What if – hear me out – voters don’t hate transgender people?
For three straight elections, the institutions of the mainstream press have covered Democratic campaigns and policymaking with the expectation and implication that the right’s messaging on cultural issues would largely succeed. And for three straight elections, the anticipated general backlash against cultural progressivism has utterly failed to materialize. Standing against all available evidence—the proof, in surveys and election results, that the electorate had moved measurably left on issues like racial justice, LGBT rights, and immigration over the last decade, the clear tendency of Republican politicians, unlike their Democratic counterparts, to embrace their party’s least popular ideas, like overturning Roe—the center and the right have been locked in a cycle of mutual delusion.
The mainstream press’s dogged insistence that most voters are alienated by the push for transgender rights in particular was belied by the right’s failure—not the first—to take electoral advantage of the issue space this cycle. Republican candidates and conservative groups spent an estimated $50 million on anti-LGBT ads, much of it dedicated to messaging on trans children specifically. They had little to show for it in campaigns across most of the country; in Michigan, where Democrats swept statewide races and secured their first trifecta in decades, state GOP chief of staff Paul Cordes lamented that gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon had seemingly pushed more ads on trans athletes “than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters.”
If the Democrats has a coherent message that actually did tangible things for living wage jobs for the lower middle class, this bs hate nonsense from the republican right wouldn’t get the same level of prominence in my view. The uneducated red neck angry white people class sees the Democrats as pandering to fringe issues, immigrants and minorities.
Greetings from the land of the angry white people. Yes, it’s Smyrna. Actually there’s a lot less hatred then you might think. Trans kids are another round of the ongoing culture wars. The Republicans have lost every battle as the corporate media hangs on every word, dripping with hatred or not. The truth is we all know gay people, their our relatives, co workers and friends. Have know several trans people and have a friend (o.k., he’s a drummer, but a good one) whose son is trans. The message here is leave people the fuk alone and screw your church and your bad tempered Gawd. They don’t like the Dems, but other then guns their not in love with the Republicans either. Both parties remain their own worst enemy and neither really serves us, and I will not live long enough to see that change.
Agreed.
The Fox News Business model of trying to keep everyone in a highly angry & exercised state of dread has seeped into all mainstream media. So now all drag shows are “grooming events” and teaching about slavery in colonial America schools is CRT.