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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
Weeks ago KCBS had a short story on issues. They interviewed some young females who said their issues were abortion and climate change. I don’t remember if hard data was presented along with the interviews.
This is another example of how the Senate Republican leaders did all they could to undercut our chances for victory in this election. LINDSEY GRAHAM two months before the election has a press conference to announce that if the Republicans regained the Senate, he would propose a law to ban abortion nationally. Is Graham stupid? No, he is a backstabbing snake. He knew exactly what he was doing by proposing something that fed the fears of all young women while being fully aware that his proposal would never happen.
I would raise the voting age back up to 21 Zafar.
It’s not even the teachers that are the problem. Teachers don’t set their curriculum, rather they teach to the standards set by the District, thr State, and the Federal government. There are some leftist teachers who want to promote their agenda in the classroom, but worse is the teacher just trying to do their job but has units they have to teach that embed a disdain for our shared mythos as Americans. By promoting our individuality and differences over our melting pot mythos you undermine any chance of our kids thinking the US is a great country.
Bryan is right that this battle was lost 30 years ago, and turning it around may be impossible absent something terrible that unites us against something. The problem with a disaster (economic, technological, environmental, medical, etc.) Is that what comes out the other side won’t bear a great resemblance to what we have now. Empires fall, and ours hasn’t been long lived, 80 years or so compared to ~250 for the British, because the people are more interested in their leisure than in working to be more.
Too risky
But I thought that young people always favored democrats. This was so pervasive during the Obama years that democrats tried to tell us that this youth vote was going to eventually overwhelm us and that a republican president would never be elected again (ignoring the fact that people generally vote more conservative as they age). Then along came Trump. And if Trump really did lose in 2020, it was only by a hair. I looked up age group voting in 2016 and it showed 18-24 year olds favoring Hillary by a 56% to 35% margin, which is not much different than the 2022 mid-term. I’m not sure where the missing 9% of those votes went, but there were 3rd party liberal candidates too. In 2020, 18 – 29 year-olds voted 60% t0 36% for Biden over Trump.
You are telling us that the youth vote has never favored democrats before but I do not believe this. You cited Reagan’s second term as evidence for this, but that was a monumental blowout election where his opponent Mondale won only the measly 10 electoral votes from his home State and 3 votes from the District of Columbia. The only reason that the 18-24 age group vote was split between Bush and Gore is that 5% of that group voted for Ralph Nader, and surely would have voted for Gore if Nader was not on the ballot. Besides, it was a pretty low-turnout election.
Well, you’re stuck with me as fan. :) As you said, there’s a risk for parents who have children in the schools.
I am hugely grateful as a fellow citizen. Thank you.
I don’t follow you. All I was doing was refuting the common belief that the young ALWAYS vote Democrat. I never said they never do.
Perhaps I was inferring more into it than you wrote.
I would say the public education system has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams in creating a generation or more of pajama boys and “life-of-julia” women.
And these will be running, or ruining, America and the world within the next generation.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
SBF is the poster child of the new generation. My prediction is that he will wind up as Treasury Secretary or head of the Fed.
This is not your father’s Animal House any longer.
Just for the record: Republicans are, and always have been, Progressives.