Democratic strategists are urging candidates to focus on labeling CRT opponents racist in the run up to the midterms.
Elected Republicans, their operatives, and education-reform activists are cheering on Democratic strategists who insist that the party must cling ever more tightly to critical race theory as the 2022 midterms approach.
“They’ve called it a ‘racist dog whistle’ and a ‘lie,'” begins a Business Insider article in which a roundtable of Democratic strategists lay out their roadmap for how best to push back on Republican messaging surrounding the presence of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools.
Their new strategy is to run back their old one — but harder this time.
Polling shows that Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s focus on the issue — and Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s retort that the backlash against CRT was motivated by racism — was central to Youngkin’s upset win in Virginia, where Joe Biden shellacked Donald Trump by ten points in 2020.
While prominent Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, argued that the controversy in Virginia was concocted by a nefarious right-wing media complex, the issue caught on outside of hard-right constituencies. In fact, a sizable plurality of independent Virginians support legislation that would bar teachers from telling students they should feel guilt or shame about their race. (In an Emerson College poll conducted in September, independent Virginian voters favored a public-school CRT ban, 50–32 percent.)
And yet, the consensus from those want to paint the country blue is that what’s needed is more, and more forceful, attacks of the kind McAuliffe mounted. And it’s not as if the party took it easy last time around: At one McAuliffe campaign event, Democratic surrogates not only repeated the dog-whistle accusation, but alleged that Youngkin was out to “silence black authors,” and “ban books about slavery and racism.” McAuliffe himself made similar allegations, while Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell inferred that Youngkin’s stated opposition to CRT was a replacement for uttering a racial epithet aimed at African Americans.
According to Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president, “voters run from the Republicans when Democrats peel back the onion on what these claims really mean. It’s not just that Republicans want a bigger role for parents in education, it’s that Republicans are willing to let White supremacists write curricula.” That argument, he says, should be made “relentlessly.”
“It can’t be dismissed as just a lie, it needs to be defeated as a way to put politicians in charge of the classroom and white supremacists in charge of the curriculum,” he added.
Similarly, Celinda Lake, one of the lead pollsters for Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, offers her opinion that as long as Democrats engage forcefully on the issue, CRT is “not a threat” to their electoral prospects.
Congressman and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney has declared that the party’s case for CRT will be centered around the idea that “children need to learn their history — all of it.”
Unfortunately for Maloney and his aims, though, voters may already be associating that message with Republicans; Youngkin repeated a similar refrain every time he spoke on education. Republicans strategists and education-reform advocates are cheering on the Democrats’ old, new strategy.
“Dear Democrats, Thank you. Sincerely, Every Republican in America,” wrote Josh Holmes, president of the conservative consulting firm Cavalry, epitomizing the GOP reaction to the piece. Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow, one of CRT’s most vocal critics summarized the strategy as “calling parents ‘domestic terrorists’ and ‘white supremacists.'”
Ben Shapiro urged them on: (“DO IT.”), while Senator Tom Cotton predicted that “this strategy will fail because parents know what their kids are being taught in schools.”
Partisans were not the only ones to make such forecasts. Alleigh Marré, the president of the nonpartisan Free to Learn coalition, echoed Cotton, telling National Review that “a broad coalition of parents have rejected this curriculum and will continue to do so as its divisive at its core. Parents have been exceedingly clear, they want their children focused on academics, not politics and activism.”