A new Siena College poll from the New York Times confirms that Democrats’ summer burst of enthusiasm has run its course. Voters have swung sharply in favor of Republicans, with 49% saying they will vote for a GOP candidate compared to 45% for a Democratic candidate.
About 64% said they believe the country is on the “wrong track,” and 45% said they “strongly disapprove” of the way President Joe Biden is running things.
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The discontent is especially noticeable among women, who, for some unfortunate reason, tend to be much more liberal than their male counterparts. Likely female voters are now split down the middle, 47% to 47%, on whether they’ll vote for a Republican or Democrat, which is quite telling since women broke for Biden by more than 13 points just two years ago. Now, self-described independent female voters are backing Republicans by 18 points.
As my colleague Tim Carney notes, this shift has occurred despite Democrats’ best efforts to mobilize women on the issue of abortion. It turns out most women don’t find the idea of restricting the killing of unborn children nearly as devastating as Democrats do. Indeed, only 5% of all likely voters, male and female, said abortion would be a top issue for them this November.
What, then, is driving women’s frustration with Democratic leadership? The New York Times/Siena College poll suggests it’s the economy. Twenty-six percent of all respondents said that “the economy” was the most important issue for them this November, followed by inflation (18%).
One Democratic woman with whom the Times spoke, 37-year-old Robin Ackerman, said she’s planning on voting Republican in three weeks “because I feel like they’re more geared towards business.” And that’s in spite of the fact that she “1,000% disagreed” with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
But, as I wrote last month, there’s another sleeper issue that I think better explains women’s sudden shift to the Right: education.
Many of these women are mothers who are still living with the consequences of pandemic school closures. Their children have been set back socially and academically for years as a result of Democrats’ pandemic policies. Just last week, for example, a report found that ACT scores for high school graduates had cratered to their lowest point in three decades. Add to that the education system’s refusal to take seriously the concerns of frustrated parents and the unrelenting pressure from leftist activists to incorporate wokeism in the classroom, and you’re left with a whole lot of angry families who are tired of feeling cut out of the picture.
Republicans are offering a solution. In Arizona, Republicans passed the most expansive school choice initiative yet, offering every single family in the state a way out of the public school system if they want it. In Florida, Republicans passed a bill blocking instruction on sexuality and “gender identity” in classrooms of young, impressionable children. And in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin stood up for parents by introducing a policy that blocks schools from hiding from them information about students’ gender confusion.
Each of these policies is popular with a large majority of voters, yet Democrats have fought tooth and nail to block them all. Indeed, in just about every single education debate over the past few years, from school closures to mask mandates to woke curricula, Democrats have proven that they see parents as an obstacle to bypass and children as future activists to be molded. And as a result, concerned parents, especially mothers, are fleeing the party in droves.
Those mothers may very well still hold liberal sentiments about abortion and other social issues. Most people do. But they seem to have realized over the past couple of years what conservatives have known all along: that liberalism is only worth supporting if you don’t care about your wallet or your family.
