Identity Politics and the 2018 Election

On Tuesday night, three more states held primary elections while Texas held runoff elections for candidates who failed to capture 50 percent of the vote in the March 6 primary.  Voters in Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky went to the polls for the first time this election cycle on Tuesday night.  All three states voted for President Trump and none of the three states have a Senator up for re-election this year.  Only two of the states, Arkansas and Georgia, have gubernatorial races this year.  Arkansas’s popular incumbent governor, Republican Asa Hutchinson, looks like he will sail to re-election in the fall.  While Texas does have a Senate race this year, the candidates had already been decided on March 6; when the nominees of both parties captured their nominations with an overwhelming majority of the vote, avoiding the need for a runoff. For these reasons, I decided not to do a “preview” of primary night as I have done for the past two weeks.

Some developments have led to me reconsider not weighing in on these races.  While identity politics played a major part in the 2016 Presidential Election, the analyses of Tuesday night’s election results made it clear that identity politics may have an even more prominent role in the 2018 midterm elections.  Identity politics, primarily but not exclusively a phenomenon of the left, argues that people should vote for a candidate because of their membership in a particular group (i.e. gender, race, sexual orientation) as opposed to their ideas. 

Republicans in Georgia have yet to choose a gubernatorial nominee to succeed retiring Republican Governor Nathan Deal. Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle and Secretary of State Brian Kemp finished first and second in Tuesday’s primary, respectively.  Since no candidate received 50 percent of the vote, Cagle and Kemp will advance to a runoff.  Whoever ends up winning the runoff election on July 24 will face off against Former State Rep. Stacey Abrams, who cleared the 50 percent threshold in the Democratic Primary, beating Former State Rep. Stacey Evans. As they reported the results of Tuesday’s elections to the American people, the mainstream media focused on how Stacey Abrams has a chance to become the first female African-American governor, not just of Georgia but in the entire United States.

In Texas, Former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez came out on top in the runoff election for the gubernatorial race, after receiving a plurality of the vote in the March 6 Democratic Primary.  She will face off against incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott in the general election.  The media made sure to note that she has already become the first openly Lesbian and Latina candidate to win a major party’s nomination for governor.

Look at it like this.  With the RAISE Act, immigrants would receive points based on English proficiency, age, and education level.  On the surface, it looks like the Democrats award points to candidates based on race, gender, and sexual orientation.  For this reason, many believe that a white male has no shot at winning the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 no matter how pro-abortion or anti-Trump they are.

If feminists really cared about smashing the WASP-dominated patriarchy, which might as well show up in the Democratic platform in 2020, they would surely support Diane Black’s campaign for Governor of Tennessee and Marsha Blackburn’s campaign for the United States Senate, also in Tennessee.  Blackburn will likely face Former Governor Phil Bredesen, a white male, in the general election; while Black, who still has to clear a primary hurdle, will likely face off against Former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, also a white male.  Yet the Democrats will not support either of these women. As a matter of fact, they will actively campaign against them, their defeats and their concurrent retirements from the House of Representatives will help advance their narrative that Republicans don’t have enough “diversity” in their party.

You could say the Democrats have a public and a private position when it comes to the candidates they support.  In their public position, they support candidates based on their race or gender.  In their private position, which has a greater influence on the candidates they choose to support, they back the candidates based upon their NARAL rating.  They just think that identity politics will help drive up turnout among the demographic groups that they spend entire election seasons trying to suck up to; primarily women and minorities.

According to the bylaws of identity politics, first crafted by Karl Marx and friends, members of a particular “group” have an obligation to vote for fellow members of their group when they run for office.  In Marx’s original world view, members of the global working class had an obligation to support one another as they sought to overthrow the concept of the nation-state.  Those who don’t vote with the rest of the tribe receive immense backlash from the self-appointed leaders of the “group.”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said there’s a “special place in hell” for women who don’t vote for Hillary Clinton.  Bra-burning feminist Gloria Steinem suggested that college girls only supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary because “the boys are with Bernie.” Michelle Obama made these condescending remarks earlier this month at the United States of Women Summit: “When the most qualified person running was a woman and look what we did instead? I mean that says something about where we are, if we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar for each other that we don’t have for men, if we’re still doing that today, if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a women could be our president ... that’s on us.”  Perhaps it never occurred to Michelle Obama that the American people have no problem electing a woman President, they just didn’t want to elect that woman President.

The Democrats thought that all they had to do to win elections was pick a non-white male candidate. This idea worked out nicely for them in 2008 and 2012, when President Obama motivated African-Americans to go out to the polls in larger numbers than usual.  They thought the same results would occur among women if they made Hillary Clinton their Presidential candidate in 2016.  Their master plan backfired.  It turns out the American people actually preferred President Trump’s ideas to Hillary’s.    

Democrats should have learned their lesson from 2016 that immutable characteristics such as race or gender don’t win you an election, ideas do.  But it looks like quite a few candidates in 2018 will still march to the drumbeat of identity politics. In Michigan, Democratic Attorney General Candidate Dana Nessel released an ad asking “Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting?  Is it the candidate who doesn’t have a penis?  I’d say so.”  In other words, “vote for me because I’m a woman.  I’ll tell you about my ideas later.”

So yes, Democrats obsess over identity politics but only when it comes to candidates that they support.  The same can be said about their propaganda machine: the mainstream media.  As Ann Coulter pointed out, in the week following Nancy Pelosi’s election as Speaker of the House, “there are 476 documents on Nexis heralding the magnificent achievement of Nancy Pelosi becoming the FIRST WOMAN speaker of the House.”  By contrast, when Condoleezza Rice became the first black woman Secretary of State less than two years earlier, “There were only 77 documents noting that Rice was the first black woman to be the secretary of state, and half of them were issues of Jet, Essence, Ebony or Black Entrepreneur magazine.”    

As for Blackburn, Republicans shouldn’t support her because of her gender, they should support her for her pro-life voting record, support for building the wall, and her likelihood to immediately become one of the top 10 most conservative members of the United States Senate. The Conservative Review awarded Blackburn a Liberty Score of 80 percent, which would make her the seventh most conservative Senator should she manage to win the election. The American Conservative Union feels even more confident about Blackburn’s effectiveness as a stewardess of conservatism, awarding her a 96 percent rating in 2016.   

If nothing else, identity politics points out the total hypocrisy of the left. Imagine a Presidential race where two very conservative women such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann appear at the head of the Republican ticket while adulterers and such as Al Franken and John Edwards would comprise the Democratic Presidential ticket.  The Democrats would probably still carry single women in this hypothetical election in spite of the fact that a decade-old photograph shows their party’s standard bearer posing like a frat boy touching a sleeping woman’s breasts and his running mate cheated on his dying wife with one of his campaign aides.  The Republican candidates should have no trouble capturing a majority of the male vote, which would disprove the theory that Hillary Clinton lost because of sexism.

In the meantime, Arizona may very well have two female candidates for the Senate.  Krysten Sinema, who currently represents Arizona’s 9^th Congressional District, will likely end up as the Democratic nominee while Congresswoman Martha McSally and Former State Senator Kelli Ward look like the two best prospects to win the Republican nomination for the Senate.  Should Sinema and Blackburn both win their respective Senate races, expect very different media coverage of their victories as the first female Senators to represent their states. Any Media Research Center study conducted after the election will surely show that the Democratic Sinema’s election victory will get a lot more media coverage than the Republican Blackburn’s.

We’ll see if the 2018 elections will go down in history as an election based on ideas or based on identity.  As the generic ballot continues to tighten, just 161 days remain between now and Election Day.