The so-called “culture wars” have long been relegated to the position of a lesser, second-class issue set among many conservative elites — an unserious, or at least less serious, collection of political causes that divert attention from the real issues of importance in America. “The culture war is a distraction,” blared the headline of a 2020 column in the Hill penned by the Heartland Institute’s David D’Amato. A Dispatch piece from Jonah Goldberg the next year bore a similar title — “The Culture Wars as Distraction.” In 2010, Mitch Daniels, then the Republican governor of Indiana, famously urged a “truce on the so-called social issues” so that political leaders could focus on budgetary issues. Two years later, the RNC’s post-election autopsy presented the party with a similar formula: cultural moderation, paired with a refocus on “growth and opportunity.”
Republican voters tend to disagree. The fact that cultural conservatism is generally more popular with Americans than is Paul Ryan–era budget hawkishness has been consistently reflected in public-opinion surveys from time immemorial, even if Republican politicians often seem intent on ignoring it. But a new poll of GOP primary voters from the American Principles Project (APP), a scrappy social-conservative advocacy group, hammers home the point that Republican voters, in particular, have a much more potent interest in the defense of American culture than many conservative elites do.
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