Call it bullshit all you want. You have to convince enough voters that it is, or at least convince enough on one side to outvote the other side. Right now, I’d put my money on Democrats losing big in both 2022 and 2024.
I don’t even understand why that was considered a big misstep by McAuliffe. I had no input into what my kids were taught at school – are standards even set at the local level? I would have thought they are set at the state level, and given that there’s state-wide testing, this makes sense to me.
I get that right-wing media spends all their time fearmongering with lies and deceit. I’m not at all clear about what normal people can do to counter that – at some point, voters have to learn what’s real and what’s bullshit.
This is what we do. We fuck up the message despite all our best intentions and then blame the other guy for not being clever enough to understand what we really mean.
In response to “one or two teachers doing something disagreeable” the Teachers Unions should have come out and said that they are not teaching CRT in schools. Period. Instead, various schoolboard representatives and progressive agenda advocates rushed out in numbers to educate the ignorant republican rubes what CRT actually means and provide them with the accurate historical context of the meaning of the term. When that didn’t work, we called them stupid and demanded that they provide examples of CRT being taught in schools. Then, in the case of Virginia, told parents their children’s curriculum was none of their business. As if what happens in Virginia, stays in Virginia.
It’s as if you don’t care about the education of children! 
The teachers are there to teach our kids what to think, not what to believe! /s
That’s an article about how teachers are saying CRT is not being taught in schools. Hmm. I guess that didn’t work.
And, as I wrote, the school curriculum really isn’t up to the parents. I mean, WTF? When was it ever?
Not the point. Even if you had never attended a single PTA/schoolboard meeting in your entire life (I didn’t), how would you have felt if you were told you had no business in the matter? I don’t know about you, but I might suddenly have developed a keen interest in it.
I love how you still think what Democrats say on an issue will ever make it to the ears of Republican voters. Teachers Unions can (and have) said that they don’t teach CRT in schools until they’re blue in the face. Doesn’t matter - it’s not going to get carried on Fox News, so Republican voters are never going to hear it.
As a long time Virginia gun owner you don’t know what you’re talking about. None of the gun control laws passed in the State have any negative impact on any lawful gun owner. They essentially banned guns at / near polling places, the State Capitol, added barriers to people with domestic violence convictions or restraining orders being able to buy guns etc. They were good changes, no lawful gun owner would take issue with any of them. Many lawless gun owners might.
Politically I do not believe the gun laws have hurt the Democrats whatsoever. None. Many people who live in the suburbs like me own guns–I come from rural Virginia though so I have some perspective on that side of it as well. The vast majority of suburban gun owners in Virginia are people like me–white centrists who believe in reasonable gun control.
The foam at the mouth holler boys whose local sheriffs were promising to “nullify” state gun laws, have been in thrall of far right extremism since the Clinton days and the Democrats should spend 0 time even thinking about those voters, they were never going to be Dem votes, ever.
I believe them and you. But by July 2021, the horse had already left the barn and it had been burned down to the ground. Nobody was listening by then.
All I can get from your responses is that Republican voters are being lied to and are spreading and acting on those lies. In order to counter that, Democratic politicians have to do something, not sure what, but don’t hurt their feelings or something.
“They’re not teaching the children that America has always been God’s annointed nation, and that everything is good and righteous.”
I’ll give a long time Virginian’s perspective on it, move along if you don’t want the over-wordy version.
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but to give some background, I had been a Republican since I was 18. While my military career took me away from Virginia for years at a time, it’s always been “home.” I’ve been a precinct captain, I’ve been an elected (by the party) member of the county executive committee previously, and I served one term on a Virginia school board (I won’t be specific as to location) in the mid-1990s. I was involved in local fundraising, canvassing etc. I was a party Republican, more so than most. With the Tea Party wave, I started distancing myself from many “active” party activities, but still generally donated and supported the party–the defeat of one of our local Congressmen, Eric Cantor by a crazy Tea Party candidate in the primaries, was when I started to move further away from the party. I was a Romney voter in 2012, and voted for some Republicans in local elections after that, but since 2015 or so I have largely left the party entirely. My politics will never be in line with those of the Dems, but the GOP represents a threat to everything America is supposed to stand for and everything I believed in for my entire life–I do not believe I will ever cast a vote for a Republican for any office for the rest of my life.
As to OP, I think you are right to be worried. If I had to place a bet, I believe Youngkin will win by a few points and the Republicans will end up controlling both houses of the General Assembly. In Virginia, I think you can get down from the ledge. Why? Because this state has changed and is changing, massively. All of our growth is in counties where the ideas of Republicanism are just too off putting. The areas where the Republicans are strongest are decaying, literally decaying away. We started off with a very rural, conservative based demographic going back many decades (oddly that used to mean Democratic when I was growing up, the Virginia Democratic party had a lock on rural Virginia until the 90s when the final gasps of Southern Democrats were being heard); so where we are now is Democrats are ascendant and will be ascendant, but because of the large built in advantage to more conservative ideology, it’s still close enough that a bad cycle for Democrats with a weak Democrat candidate and a strong Republican candidate are enough that the GOP is going to win, I think they’ll basically clean up tonight.
But in 2 years, the conditions will be even worse for the GOP. Two years after that, even worse. Two years after that, even worse. The fears that the GOP is going to “gerrymander a permanent majority” are not real, we’ve done away with partisan gerrymandering and our maps for the next 10 years will be drawn by the State Supreme Court. By the time the GOP gets a chance at gerrymandering Virginia again–which would require them actually reversing State law, then holding on to the Assembly with the non-Gerrymandered maps until the next Census. I just don’t see it, again, every two years the State is going to get worse and worse for them. We aren’t Florida, Pennsylvania, or Michigan where demographics suggest probably long-term brutal fights, we’re a state that is turning blue rapidly. Northern Virginia is the engine, and it’s growing fast, and nothing any Republican in the State does can change that.
Now that being said, if we want to talk nationally–I think you need to get back up onto the ledge. Why? Because Youngkin - McAuliffe, and I say this as a politically experienced supporter of the Dems, but an “outsider”, this match up represents everything wrong with the Democratic party and why, despite generally having the support of less than 50% of the voters, the Republicans have been so easily able to take your lunch so often. It’s right for Dems to raise issues like gerrymandering and how unfair the Senate is, but there’s a lot of elections you’d actually have won in spite of that if you guys knew how to run campaigns.
Republicans run issues-based campaigns that fire up their voters. Democrats largely run milquetoast campaigns that are designed to…not offend any part of the Democratic coalition. Republican candidates often are just simply more decisive, they pick issues that might offend part of the GOP base–that’s why they lost voters like me, but they gamble that most Republicans will stay loyal–and they do. Democrats are horrible at firing people up. Most Democratic big wins since Clinton have seemed to largely come down to getting lucky because the country is unhappy with Republican rule and is willing to embrace boring technocratic Democrat candidates. But anytime the country isn’t in that “political mood” you guys get your asses kicked, because you just don’t seem to know how to run political campaigns.
Now I actually know the people running a lot of these campaigns for the Dems are not idiots and do actually know how to run campaigns. I think the issue is the culture of the party has moved into this “offend no one” technocratic direction, that most Democrats are afraid to run bold campaigns because it is seen as being “divisive” in the party. I think Democrats need to find a way out of that puzzle box.
By the way, remember how I said Republicans run issues-based campaigns? The typical Dem response is “BUT THEIR ISSUES ARE BULLSHIT.” Take Virginia for example–nothing remotely like CRT appears on any official curriculum in any school district in the commonwealth. No textbooks or official reading list in any district has any hint of CRT to it either. That does not matter. There are 3.2 million teachers in America, the typical way teaching works is the State sets curriculum guidelines, the School Board oversees local administration and some high-level contractual decisions, and sometimes a little bit of curriculum (at least when I was on a board, we didn’t influence curriculum that much), and teachers follow it. However just following the curriculum is not all teachers do. Teachers are in these classrooms every school day every year, with all their students. The system is not set up to micromanage what the teachers do every minute of their day, and that’s IMO a good thing. But what it does mean, is out of those 3.2m teachers, Fox News and The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart, are absolutely going to find lefty teachers, either having discussions or maybe doing readings “outside the curriculum” that will be on racial issues that annoy or piss off white parents with their tenor or tone.
I’ve actually followed it fairly closely, out of the 3.2m American teachers, I think the far right has gotten less than 30 genuinely good tales of this. So this is pretty fucking rare. But when Fox News runs over 100 hours of content on those couple dozen outliers, it has a huge impact. When Breitbart runs articles about it every day, it has a huge impact. When conservative influencers Tweet about it every day it has a huge impact. Now, the reality is teachers have always taught “off curriculum” and most of the time this is actually independence we want our good teachers to have, and even many of the examples the far right has found, frankly aren’t actually THAT bad if you dig into them.
But people won’t dig into them, if you’re explaining yourself, you’ve already lost.
I don’t run political campaigns, I’m not an expert. I could be full of shit. But to me the way you fight disinformation like that is not by countering it. Because you can’t win by explaining. How do Republicans usually handle it when they are being attacked on issues that aren’t good for Republicans? They ignore the issue and counter attack on something else. Maybe that isn’t a panacea, but what I can say absolutely, never, never works is just saying "that’s not a real issue, it’s just Republican propaganda. You guys remember that propaganda works right? That’s why it was invented and why it’s still used. When someone is hitting you with effective propaganda the only defense is to punch them in the mouth, and that means hitting them with something worse, find something to fire up your base, find something to drive a wedge between the other side’s voters etc.
The typical Democratic game plan here does not work.
My prediction is that when Youngkin wins, the CRT playbook will be exported around the entire country in 2022, and if Democrats don’t learn this lesson, they are going to lose close races they otherwise could have won. I think the educated white population is “weak” for the GOP more so than it has ever been, and looks to probably get weaker over time, but it’s not “out of reach” for the GOP…not yet, so stuff like this, that makes suburban parents feel like their kids are being indoctrinated with weird, anti-white racist stuff, it’s going to cost you votes. You need to learn how to fight against this stuff, the country needs a non-Republican party that actually knows how to campaign.
Although still unlikely, let’s say that Youngkin prevails tonight. What would the D’s and R’s take away from it? Would they both come to the conclusion that CRT and parental-influence-in-schools is a prime issue going forward?
Whatever happens, I’m sure the mainstream press will say it’s bad news for Biden.
Help me understand: Does the NEA represent those 3.2M teachers?
If so, it probably doesn’t help the teachers or schoolboards insisting they don’t teach CRT when the organization that represents them has the following on their website:
As I said–school boards insisting they don’t teach CRT isn’t a useful dialogue in any case. It doesn’t matter what the evidence says, you don’t run against that by arguing the point. If the NEA did not have a statement like that on their website, my opinion is it would have zero impact on any votes being cast today or in 2022. Fox News is always going to find stuff to run to anger its viewers, that’s why you can’t beat it by arguing with it.
The NEA is the big teacher’s union, but I think it’s around 2.2m members–so not all 3.2m. Some States don’t allow teachers to unionize.
FWIW I do not believe it should be the role of the NEA to help democrats or school boards counter Republican messaging, it should represent the interests of educators and proper educational guidelines. It’s the job of the Democrats to run their campaigns and counter Republican messaging.
But unions, especially teachers unions, have historically been Democratic Party strongholds. Hard to establish an arms length relationship when the two entities are so politically entwined.
I’m a Virginia voter and I remember 4 years ago the polls being extremely close between Northam and Gillespie (if not quite as close as they are today), and Northam ending up with a 9 pt win on election night.
I’m hopeful history will repeat itself.
This is one of the reasons my wife quit being a teacher. She couldn’t stand how politicians constantly try to get votes by saying teachers are doing something wrong. I don’t blame her — the last time I was at a company where I got word some higher up didn’t like the job I was doing, I quit within two weeks.