If Democrats could bottle Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan state senator who delivered a widely publicized speech condemning Republicans’ push to restrict discussions of gender and sexuality in schools, they would.
McMorrow’s big moment, which we wrote about on Monday, made her an instant political celebrity on the left. Her Twitter followers have grown to over 220,000. Democrats who raise money for state legislative races already have them as a Fundraising Powerhouse.
McMorrow’s five minutes of rage were so effective, Democrats said, partly because they were so infrequent.
It tapped into a frustration many Democrats feel about their party leaders’ reluctance to get involved in these cultural firestorms, said Wendy Davis, a former Texas lawmaker whose filibuster of an abortion law in 2013 made her a national political figure.
“What We Fight For”
“At some point you just have to stand up and fight back,” Davis said.
“The strategy of not hitting the right wing where it is can only get you so far,” she added. “I think people were really hungry to see the Democrats push back and push back hard like Mallory did.”
Other Democrats are urging candidates to defend their beliefs more aggressively, rather than ignoring or deflecting Republican cultural attacks by changing the subject to paperback issues.
“Democrats are afraid to talk about why we’re fighting for what we’re fighting for,” said Tré Easton, a progressive strategist. “It was exactly the kind of values-based rebuttal I want every Democrat to sound like.”
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Another lesson from McMorrow’s speech, said Rebecca Katz, a senior adviser to Lt. gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, says voters are looking for authenticity and passion rather than ideological alignment in lockstep.
“Voters want candidates who speak like real people, rather than slick, poll-proven performers,” Katz said. “They like candidates that are unfiltered, uncalculated and unscripted. And even if they don’t always agree with you, if a candidate is direct and honest, voters tend to respect that.”
Fetterman, who leads polls ahead of the May 17 primary, is a progressive who aligns with the party’s Bernie Sanders wing. His main opponent is Rep. Conor Lamb, a centrist from a suburban area outside of Pittsburgh. Fetterman has worked to reassure Democratic Party leaders in and out of the state that he is not too far left to win a seat vital to their hopes of retaining their Senate majority.
But the fault lines within the party concern communication with the public as well as traditional struggles between progressives and moderates.
Party strategists in Washington, led by centrist lawmakers facing tough re-election bids, have agreed on a heavily poll-tested mid-term message that highlights the key legislation Democrats have passed in Congress: the $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
It’s an approach that has some Democrats wanting a little more Mallory McMorrow.
“I agree that we should make sure that we tell Americans every day what we’re doing to help them and their families,” Davis said, measuring her words carefully. “But we must also fight fire with fire.”
what to read
New York’s Supreme Court ruled that Democratic leaders had violated the state constitution in drawing new congressional and Senate districts and ordered a court-appointed expert to draw replacements for this year’s critical midterm elections.
Democratic lawmakers released a report alleging that senior Trump administration officials granted a $700 million pandemic relief loan to a troubled trucking company in 2020 over objections from Defense Department officials.
The White House Correspondents Association dinner returns in-person Saturday after a two-year pandemic absence. It has some in Washington calculating the risks involved. President Biden will be there. Anthony Fauci skips it.
pulse
It’s the gender difference, fool
It might be the most important divide in American politics: the gender divide between the two major parties. And it’s getting bigger.
New public opinion research from the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington, examines how far apart Democrats and Republicans are today on a variety of issues, including their opposing approaches to sex and sexuality and their spiritual practices.
The split is fueled in large part by the steady migration of college-educated women into the Democratic Party. In 1998, the study’s authors note, only 12 percent of Democrats were college-educated women. That number is now 28 percent – making it a dominant bloc in the party. For comparison, men with no college degrees now make up 22 percent of the Republican Party, up from 17 percent in 1998.
This gender divide is a silent driver of political polarization, said Daniel Cox, the director and founder of AEI’s Survey Center on American Life.
He was struck by the strong disagreements between women with college degrees and men with no college degrees, especially on two issues: climate change and abortion.
Sixty-five percent of college-educated women prefer environmental protection to faster economic growth, AEI found, compared to just 45 percent of non-college-educated men. 72 percent of college-educated women say abortion should be legal in most cases, while only 43 percent of non-college-educated men agree.
The gender gap widened long before Donald Trump, Cox said. But his election “charged” political activism, particularly among millennial women, he said.
It was mostly college-educated women who rallied on the National Mall in 2017 to voice their opposition to Trump, a Republican president who was swept into office by what he called “the undereducated.”
College-educated women joined Joe Biden during the 2020 election, repelled by Trump’s brash and aggressive political style.
Those feelings only got stronger. According to the AEI, 73 percent of women with college degrees have a negative opinion of Trump, while 59 percent have a very negative opinion of him. In contrast, 48 percent of men without a university degree reject Trump.
—Blake
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