Democrats Finally Have the Upper Hand in the Culture Wars
In the months since the Dobbs decision, it’s become clear that Republicans are losing at their own game.
In May 2022, during his closing remarks at the Pennsylvania mid-term primary debate, GOP Senate candidate Mehmet Oz declared that his party needed to step up its game in America’s culture wars. “We keep showing up at cultural war knife fights with neatly arranged 3-by-5 index cards,” he told the crowd. “We have to get into these issues. The liberals are taking over our media, they control much of government, the corporate suits are dominated by the ‘woke’ ideology, and our universities as well.” As someone who has sat through numerous Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC), I’ve heard versions of Oz’s argument before; as far as I’m aware, Republicans have never seen a culture war they haven’t tried to fight in. But are these battles starting to become political quagmires for the Republicans?
Oz’s proclamation was four months, and a Dobbs decision, ago. After a messy summer of doctors reportedly postponing or refusing to provide medically necessary abortion care, Republicans face an unfamiliar setback: For the first time since Donald Trump busted onto the scene like a racist Kool-Aid Man, it looks like Democrats might have the upper hand in the culture wars. This jarring shift hasn’t gone unnoticed. As Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, told Politico last week, “The environment is upside down … The intensity has been reversed.”
As I’ve tried to show here, here, here, here, and here, the Dobbs decision’s assault on bodily autonomy is a much bigger deal to voters than the pundit class will admit. “The Dobbs decision recast the cultural debate and completely transformed the 2022 election,” Democratic pollster Jim Gerstein told me this week. “If anyone would have told you six months ago that Democrats would be running on abortion rights in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, you would have thought they were joking. Or Arizona and Georgia. But this is why Democrats are currently leading critical races in these swing states and can overcome the historical challenges of the mid-term election.”
But this tidal shift isn’t just about abortion. There’s something else happening here, something more subtle. I suspect that the GOP has put too many eggs into its culture-wars basket, and it’s turned off non-MAGA conservative voters.
As a case in point, the Florida governor and noted culture warrior Ron DeSantis has been pushing assorted culture-war bills in the hopes of positioning himself as the heir to MAGA. Most notable of these is the new “Don’t Say Gay” law, which did a better job of painting Florida Republicans as extremely anti-LGBTQ than as child protectors.
As with all pointless culture-war bills, the early effects of “Don’t Say Gay” have not been great. With the new school year under way, Time reported in August that “LGBTQ educators in Florida describe widespread confusion over how much they need to hide their own identities.” Andrew Spar, the president of the Florida Education Association, told The Washington Post that the state’s schools face an estimated 8,000 teacher vacancies—up from 5,000 the year before.
Sure, “Don’t Say Gay” may have helped DeSantis with the GOP base, which he’s courting for a possible 2024 nomination. But did it help with swing voters? Probably not. The research and analysis firm Morning Consult found in May that “vast majorities of parents who are Democrats or independents said they are comfortable with LGBTQ people interacting with their kids, while nearly 3 in 5 Republican parents agreed,” calling the anti-LGBTQ push by GOP lawmakers “tricky political territory.” It’s the fundamental problem of Trumpism in a nutshell: The base loves it, but the rest of the country is appalled.
The Republican culture wars’ focus on the LGBTQ community could prove even more unpopular than its attack on abortion. As Politico wrote last week, “Less than 20 years after conservatives used ballot measures against same-sex marriage to boost voter turnout in 11 states, public sentiment has shifted on the issue so dramatically that Democrats are poised to force a vote on legislation to protect same-sex marriage to try to damage Republican candidates.” In June, a Gallup poll showed that Americans’ support for same-sex marriage had reached a new high of 71 percent—it’s almost as if Republican extremism is actually helping Americans cement their values.
“Current events and nutty Republican positions on abortion rights, gun safety, and democracy have put the Republican Party way out of the mainstream on core cultural issues,” Gerstein told me. “The clearest evidence has been the complete transformation of the 2022 election after the Dobbs decision. Democrats are defying history and leading in critical swing states simply because Republicans fail miserably to pass a threshold of credibility on abortion rights.”
We’re still 54 days out from the midterms, and a lot can happen in that time, but it seems clear that culture wars are not the winning gambit they once were for Republicans. In a recent text-message exchange, the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville may have put it best: “The one who starts the culture war usually loses.”
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