“Even when students are in the classroom, they’re being bombarded with woke propaganda and radical gender ideology,” a concerned parent wrote in August as American children began to head back to school. That was because of Democrats and the White House, she argued, while “Republicans are championing parental rights and educational opportunity for every student.” It was Republicans who had “fought against critical race theory and leftist efforts to replace parents with the state,” she insisted.
She would. The author was Ronna McDaniel, chair of the national Republican Party. The unsubtle essay appeared in the conservative Washington Examiner.
As with any such essay, McDaniel was being aspirational. She wanted American parents to view her party as their natural ally, especially with the midterm elections looming.
Exit polls show that Republicans did slightly better than Democrats in November with voters who had kids under the age of 18 — though the party underperformed relative to expectations. New polling from Fox News, meanwhile, shows that the party’s efforts to bolster its purported advocacy for parents is stumbling.
The Fox News poll (conducted by well-regarded bipartisan polling firms) asked respondents the extent to which they were concerned about various issues. It does this fairly regularly; a number of the questions in the most recent poll were also asked in a poll conducted in May last year.
They included a question about the extent of concern Americans had about “book banning by local school boards.” In May, two-thirds of self-identified parents said they were “extremely” or “very” concerned about such bans. By March, three-quarters did.
Importantly, the views of parents were not much different from the concerns of Democrats or Republicans in May, differing only by a few percentage points. The 19-point increase in concern among parents between May and March, though, mirrored an increase in Democratic concern. Now, parents align much more closely with Democrats on the subject.
Notice the wording here, by the way. The question is about book bans, a real issue — but attributed to “local school boards.” This depoliticizes the issue to some extent. It’s not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) pushing for schools to limit what books are available out of concern over “critical race theory.” Instead, it’s just a local school board making a call.
Contrast those results with another issue: what’s being taught in public schools. In May 2022, the level of concern expressed by parents aligned with those of Republicans, differing by only two percentage points. By March, though, that concern had fallen seven points.
In May, three-quarters of parents expressed concern about what was being taught in schools. Now, three-quarters worry about book bans.
On a number of other issues in the new Fox News poll, parents align more closely with Democrats than Republicans: climate change, expanding gun background checks, increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Most of those, though, aren’t directly related to parenting as such, though they may be a prompt for how people vote.
There is one other noteworthy shift. In May, parents generally worried about “higher crime rates” at about the same level as Democrats, while concern among Republicans was much higher. In the most recent Fox News poll, concern among Democrats and parents both increased substantially.
Here, too, the question wording is important. Whether crime rates are “higher” depends on one’s frame of reference, which itself is often political. But the midterm-season push (particularly on Fox News) to emphasize crime appears to have had an effect.
McDaniel’s essay had other dubious arguments, such as her echoing the false suggestion that run-of-the-mill parents were being targeted by the Justice Department for scrutiny. As for the overarching claim about leftist educational curriculums, the claim that has been the jumping-off point for politicians to launch book removals and bans? Her party is losing ground with parents, not gaining it.
