On the issues most important to American voters, Republicans are preferred over Democrats. Upcoming off-year elections could be instructive for 2024.
At present, the Republican Party is not presenting voters with the best version of itself. The GOP’s presidential primary race is static, with Donald Trump in the lead. Its voters seem bound and determined to test the proposition that the national electorate really meant it when it voted to oust Trump from office after a single term, and that was before he sought to overturn the results of that contest and faced down the prospect of multiple criminal indictments. The congressional GOP has thrown the federal legislature into chaos for no discernible reason. The race for House speaker now centers on finding a candidate who supported overturning the 2020 election results, opposes same-sex marriage, and views periodic government shutdowns favorably. On the national level, the Republican Party seems committed to making itself as unpopular as possible.
And yet, on the issues most important to American voters, Republicans are preferred over their Democratic counterparts. The GOP is the party trusted more to handle border security, crime, the economy, preserving constitutional rights, and even “protecting democracy.” Maybe the GOP benefits by default from the contrast voters are drawing with the deeply unpopular Democratic president, but so what? A vote is a vote, regardless of the rationale behind it.
The Republican Party’s advantage on the issues is about to be tested when voters head to the polls in off-year elections. In New Jersey, which is one of those off-year states, the GOP’s national dysfunction should not weigh heavily on voters’ minds. This is not a gubernatorial year, and hyperlocal elections for municipal and legislative races are likely to hinge on hyperlocal issues. Garden State Republicans have pushed all their chips in on the local issue of parental rights in education — specifically, the right of parents to know if their children are experiencing gender dysphoria.
For months, school districts have struggled with Governor Phil Murphy’s state-level guidance restricting schools from “outing” their LGBT-identifying students. The policy establishes that schools have “no affirmative duty” to “notify a student’s parent or guardian of the student’s gender identity or expression.” The state attorney general’s office insists these guidelines are discretionary, but many school districts have interpreted them as mandatory. Amid a parental revolt, some districts enacted policies that compel administrators to notify parents if their children begin to “socially” transition toward expressing the gender of their choice. The Murphy administration then went to court to block the implementation of these policies and won. The argument that schools have no obligation to forcibly “out” their students, thereby contributing to their individual risk of self-harm, has repeatedly prevailed when it is put before judges.
New Jersey Republicans have devoted considerable resources to making parental rights in schools into a major election-year issue. The party is blanketing the state with advertisements on broadcast television and streaming services featuring personal testimonials from self-described Democratic voters who pledge to vote Republican this year only so their schools will be compelled to notify them if their child shows signs of gender dysphoria while in school. The ads purport to be aimed at persuadable Democrats, but their desired effect is to motivate Republican voters so they will head to the polls in disproportionate numbers. And if the polling is any indication, the GOP’s messaging campaign is working.
One recent survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that Democrats in the Garden State enjoy an eight-point advantage over Republicans (37 to 29 percent) when voters are asked which party they support in upcoming legislative elections, though 27 percent of respondents remain undecided. However, that changes dramatically when voters are “primed” with the Republican Party’s messages around parental rights:
In the unprimed condition – when the parental control question is asked after vote choice – independents prefer Democratic candidates over Republicans by 20 points (28 to 8, with 42 percent undecided). When the parental control question is asked first, independents prefer Republicans by 16 points (24 to 8, with 63 percent undecided). . . . The net effect is that when NJ voters aren’t asked about parental control of schools, they say that they’ll vote for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate by a 16-point margin (42 to 26); when they’re primed to think about it, they still prefer Democrats – but only by one point, 33 to 32, a difference that’s not statistically significant.
So the effect of the New Jersey Republican Party’s messaging efforts is to increase their appeal among voters by six points while driving the Democratic Party’s support down by nine points. If that effect materializes on Election Day, it could dramatically alter the composition of the state legislature. In 2021, Republican legislative candidates won 48 percent of the popular vote, picking up six new seats in the state assembly and two seats in the state senate. The 2021 elections left Republicans in the best position they’ve occupied since the early 2000s, and the Democratic Party’s slim majorities in both legislative chambers are not assured in the wake of redistricting. “Republicans could win a majority in the [state Assembly] for the first time in more than 20 years by flipping seats in just three legislative districts and holding all the ones they control now,” the New Jersey Monitor reported.
Such a result would certainly contribute to the anxiety among Democrats, who cannot comprehend why a Biden–Trump rematch would be a close-run contest. It would almost certainly convince Republicans that the 2024 race is theirs to lose, even with Trump at the top of the ticket. But like the 2021 race, which occurred in an environment where the GOP had temporarily shed much of the baggage with which Trump had saddled the party, 2023’s legislative elections will not be a nationalized contest. The upcoming race will, however, show the GOP what might be if the party emphasizes policy-related distinctions with Democrats over and above the personalities that presently dominate Republican politics. Whether Republicans will heed that lesson is yet to be determined.