The Democrats CRT problem

 Claire Brighn:

Late last week, Beto O’Rourke made headlines by becoming the first prominent Democrat to explicitly come out against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools. While that announcement is unlikely to save O’Rourke’s floundering gubernatorial campaign in Texas, it is an indication that at least some Democrats are coming to the realization that perceived support for CRT and politicized education is a major electoral liability – a fact made all the more apparent by recent public polling on the subject. But after first denying the very existence of CRT and then defending its inclusion in K-12 curriculum, Democrats may have already sealed their fate this fall.

According to a recent CNN poll, 46% of voters – including about half of parents with children under ages of 18 – said education would be “extremely important” in how they vote in the Congressional midterm elections this November. A recently released Cyngal poll makes the importance of education even more clear and finds that, among swing-state voters on the question of which party is more trusted to protect parental control in education, Republicans hold a 10-point lead, 47 to 37.

These numbers clearly have Democratic leaders on high alert. According to polling of voters in swing districts in late January and paid for by the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, Democrats would lose to Republicans by 4 points on a generic ballot. One of the big reasons why? An astounding 61% of voters surveyed agreed with the statement that “Democrats are teaching kids as young as five Critical Race Theory, which teaches that America is a racist country and that white people are racist.”

While such numbers may be easy to gloss over as obvious or self-evident, it’s worth noting just how significant those findings are. In today’s highly polarized political climate, it’s difficult to get a majority of voters to agree on anything – which means that a political party that can effectively appeal to those sentiments has a formidable advantage in any election.

What’s more, there is at least some reason to believe that the power of the concerned parent is likely underestimated in a number of these polls. Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar, one of the most accurate pollsters throughout the last several election cycles, made an important distinction months ago in saying that what people think of critical race theory itself is “very different” from what parents “think should be done if critical race theory came to their school.”

A recently released Manhattan Institute poll confirms this, showing that 54% of voters support removing “lessons based on critical race theory about concepts such as white privilege and systemic racism from public school curriculum.” But when the same question was asked of parents, that number skyrocketed to 66%, with well over half of every demographic concurring, including black and white parents alike. That could very well indicate that normally Democratic voters will be pushed to vote Republican by Democrats’ education extremism.
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 CRT is probably closer to "systemic racism" than anything they are teaching about the subject.  It also hurts Democrats that many of those teaching CRT initially lied about the fact they were teaching it.  The Virginia election of Republican Youngkin as governor shows the power of oppostion to CRT.