The Democrats may be learning the hard way that it’s a mistake to alienate suburban parents. In particular, that it’s a mistake to say that parents shouldn’t be able to tell schools what to teach their children, or to brand them as participants in “domestic terrorism” when they vocally protest the teaching of critical race theory (CRT), transgender use of school bathrooms, and other progressively fashionable but highly controversial public-school policies.
That’s why Terry McAuliffe, the popular Democratic governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2018 who it seems just days ago deemed a shoo-in in his bid for a second term on Nov. 2, is suddenly neck-and-neck with his Republican rival, Glenn Youngkin, a relatively obscure Virginia businessman.
One obvious reason: Those same Northern Virginia suburbs, especially Loudoun County, Virginia’s most populous and affluent jurisdiction, are CRT battlegrounds, with parents battling school boards over what the parents say is indoctrination of their children in the notion that racism is baked into American institutions, privileging whites over members of ethnic minorities. Angry parents across America have shown up at school board meetings and on social media to protest CRT-influenced curricula that they say foster crude anti-white hostility.
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe declared. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” His polling promptly took a nosedive, and he’s now scrambling to maintain that his words have been taken out of context.
The Virginia governor’s race is supposed to be a bellwether for the midterm elections of 2022, when Republicans have a good chance of cashing in on current dissatisfaction with the Biden administration to recapture both the House and the Senate. A McAuliffe victory might distract the electorate from a string of Biden economic debacles, from surging inflation to lackluster job creation to massive disruptions in the supply chain that have meant empty shelves in stores and more than 100 container ships idling undocked in the Los Angeles harbor. A McAuliffe victory also might signal that the suburban political moderates who helped Biden into the presidency in 2020 in the first place are willing to support the massive-spending left turn that he and his fellow Democrats in Congress have taken since his inauguration.
Footnotes to the letter listed about 20-odd incidents nationwide of supposed “threats” and “violence” against school board members and school personnel. While one or two of the alleged incidents involved conduct that was arguably criminal—an individual mailed a letter to an Ohio school board member stating, “We are coming after you”—most of the reported behavior was merely rude, or perhaps not even that. A protester in a Detroit suburb gave a Nazi salute to a school board member over a COVID-19 mask mandate for children, and a Tennessee parent mocked a student who had similarly advocated the wearing of masks by youngsters in classrooms. The most common verb in the footnoted news accounts describing the parental conduct was “disrupt,” and the most common adjective was “disorderly.”
At the June 22 meeting, Loudoun School Superintendent Scott Ziegler maintained that “we don’t have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” triggering Smith’s emotions. In fact, the alleged perpetrator had reportedly been quietly transferred to another school, where he allegedly sexually assaulted another girl in an empty classroom, according to sheriff’s reports. He’s currently awaiting judicial disposition on both charges. Parent-activists are calling for Ziegler’s resignation.
Maron wrote: “You may disagree with parents like me who do not want our children indoctrinated with Critical Race Theory, masked during recess, or told that their biological sex is … not real. But in a free society, we don’t call the feds to police our fellow Americans because we don’t share their politics.”
On Nov. 2, and certainly in 2022, the Democratic Party may well learn that even suburban liberals and moderates react with hostility when they’re told by the government they have no control over the schools where their children spend most of their days.
