Politico: Ukraine War Helps Democrats Divert Attention from Unpopular ‘Culture Wars’

The Ukraine war is good news for Democrats because it distracts from their unpopular domestic issues, an article in Politico magazine argues.

“Dems catch a break from the culture wars: War in Ukraine and the domestic economic fallout have given Democrats a chance to focus there instead of on other issues that dominated 2021,” read the headline on the lead story by David Siders and Elena Schneider in the Saturday morning layout at Politico’s website.

The article, which was about the Democrats’ 2022 campaign meeting in Washington, D.C., notes that “[f]or more than a year, Democrats have been on defense, with the party’s own polling clarifying its vulnerability to the GOP’s “alarmingly potent” attacks in the “culture wars.”

However, the article then adds that the Ukraine war and “ensuing economic fallout” have now “given the Democrats a chance to put those matters aside and focus on an unlikely, more favorable set of issues eight months before the midterms.”

The article continues:

For once, it’s not banned books or transgender athletes nonstop on Americans’ TVs, but foreign affairs and rising gas prices. In the past week, Biden’s public approval ratings have ticked up, and the generic ballot has improved slightly for Democrats. Democratic governors are proposing gas price relief, while the party’s campaign arms are pummeling Republicans on taxes and health care costs.

The Politico article, however, absolves the Democrats of blame for these political disasters, and even portrays their culture policies as Republican-initiated attacks:

“What’s the GOP plan?” Jaime Harrison, the DNC chair, said in his speech at the party meeting on Thursday night. “How will they bring down costs and address the needs of regular people? In the states, they’re too busy attacking trans and queer kids, too busy taking away your reproductive freedom, too busy telling teachers what history they’re not allowed to teach, to actually do their jobs.”

In the hotel bar late that night, DNC staffers raised their hands and cheered for Harrison’s speechwriter. And it wasn’t a one-off. At a meeting of state party chairs, Ken Martin, chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said Democrats would not succumb to the “distraction and demagoguery” of Republicans, who he said had “set their sights on transgender kids” instead of addressing “real issues.”

Meanwhile, Democrat support among blacks, Latinos, and whites is dropping to record lows amid inflation, migration, and cultural negation. On March 2, Business Insider reported:

The vast majority of Black workers who lost their jobs said they were still looking for work a year after the start of the pandemic (68%), even as employers across the country complained that they couldn’t find anyone amidst persistent labor shortages.

That’s according to the CARE at Work survey of nearly 2,000 Black workers in Southern California about their experience during the pandemic. The survey was conducted from May 2021 to July 2021.

“Black workers in times of crisis, in times of economic recessions and downturns, are oftentimes the first to be let go from work, and then the last to be hired back,” Déjà Thomas, the report’s lead author, told Business Insider.

Under President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies, however, black unemployment dropped to record lows.

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