Pavlich: The left’s identity politics fall apart
BY KATIE PAVLICH
As we head into the 2018 midterm elections and eventually the 2020 presidential race, the expectations Democrats have from voters has stayed the same as previous cycles. The left’s assumption is that women and minorities vote for Democrats because it’s in their best interest and major cultural events back it up.
But over the course of the past two weeks, the left’s strategy of identity politics as a way to divide and conquer American voters has not only failed, it’s backfired.
We saw this play out first with the fight to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The narrative, created by the left and repeated by allies in the media, quickly became about women. Without distinction, it was declared that all women were on the side of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
This was hardly the case and shouldn’t have been surprising since all women don’t think the same way. Hundreds of women who knew Kavanaugh came out publicly in his defense. Scores of women wearing “I Stand With Brett” and “Women For Kavanaugh” T-shirts gathered on Capitol Hill to show their support for his nomination. Thousands tweeted #HimToo as a way to show support for due process and evidence to back accusations.
“The theater turned us off, but it was a kind of a last straw — after years of pussy hats and #MeToo and college kangaroo courts. We don’t buy the larger message about a GOP ‘war on women.’ We know these are crude scare tactics designed to get our votes. But Democrats are making a huge miscalculation,” conservative Stephanie Gutmann wrote in an op-ed for USA Today.
“We are furious at the people purporting to speak for women, furious that what should have been an ordinary parsing of evidence (what little there is after 36 years) was turned into a Kabuki theater campaign ad for the Democratic Party, stressing their trope that the GOP is conducting a so-called war on women,” she wrote.
More importantly, it encouraged conservative women to get ready to head to the polls. According to a survey conducted by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Polls, enthusiasm among Republican women jumped 12 percent since Kavanaugh was announced in July and that was further solidified during and after his confirmation.
Shortly after Kavanaugh was officially sworn in as a justice, President Trump held a meeting at the White House with rapper and cultural icon Kanye West.
With the cameras rolling, West lavished Trump with praise, talked about prison reform and explained why he loves what the president is doing.
“He can speak for me any time he wants,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “He’s a smart cookie. He gets it.”
It was yet another cultural moment that derailed the left’s talking points: African-Americans are Democrats and could never align themselves with a Republican president.
The meeting was shocking to some and spun many into a panic of egregious and racist insults.
“Kanye West is what happens when negroes don’t read,” CNN commentator Bakari Sellers said on Don Lemon’s show.
Since West showed support for Trump’s policies earlier this year, the president’s approval among African-American voters has been on the rise.
Finally in a desperate attempt to somehow fit into the left’s narrative on race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released DNA test results this week. Complete with a video and extensive campaign website, the data shows she might be 1/1,024th Native American.
The fallout was swift and painful.
“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America,” Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. released in a statement. “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. … Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”
Warren’s cultural and grievance appropriation not only further hampered her reputation, but threw a bomb into the waning “blue wave” just three weeks ahead of the midterms.
“Argue the substance all you want, but why 22 days before a crucial election where we MUST win house and senate to save America, why did @SenWarren have to do her announcement now? Why can’t Dems ever stay focused???” tweeted Jim Messina, former President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager.
Democrat obsession with skin color and gender as a strategy is starting to fall apart and recent cultural events show us how. Nov. 6 is just around the corner and the battle lines for presidential votes are already being drawn. For Democrats, those lines are being crossed as women and minorities vote on interest, not on identity politics.
Pavlich is the editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.
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