GOP banks on ‘culture war’
WASHINGTON — Two weeks ahead of the highstakes midterm elections, President Trump and Republicans are banking on “culture war” issues to galvanize the GOP base and boost voter turnout enough to help the party fend off a potential Democratic wave.
For months the conventional wisdom of Republican strategists is that the more attention topics like immigration, claims of voter fraud, racial inequality and LGBTQ issues get, the better it is for the GOP.
Likewise, in the lead-up to the election that will determine party control of Congress as well as state houses across the country, Democrats have tried to focus on issues such as health care and climate change — wary that focusing too much on Trump and his rhetoric could lead to a repeat of 2016.
But Trump has pressed the culturally divisive issues into the foreground.
“Take your camera, go into the middle and search,” Trump challenged reporters yesterday of the migrant caravan making its way through Mexico. “You’re going to find MS-13. You’re going to find Middle Eastern (sic). You’re going to find everything. And guess what — we’re not allowing them in the country. We want safety.
“What’s happening at the border was caused by the Democrats,” Trump added.
His statements echoed a tweet from earlier in the day that stated without corroboration that “unknown Mid- dle Easterners are mixed in” with the thousands of Central American migrants making their way toward the U.S. southern border.
It also comes as the Trump administration mulls Health and Human Services Department guidance to limit the definition of gender to the sex listed on individual’s birth certificates and through genetic evidence — a move LGBTQ activists decried as an attack on transgender individuals.
Yesterday protesters gathered in front of the White House with signs that read “we will not be erased.”
Trump also tweeted over the weekend that “Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING” — a move Democrats and voting rights groups called a dog whistle.
“Let’s be honest. Trump put the fear of God into a lot of Latino voters,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said.
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called Trump’s comment “one of the most naked attempts to promote voter suppression that we have seen in modern time.”