not just a symbol of the desegregation of U.S. schools, but can also address the fact that a right-wing parents’ group seized on a Tennessee law limiting the teaching of race to mount an attempt to ban a book about her.

Most of these anti-wokeness campaigns were fueled by Republican success in the 2021Virginia election where Glenn Youngkin promised to end the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Conventional wisdom developed to suggest that he had won over (predominantly white) suburban women with that message. But a deeper dive into election results by TargetSmart revealed that assumption to be demonstrably wrong.

This chart shows the percent increase in total ballots cast in VA between 2017 and 2021 by age group. There is nothing here that suggests that parents of school children were driven out to the polls by closures, masks, vaccines, etc. Seniors were mobilized though. https://t.co/o1fXWgPyqD pic.twitter.com/8mRNHH0sGn

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) February 22, 2022

They further found that "Voters age 65 and older are an estimated 15.9% of Virginia’s population according to the census, yet accounted for 31.9% of all ballots cast in 2021." We don't know what motivated those seniors to turn out in such record numbers. Perhaps it was their fear about critical race theory being taught in schools. But if so, there is no indication that it similarly motivated the parents of school children.

As I've already noted, the focus on the Virginia governor's race overshadowed what happened in other local races.

Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics, identified 96 school districts with a total of 302 seats up for election where social issues and the coronavirus response were major campaign issues. That includes, for example, questions of mandatory masks in school, comprehensive sex education, rights for transgender students and how race is taught in classrooms...

Ballotpedia found that candidates who took conservative stances on race, gender and pandemic issues did not win most of their races. Of the 275 candidates that Ballotpedia was able to label, about 28 percent of the winners had taken a conservative stance.

We've recently seen similar things happen across the country. For example:

In New Hampshire, where bitter debates over school masks and “critical race theory” (CRT) have dominated local politics for more than a year, the season of parent rage ended in a stunning sweep of school board elections last week by progressive public school advocates. “It was a complete repudiation of the GOP’s attempt to drive a wedge between parents and schools,” says Zandra Rice Hawkins, executive director of Granite State Progress. Of 30 candidates designated by the group as “pro–public education,” 29 won their races—many in traditionally “red” regions of New Hampshire. Across the state, culture warriors and advocates of school privatization lost to candidates who pledged to protect and support public education.

Here is what happened in school board races yesterday in Wisconsin:

If Republicans were using Wisconsin’s April 5 school board elections as a test run for state and national elections this fall, the results were mixed.

Republican-endorsed candidates picked up seats in districts including Waukesha and Kenosha. But in other areas, including Beloit, La Crosse and Eau Claire, despite unprecedented involvement by outside groups, major political parties on both sides and even rightwing billionaire and GOP megadonor Diane Hendricks, conservative candidates lost, as voters rejected hyperpartisan, negative school board politics.

In Eau Claire, all three school board candidates who ran on anti-LGBT platforms lost to the incumbents and their allies.

We're hearing a lot these days about hateful anti-woke legislation being passed in red states like Florida, but not as much about what recently happened in Indiana.

The Indiana Senate killed controversial House Bill 1134, which would have banned several "divisive concepts" and given more power over curriculum and classroom activities to parents, Monday night after several hours of closed-door discussions in the Republican caucus.

Even though Republicans have a supermajority in the General Assembly, Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, R-Martinsville, said he didn't have the votes to support the bill that was inspired by nearly a year of debate about "critical race theory" in the state's public schools.

All of these developments are worth keeping an eye on. It is possible that, flying under the radar at the grass roots level is a backlash to the escalating hate campaigns that are emanating from the right. As NBC News just reported, "in 2010, Democrats had a 10-point lead among women with college degrees; it’s now ballooned to 38 points." One can only imagine what happens to that constituency when/if the Supreme Court guts or overturns Roe v Wade while Republicans continue to ramp up their hate campaigns against women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans.

As Jennifer Rubin suggested, "Democrats who concluded that voters were rebelling against “wokeness” might want to reconsider." Perhaps, contrary to what the neo-New Democrats are suggesting, it is time to "lean in" to these issues as Republicans become more hateful and extreme every day.