"They've called it a 'racist dog whistle' and a 'lie,'" starts a Business Insider article in which a roundtable of Democratic strategists layout their map for how best to drive back on Republican messaging about the presence of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools.
Their new plan is to run back their old one — yet harder.
Polling reveals that Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin's focus on the matter — and Democrat Terry McAuliffe's retort that the backlash against CRT was caused by racism — was necessary to Youngkin's upset win in Virginia, where Joe Biden shellacked Donald Trump by ten points in 2020.
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While leading Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, claimed that the controversy in Virginia was concocted by a nefarious right-wing media complex, the matter caught on outside of hard-right constituencies. Actually, a sizable plurality of independent Virginians support legislation that would prevent teachers from teaching students they need to feel guilt or shame about their race. (In an Emerson College poll conducted in September, independent Virginian voters favored a public-school CRT ban, 50–32 percent.)
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And yet, the consensus from those who want to paint the nation blue is that what's required is more, and more forceful, strikes of the kind McAuliffe mounted. And it's not as if the party took it lightly last time: At one McAuliffe campaign event, Democratic surrogates not just echoed the dog-whistle accusation, yet further claimed that Youngkin was out to "silence black authors," and "ban books about slavery and racism." McAuliffe himself made similar charges, while Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell inferred that Youngkin's stated opposition to CRT was a replacement for expressing a racial epithet directed at African Americans.
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According to Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign for president, "voters run from the Republicans when Democrats peel back the onion on what these claims really mean. It's not just that Republicans want a bigger role for parents in education, it's that Republicans are willing to let White supremacists write curricula." That argument, he states, has to be made "relentlessly."
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"It can't be dismissed as just a lie, it needs to be defeated as a way to put politicians in charge of the classroom and white supremacists in charge of the curriculum," he went on.
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Likewise, Celinda Lake, one of the lead pollsters for Joe Biden's campaign in 2020, offers her view that as long as Democrats engage vigorously on the matter, CRT is "not a threat" to their electoral prospects.
Congressman and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney has announced that the party's case for CRT will be focused around the notion that "children need to learn their history — all of it."
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