Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Behind the Failed Red Wave Lies an Urgent Warning
Postmortems on the failed red wave in this month’s midterm elections have identified several possible explanations. The Democratic Party’s campaign to turn the election into a referendum on democracy, abortion, poor quality candidates and candidates linked to former President Trump, and election denial all contributed to Republicans’ disappointing results. However, there is one important factor that has received much less attention – overwhelming Democratic support among young people. The 2022 elections must serve as a wake-up call, and not just to Republicans, but to all Americans concerned about the future of our country.
In aggregate, Republicans received nearly 3.5 million more votes than Democrats for U.S. House of Representatives seats in November’s midterms. In percentage terms, Republicans outperformed Democrats by over 3% (50.9% to 47.6%). However, according to the Edison Research National Election Pool exit poll, young people aged 18-29 favored Democrats by an extraordinary 28-point margin, 63% to 35%.
The difference is even more striking if we look at the key battleground Senate races. In Pennsylvania, where Democrat John Fetterman beat Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz 51.1% to 46.4%, youths aged 18-29 preferred Fetterman by a remarkable 42-point margin (70% to 28%) according to CNN exit polls. In Arizona, where Democrat Mark Kelly beat Republican Blake Masters 51.4% to 46.5%, youths favored Kelly by a whopping 56-point margin (76% to 20%).
In Nevada, where Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto beat Republican Adam Laxalt 48.9 to 48.0, youths voted Democrat by 33 points (64% to 31%), and in Georgia, heading into a runoff election, Democrat Raphael Warnock led Herschel Walker 49.4% to 48.5% while 18-29 year-olds preferred the Democrat by a 29-point margin (63% to 34%) and 18-24 year-olds by an even more dramatic 41-point margin (69%-28%).
The news only gets worse for Republicans if we look forward. Millennials (ages 26 to 41) and Generation Z (10 to 25) voters are projected to go from about 37% of the vote nationally (based on 2020 elections) to 60% in 2036. And whereas millennials received most of their progressive political indoctrination in colleges and universities, Gen Z, and younger children, are being fed a ceaseless diet of far-left progressivism starting in kindergarten.
From mandatory pronouns to unisex bathrooms, from anti-American American history to equitable math, from climate alarmism to myths of voter suppression, our nation’s children are being bombarded in their schools with extremist ideas aligned with, and espoused, by the Democratic Party. The leading proponent of politicized schools are teachers’ unions.
Teachers’ unions have two primary purposes. The first is to raise money for the Democratic party. According to Open Secrets, our nation’s largest teachers union, the National Educators Association (NEA), contributed more than 98% of its total pollical dollars in the 2022 elections to Democrats. Less understood, but even more important, is the second primary purpose of teacher unions – to recruit children to the Democratic Party.
Led by the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), our country’s public schools have abandoned their core missions of literacy, basic skills, and career readiness, and adopted a new mission of using our nation’s children to remake society in the name of social justice. Under the pretense of child-centered and social-emotional learning, antiracism and anti-oppression, trauma-informed and culturally responsive pedagogy, schools are turning our children into Democratic activists.
Some may dismiss my concerns as overly alarmist, taking comfort in three widely held assumptions. First, that our youth have always strongly favored Democrats. However, this is not the case.
In the mid-1980s, during the Ronald Reagan presidency, polling data shows that 18-29 year-olds were almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. In 1994, when Republicans took control over both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952, young people actually favored Republicans 51% to 49%. Young people’s votes were evenly split from 1998 to 2002, including in the controversial 2000 presidential election between George Bush and Al Gore. Only beginning with 2004’s midterm elections do we see the dramatic shift in 18-29 year-olds overwhelmingly voting Democrat.
A second common misconception is that young people are apathetic and tend not to vote in significant numbers. According to estimates from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), 27% of young people ages 18-29 voted in the recent midterm elections, the second-highest youth voter turnout in a generation. Further, CIRCLE estimates that youth voter turnout was even higher, at 31%, in nine battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia.
Public schools are bombarding children with a message about the importance of voting. Civics education favored by schools is no longer about the three branches of government or checks and balances. Nor is it about the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights or the dangers of Communism. Being drilled into students is that in the interest of social justice and in the interest of saving Democracy, you must vote.
In a post on the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) website entitled, “Civic education is vital to saving our democracy,” AFT President Randi Weingarten summed up this sentiment:
“Teaching civics is vital to ensuring that our democracy in America survives and to ensuring that students see themselves as having a role and a voice in our country… It’s how we lay the groundwork for a future generation that’s engaged, that’s informed and that’s empowered.”
The third common assumption in need of debunking is that young people tend to become more conservative as they get older. This tends to be true only for those who marry and have children, and today’s millennials are doing neither at ever higher rates.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. marriage rate fell to its lowest rate since the federal government began keeping data in 1867. In 2020, births diminished in every single state. In fact, more people died than were born in 25 states in 2020, far exceeding the 2019 record of 5 states. A recent study in the Journal of Marriage and Family showed a striking decrease in the desire for men to become fathers over the past two decades.
Once again, we can look to schools to explain this trend. Social justice ideology espoused by schools has conditioned young people to view society as hostile and unredeemable. Boys and men are considered toxic. Climate change will inevitably destroy the Earth. Oppression is always and everywhere. How could any self-respecting human being bring kids into such a world?
Worse is the radical gender ideology that has become pervasive in schools. The incessant focus on gender issues has been misinterpreted. It is not about encouraging the acceptance of gay or trans people, as the left maintains. Nor is it significantly about sexual grooming as some on the right claim. Its true motives are to recruit children, especially girls, into a lifelong, non-heterosexual cult, to belittle the idea of traditional families, and to encourage children to stay single and childless. The goal is to galvanize children to keep a deep-rooted progressive inclination and remain loyal Democrats. Unsurprisingly, unmarried women are strikingly liberal, voting 37% points higher for Democrats according to CNN exit polls. Married women, in comparison, favored Republicans by a 14-point margin.
For Republicans to win elections in the coming years and decades, and to rescue America from the throes of wokeism, our nation’s schools must be ridded of the blatantly political and progressive ideology in which our children are being indoctrinated. Three things must happen.
First, Republicans have to stop playing whac-a-mole. Critical race theory, ethnic studies curricula and radical gender ideology are just some of the manifestations of progressive ideology in schools, but addressing them piecemeal with legislation will not move the needle. Nor will expanding school choice, which while important for the long-term, will have little short-term impact on the vast majority of America’s children.
As aggressively as possible, we must go after the root cause of politicized schools, which, as I have argued, are the teachers’ unions. The NEA, AFT, and state education unions should be considered political arms of the Democratic Party. The ideologies they are promoting in the classroom must rightly be viewed as political speech, which is not protected in public schools by the first amendment.
Second, we need to reinvigorate the parent’s movement, which risks fizzling out as covid restrictions and school closures fade into memory. While we have been successful in mobilizing many parents in red states, and have won some school board races around the country, we have, so far, mostly failed at educating parents to the true dangers of woke schools to their children and to our country.
In New York, for example, the only state to have a red wave other than Florida, education was not even in the top 10 most important issues to voters, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in October. We need a stronger, more coordinated, and better funded parent’s movement to proactively educate busy parents.
Lastly, we desperately need more courageous and smart political leaders like Ron DeSantis who are willing to aggressively fight the woke culture war, and who recognize the primal importance of education to this battle. DeSantis’s 19-point margin of victory in the once-purple state of Florida demonstrated that leading on these issues rather than following polls, is a winning political strategy.
Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture. What educators have known for a long time, and what conservatives and classical liberals have just recently woken up to, is that both politics and culture are downstream from education.
The far-left, led by the radical teachers’ unions, have succeeded in turning our nation’s schools into woke indoctrination machines, and turning our children into automatons thoughtlessly spouting the latest progressive talking points and mindlessly pulling the Democrat lever. If we don’t take back our schools – and quickly – we face the inevitable blue waves that will one day result in an Ocasio-Cortez presidency and in our country’s irreversible transition into a Latin American-style Marxist dictatorship.
As always, I want to share with you the latest episodes of the podcast I co-host here on Ricochet with Beth Feeley, Take Back Our Schools.
Why Are Our Children Hollowed Out?
On this episode of Take Back Our Schools, Beth and I speak with award-winning teacher and author, Jeremy Adams. Jeremy shares his views on why students have rejected the wisdom, culture, and institutions of Western Civilization and have given up on the American Dream. He talks about the breakdown of families and the loss of family-time that his own students are experiencing. We also discuss the damage that cell phones and social media are doing to children and how they have led to isolation and the most antisocial generation in history.
Jeremy S. Adams is the 2014 California Teacher of the Year and the author of the Amazon best-selling book Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation. He is a weekly columnist for The Daily Wire and his writings have appeared in Newsweek, The LA Times, The Washington Post, Quillette, and many other outlets.
Pioneers of the Parents Movement
In this episode of Take Back Our Schools, Beth and I speak with parent activist, Betsy Hart. Betsy was, along with our own Beth Feeley, a co-founder of the group Parents of New Trier (now New Trier Neighbors). Betsy and Beth share their stories about being pioneers of the parents rights movement. Betsy talks about what prompted the group’s founding more than five years ago, and shares her views on how the parents movement has evolved. We also discuss the recent expose in Mother Jones magazine about the group entitled, “The Right-Wing Attack on Public Education Began in One Elite Illinois High School.”
Note: This article first appeared on my Substack.
Published in General
This is an excellent post. It needs to be elevated to the Main Feed.
Why not raise the voting age till 30? Republicans will win for sure if the under thirties can’t vote.
Republicans will never actually try to win the hearts and minds of Americans. Regan was the last one to try.
The time to fight in the schools has past. The Republicans gave up after Regan. All this shows us is how over it all is. We will not be taking back our schools quickly or ever.
The GOP cannot even defund PBS
As I started reading this post, my first thoughts were That young people always vote Democrat. I was a raging leftist when I was young. But the author later on in the post Addressed that point and shut it down completely. Every Republican governor must Push for school choice in their state. And every conservative family must take control of their children’s education. This was an excellent post. The author made it clear his preference for the 2024 presidential election. I have to say, I do not know how prepared President Trump would be to address this issue. Right now President Trump doesn’t seem to be prepared to invite dinner guests. This is very concerning.
Yep. Especially so considering the difficulty firing a public school teacher. They are dug in like ticks.
Absolutely not alarmist. If you don’t have children at school age you don’t have visibility on it. It’s an evil, evil storm.
But parents have to choose – and it’s hard to swim against the tide, whatever it is. And the schools et al know they can outlast you and your child in whatever grade they are in. It’s not possible to overstate how degraded the school personnel are using children to attack western civilization, but that’s what they are doing.
I’m choosing to challenge our school board through this year (speaking at meetings which are streamed and writing bulletins to the “neighborhood” social media) to publicize issues, have found other concerned taxpayers and have helped identify people able and willing to run for the board. And I’ve been able to pass parents on to homeschool resources and State funding they didn’t know about. Most of all I do not use euphemisms for bad behaviour and don’t debate.
I do have to pray often on whether I’m doing anything worthwhile @bryangstephens – but so far the answer is yes. I may have kept the town elementary school from getting to 50% of the student population taking the heinous Holistic Student Assessment. The District hopes to use it to get more social emotional learning embedded in the curriculum this year. The report is due at the December meeting. Parents didn’t know they had to opt IN and consent meant agreeing to any recommended “interventions.”
Civilization must be defended every blessed day.
Young people are getting absolutely screwed by the government yet I know of no major Republican that wants to explain to young Americans how and why they are being screwed.
Talk about missed opportunities.
Yes, cdor ,young people generally are much more idealistic and generally want to uplift the oppressed and downtrodden, but the plain facts are that the Democrats are absolutely raping the oppressed and downtrodden but the Republicans are too cowardly to explain it to them.
Rather than looking for complex, multifaceted explanations, perhaps consider that the quality of the candidates on offer by the GOP have been less than optimum. If a brain-damaged hobo who can barely speak can defeat your candidate with a five-point margin, maybe it’s time to look at the candidate selection process.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last half-century or so, you’d probably realize that this has been a complaint by Republicans since the passage of the 26th Amendment. The problem is not new nor are the proposed solutions. Yet, somehow, Republicans were able to win elections handily (cf. 1980 & 1984) and those crazy young folks that everyone was so worried about back then turned into the Republican voters of the present day. These kids today!
Yes, there are problems with education, K through infinity. Education reform doesn’t stand much chance because educational institutions are staffed with nutty leftists from stem to stern. Furthermore, the same can be said of all institutions, from major corporations to government bureaucracy to the legal & medical professions. This is the endpoint of liberal democracy. Good luck putting a band-aid on that.
Maybe. But if voters are EVER willing to vote for a brain-damaged hobo who can barely speak, what does that say about the voters?
Based on what actually happens in the game, American “football” would be more properly called “handball.”
Younger people have long voted Democrat. The author picked high water marks for Republicans (mid 80s when every age demo was voting Reagan, 1994 R revolution). That said I think his point is still valid and we should never assume people will turn more conservative as they age, which they typically do, as they are behaving differently (less marriage, kids) than past generations. I agree public education is a disaster and creates voters inclined to vote D. That’s an ongoing half century battle. What I almost never see though, is an effort by Republicans to reach young people. I was probably odd when I was young (late 80s/90s) in that I was attracted to conservative politics precisely because they were uncool and seemed more serious about issues. I wanted a grownup talking to me like a grownup. At the time they were also the happy warriors. Today many conservatives seem bitter, resentful, and lacking a positive vision about almost anything. I find myself becoming that way as well. What is our message for young people? I always expect Ds to have an advantage because of the cool factor and free stuff campaign; they appear to care more. No party wins every group. We certainly could do better with young people, who are amongst the most depressed, fearful generation we’ve had, with a coherent positive message.
Younger people have long voted Democrat. The author picked high water marks for Republicans (mid 80s when every age demo was voting Reagan, 1994 R revolution). That said I think his point is still valid and we should never assume people will turn more conservative as they age, which they typically do, as they are behaving differently (less marriage, kids) than past generations. I agree public education is a disaster and creates voters inclined to vote D. That’s an ongoing half century battle. What I almost never see though, is an effort by Republicans to reach young people. I was probably odd when I was young (late 80s/90s) in that I was attracted to conservative politics precisely because they were uncool and seemed more serious about issues. I wanted a grownup talking to me like a grownup. At the time they were also the happy warriors. Today many conservatives seem bitter, resentful, and lacking a positive vision about almost anything. I find myself becoming that way as well. What is our message for young people? I always expect Ds to have an advantage because of the cool factor and free stuff campaign; they appear to care more. No party wins every group. We certainly could do better with young people, who are amongst the most depressed, fearful generation we’ve had, with a coherent positive message.
“In my studies of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.” — Theodore Dalrymple
The election result might somewhat correspond to reality, but the election system certainly appears to correspond to something else.
Blame the voters is never going to be a winning strategy. A bit reminiscent of the basket of deplorables. How’d that work out for The Cackler?
The primary alternative, at least to get THOSE voters, would seem to be being more like the Democrats that they currently vote for. How does THAT work out for the Side of Light?
Wow. Nice going. Consider me an admirer. :)
That’s very kind. I’m not brave. It only took meeting one parent whose 11 year old girl was willing to speak (eloquently) at the school board meeting about the bathroom rules and how they damage her to give me just enough courage. We’ve no children in the District but I project on if our grandchildren had to cope. There are things “only” taxpayers can do. Not wavering on reality is one. The sexualization tactic is just evil for the benefit of adults, not children. Others do what I can not (run for office) and I try to do what they struggle with: I know how to research and use data, show up and write for others to read under my own name. I can’t be intimidated and have no children at risk. It’s enough to be going on with. You’re kind.
It is not just conservatives, indeed, I would estimate that Bitterness is considerably more prevalent among Leftists of various persuasions.
Here’s something someone said several years ago at a blog: If you are bitter, you are basically announcing to the world that you are a failure in your own eyes.
If this is true, then we have a whole lot of people in America today who are failures in their own eyes.
Or maybe it means they’re actually something else, not “bitter.”
They had a positive vision and it was rejected. What you see now in many conservatives is the normal bitter wisdom of old age.
The young have their own visions now. Maybe it’s time to step aside and let them have their way. I think it was Ben Franklin who said that experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.
Do not underestimate how the promise of student loan forgiveness won the loyalty of younger voters, especially single women.
I am not stepping aside.
But that didn’t really make sense, they were only talking about $10,000 and that’s not enough to make a significant impact on people who have several times that amount in student debt.
I heard the other day that all-in, it’s like $80,000 PER YEAR for Georgetown. And some others are even higher!
Who said it had to make sense?
Almost no one pays list price.
Well yes, but all the people who are complaining about their student loans, seem to owe WAY more than just $10,000.
To what extent did the abortion issue motivate young voters to go to the polls and vote Democrat? Do we have any data on that?
Good question
To have a firm position on abortion can be a variant on virtue signaling. To support student loan forgiveness is often pure self interest.
But someone might be motivated to cast a vote for a candidate based on either issue. I am just wondering if we have any data on how salient the abortion issue was in the 2022 midterms. Word on the street was that the Dobbs decision made the abortion issue more salient than before. Did it?
And what are the implications looking ahead to the 2024 presidential race? How should Republican presidential candidates approach the abortion issue? Should they advocate for a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks, as Lindsey Graham suggested? Or should they take the Mitch McConnell position that abortion is a state issue only?
In a general election, they should say as little as possible (ideally nothing) on abortion. If they have to say anything, say it is up to the states and the democratic process. That’s the only way not to lose voters in blue areas.