According to a report from the Guardian's Lauren Gambino, the leadership of the Republican Party has already drawn up their battle plan for taking over both chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms and it is centered around using the Donald Trump playbook of increasing the fears of conservative voters in order to scare them to the polls.
According to the report GOP lawmakers have been handed a memo from the House Republican Study Committee that was bluntly titled: "Lean into the culture war."
What that means, reports Gambino, is that the GOP is dead set on re-upping "the culture war battles that Donald Trump waged from the White House."
"Grievance politics is not a new strategy for Republicans. In 1968, Richard Nixon employed the 'Southern Strategy' to exploit white racial grievances coded in language such as 'law and order' and 'states’ rights”' But as partisanship grows and the parties become increasingly hostile to one another, so too has the potential political benefit of cultural warfare that inflames division and energizes their base," the report states, with Gambino adding that GOP is already hard at work ramping up anger.
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"As Democrats negotiate amongst themselves over how to pass Biden’s signature domestic policy bill, Republicans have been seeding outrage over – and fundraising off of – all manner of perceived injustices from cancel culture to Dr Seuss to the 1619 project," the Guardian reports. "They are hammering the administration over its handling of immigration at the southern border and Democrats over rising crime rates in cities. And Biden’s efforts to pursue racial equity as part of his governing agenda has drawn accusations of racism from conservatives who say the efforts discriminate against white people."
According to messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio, "It’s the oldest trick in the book. It’s creating some sort of an ‘other’ so that we don’t notice that they’re actually the cause of our problems.”
Noted pollster and election analyst Ruy Teixeira stated that Democrats need to "rebrand" to blunt the GOP attacks.
"We need a durable majority. You can’t build a durable majority by ignoring socio-cultural concerns and the values of these huge swaths of the population," he advised before adding, "We’re really just at the beginning of what needs to be a substantial change in the way the American economic model works. And to do that, it’s not enough to just win one election and pass some stuff. We need to win a number of elections and pass even more stuff … It’s not much more complicated than that.”
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