Culture war turns into a dud for GOP

The Republican Party has always leaned on culture war issues to win elections, but for the last three years, since Joe Biden won office in 2020, an aggressive and virulent form of culture war demagoguery has been at the center of Republican political strategy.

If the results of recent elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio tell us anything, however, it’s that this post-Roe form of culture warring is an abject failure, an approach that repels and alienates voters far more than it appeals to or persuades them.

To be fair to Republican strategists, there was a moment, in autumn 2021, when it looked like the plan was working. Glenn Youngkin, Republican nominee for governor in Virginia, ran on a campaign of “parents’ rights” against “critical race theory” and won a narrow victory against Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic governor, sweeping Republicans into power statewide for the first time since 2009. Youngkin shot to national prominence and Republicans made immediate plans to take the strategy to every competitive race in the country.

In 2022, with “parental rights” as their rallying cry, Republican lawmakers unleashed a barrage of legislation targeting transgender rights and Republican candidates ran explicit campaigns against transgender and other gender-nonconforming people.

Republican candidates and political committees spent millions of dollars attacking gender-affirming care for minors and transgender participation in youth sports. Republican opponents of Michigan’s initiative to protect abortion access in the state warned voters that it would give transgender youth the right to obtain certain forms of care without parental consent.

Michigan voters successfully amended their state constitution to protect the right to an abortion. Overall, election night 2022 was a serious disappointment for the Republican Party, which failed to win a Senate majority and barely won control of the House of Representatives. The hoped-for red wave was little more than a puddle. The culture war strategy had fallen flat on its face.

Undaunted, Republicans stepped back up to the plate and took another swing at transgender rights. Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky, the Republican nominee for governor of that state, and his allies spent millions on anti-transgender ads in his race against Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear.

Beshear won reelection.

I can think of three reasons that voters — going back to the 2016 North Carolina governor’s race, fought over the state’s “bathroom bill” — have not responded to Republican efforts to make transgender rights a wedge issue.

There’s the fact that transgender people represent a tiny fraction of the population; they just aren’t all that relevant to the everyday lives of most Americans. There’s also the fact that for all the talk of “parents’ rights,” the harshest anti-trans laws trample on the rights of parents who want to support their transgender children.

Additionally — and ironically, given the Republican Party’s strategic decision to link the two — there’s the chance that when fused together with support for abortion bans, vocal opposition to the rights of transgender people becomes a clear signal for extremist views. The vibe is off, one might say, and voters have responded accordingly.