The Republicans’ culture wars are dooming the party to failure

The Republican Party is ramping up its focus on far-right culture war fights, setting the stage for these hot-button social issues to be the centerpiece of their platform in 2024, which will invariably cost them winnable races next year. 

In addition to lacking popular support, the Republican Party’s extreme moral crusades come at the expense of focusing on the core issues Americans care most about, and undermine the GOP’s ability to draw a legitimate and compelling contrast with Democratic policies at a time when Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. 

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and far-right House Republicans are now using the annual U.S. military budget as an opportunity to spar with Democrats over abortion and other social issues, jeopardizing the critical bill’s passage and bucking the trend of bipartisan backing for the Pentagon’s budget. Under the guise of combatting “wokeness” in the military, the House GOP caucus voted on Thursday to end abortion services for military members and ban transgender health care.  

The House GOP’s latest effort comes on the heels of a controversial video circulated by the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) The spot touts DeSantis’s record opposing LGBTQ rights as governor and attacks frontrunner Donald Trump for allegedly supporting gay rights in the past. In an effort to outflank Trump on the right, DeSantis has advanced an extremely conservative agenda in Florida this year, which included signing a six-week abortion ban and his “Don’t Say Gay” school policies. 

We cannot separate DeSantis’s rhetoric from House Republicans stalling essential government business to air their cultural grievances. Both represent an effort to appeal to the most radical Republican primary voters who — by way of a plurality-rules electoral system — wield outsized influence over their party, yet represent just a small fraction of the national electorate. 

To be sure, any effort by Republicans to restrict abortion is a political loser nationally if polling and recent election history are any indication. Polls consistently find around 70 percent of Americans saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and in last year’s midterms, Republican candidates’ extreme anti-abortion rights positions bolstered their Democratic opponents. 

The majority of the country also supports rights for same-sex couples, putting Republicans like DeSantis well outside of the mainstream. There are some nuances when it comes to transgender rights, as there is a sense among many voters that the left has moved too far on this issue, specifically in its support for teaching gender ideology in grade school and allowing transgender women to compete against biological women in sports.  

Some political operatives see the transgender issue as a way for Republicans to reach independent voters who are uncomfortable with the left’s prescriptions for new gender norms. But given that the most extreme Republican voices are dominating the dialogue, the commonsense center-right argument surrounding these issues is largely absent from the conversation. As such, it is more likely that Americans will perceive Republicans’ preoccupation with LGBTQ matters as yet another effort by the party to take away individual freedoms — as with abortion rights — and as an unwelcome distraction from addressing the “kitchen table” issues they want their leaders to address, such as the cost of living. 

By putting quality-of-life concerns on the back burner to their culture wars, Republicans are undermining their inherent advantage over President Biden, a profoundly vulnerable incumbent whose approval rating generally hovers at or below 40 percent in public polls, largely as a result of Americans’ dissatisfaction with his handling of issues that impact their daily lives. 

In 2021, now-Virginia Governor, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated a well-known Democrat in a state that Biden won by 10 points just one year prior by running on a center-right platform focused on the economy, public safety, education and personal freedoms. Republicans would be wise to ditch their far-right culture war crusade and emulate Youngkin’s strategy at the national level — as polling finds that Americans broadly favor strengthening parental rights in education, are dissatisfied with the nation’s crime policies and favor limiting government spending. 

That being said, if recent events are any indication, the Republican Party is more likely to continue waging its electorally costly culture war, moving further and further out of the mainstream of American politics with each battle. 

Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an advisor to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is: “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”