All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.
This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it’s not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico — a seminary student-turned-politician — embodies an existential threat to the right’s long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.
Yes! It’s frustrating because I genuinely want what’s best for this community, but I feel like this is such a massive misstep.
I think of the issue of gun regulation. Democrats wanted “common sense gun regulation”. With was incredibly popular in the polls. But Republicans lied about what democrats wanted, and this engaged their voters. They went to the polls to protect their gun rights.
Now guns are deregulated in ways nobody even wanted. Maybe democrats were on the right side, but the messaging was wrong, and it backfired massively.
On a wedge issue like this there really doesn’t seem to be a right way to do the messaging. On Fox news you’re addressing entrenched beliefs that trans athletes are this huge threat to all that is good in the world, trying to explain why it isn’t so is a losing game.
I think Talarico tried to sidestep the issue by saying he opposes trans athletes “if it endangers safety or fairness”, which is really quite a reasonable position. To the right wing it sounds like he opposes trans athletes but the condition he put on it means he actually doesn’t. He put forward a position that both sides might even agree on, but it didn’t give the trans community the impression of endorsing their side that they wanted.