Virginia moms explain why they voted against Democrats

 Hot Air:

As grim as this clip is for Democrats, it might reassure them to learn that all of these women were single-issue voters last week. If Dems can pivot on that issue — school closures — then in theory these votes are back in play.

Democrats will pivot. They already have, in fact. The country’s biggest blue state, which kept schools closed for so many months during the pandemic, has done a bang-up job of keeping them open this fall. With the arrival of vaccines for young children and wonder drugs from Pfizer and Merck to treat adults infected by their school-aged children, any remaining argument for shuttering schools for safety reasons (which was never strong to begin with) is up in smoke. If that wasn’t already clear to liberals, the results in Virginia and New Jersey have made it so.

I’ll also predict that we won’t see Randi Weingarten campaigning much with Democrats next fall or Barack Obama sneering about phony trumped-up culture wars, both of which are specifically cited in the CNN interview below as having alienated these suburban moms. (One woman compared Obama’s disdain to how school boards have reacted to parents’ complaints about closures.) That was total political malpractice by Terry McAuliffe. As bad as Democrats are at retail politics, even they’re destined to learn from it.

...

All the hype about suburbanites veering rightward in Virginia to put Glenn Youngkin over the top after they trended leftward during Trump’s presidency is obscuring another problem for the party that’s harder to solve. Your read of the day is this Times story about the GOP building ever greater margins in rural areas, something Democrats didn’t believe was possible. They thought 70/30 was about the worst they could do outside the suburbs. They were wrong. They also thought Trump alone could motivate rural voters to turn out in huge numbers. Wrong again: Youngkin the private equity guy had bigger margins in the sticks this year than Trump did last year.

...

There is more.

I think the parents' revolt is real and Democrats misjudged it because of their political biases.  But there is also a growing rebellion against Democrats in rural America who have been hit hard by things like Democrats driving up the cost of energy.  As a rural American, every time I drive past a gas station and see the prices advertised it makes me want to vote against every Democrat on the ballot.