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In state capitals across the country, Republicans seem to be overplaying their hand. The most obvious example is abortion, which poll after poll shows most Americans support in many, if not most, circumstances. In Iowa, a state policy to cover the costs of abortion and morning-after pills for rape victims is on hold as the Republican Attorney General reviews it. In Idaho, where abortion is already illegal in all cases, it is now a crime punishable by up to five years in prison for adults who help pregnant minors to cross state lines to obtain the procedure. In South Carolina, a bill categorizing abortion the same as homicidepunishable by the death penaltyhas seemed to lose steam, but nonetheless remains in play.

And those are just some of the dozens and dozens of efforts undertaken with Republican guidance to further erode abortion rights in a post-Roe world. Look around at other culture-war-flavored topics running on parallel tracks inside the GOP, and its clear that their leaders are chasing broadly unpopular goals: banning books and targeting drag queens; making some of the most dangerous firearms even more accessible; blocking health care for transgender individuals; fighting corporations over wokeness; and engaging in the most brazen political retaliation.

All of these are polling clunkerswith the important exception of gender-affirming care for trans minorsand stand to leave the 44% of Americans who identify with neither party wondering just what is animating Republican lawmakers this session, be it in statehouses or here in Washington. Heres the most basic answer: its what they need to do to survive.

Now, hear me out. A lot of my liberal friends predictably will retort that this is all part of some scary, hate-filled agenda meant to oppress non-white, female, and marginalized communities. My conservative pals will say these are simply efforts to roll back governments reach. Both can be true, but if you get down to the realpolitik of the situation, this polarized agenda is merely the logical conclusion of what happens when the party in power looks around and sees theres no one there to stop them from drawing legislative districts however they please. The extreme gerrymandering that results means red states get redder legislaturesand, to be fair, blue states turn deeper blue; there are just fewer of themand the resulting policies move to the extremes with few consequences.

Few consequences, that is, until someone falls out of line. Its really, really rare to lose re-nomination as an incumbent; just 14 of the 435 House seats saw that happen last year, and roughly half were victims of ex-President Donald Trumps petty endorsement of a challenger. Moving to last years November ballot, a study of most of the races on most ballots found 94% of all incumbents won another term, with congressional incumbents posting a staggering 98% win rate and state-level incumbents notching a 96% record in the general election.

This job-for-life patina is not by accident. Incumbents know its statistically improbable that any newcomer can credibly boot them from power. Incumbency has huge advantages, including taxpayer-funded (official) travel, the power of the bully pulpit, and donors looking to stay in good graces. But you look at the few case studies about incumbents who didnt win re-nomination, and there are warning signs. The folks who lose spectacularly often run afoul of orthodoxy inside the partys most fervent crowds. Rep. Liz Cheneywho dared call Jan. 6, 2021, for what it wasis a prime example. (To be fair, Rep. Caroline Maloney, who had the misfortune of being matched with another longtime institution of New York Democratic politics, is not.)

Then there are the very carefully drawn and high-cost maps themselves. Chris Cillizza smartly noted in his newsletter last week that the Cook Political Report analysis of the current map shows a scant 82 House seats in play, and only 45 would be considered truly competitive. When Cook did this analysis back in 1999, the number of potentially competitive districts totalled 164double what it is today. Which means this: the head-to-head, D-vs.-R voting isnt the real race. The true competition is the one that transforms a candidate into a nominee in increasingly homogeneous communities where voters are picking real estate based not only on crime and tax rates, but also their prospective neighbors ideologies. Being seen as an oddball for a districtAKA collaborating across the aisle on legislationis a death sentence in a lot of districts, which explains the steady polarization in Congress itself. The name of the game for incumbents is survival, and veering to an extreme can be a gilded path for another term, while trying for comity can mean a skid toward K Street.

So as you look at the seemingly out-of-touch agenda snaking its way through state legislatures and the Republican-led parts of Washington and think the plans are incompatible with the electorate, thats only partially true. Broadly, yes, Americans are aghast at parts of this all-culture-wars-all-the-time agenda. Some 76% of Americans tell pollsters that theyre fine with schools teaching ideas that might make students uncomfortable. And a clear majority of all Americans64%think abortion should be legal in most or all cases. The same number of Americans say there should be laws protecting transgender individuals from discrimination.

Read more: Exclusive: New Data Shows the Anti-Critical Race Theory Movement Is Far From Over

Dig into the numbers a little, though, and its quickly apparent that the lawmakers chasing these divisive notions are not completely irrational, especially when you consider their district borders are drawn to foment hardcore policies. The dirty secret among political professionals is that all voters are not created equal. Take the question of whether schools can teach ideas that make students uncomfortable. Among voters who backed Biden in 2020, just 7% of Americans said they were fine with such a block; look at Trump 2020 voters, and that number gets to 36%, meaning a full third of the GOP universe for 2024 is OK with at least some measure of book bans, and that group is probably more likely to vote in the next primary. On abortion, among Republicans, polls find 58% support for the overturning of Roe, including 35% who said they strongly support it. And while 64% of all Americans favor non-discrimination policies toward trans individuals, 58% of them also say trans student athletes should play on the team that matches their gender at birth, regardless of how they identify. Among Republicans, that number spikes to 85%, an astronomical figure that almost demands action.

Put simply: the culture wars might be less about the fight and more about how the battlefields were drawn well before any of the officeholders even showed up.

Thats a small consolation for liberals in competitive states watching as increasingly conservative lawmakers rush ahead on an agenda mismatched to what constituents actually want. Democrats may be able to claw back some of that imbalance if they ever convince their base of the reality that securing the right handful of state legislature seats would have far more power in shaping national politics than throwing millions at longshot, feel-good candidates who become darlings on social media but are chasing votes that arent there. Nonetheless, most of these maps are locked in place until at least 2031. Republicans know it, too, which explains why so many of them are leaning into broadly unpopularbut parochially homerunpolicies.

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Write to Philip Elliott at philip.elliott@time.com.

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Why Republicans Are Overreaching So Hard in So Many States - TIME

Gov. Gavin Newsom, with first partner Jennifer Newsom in Florida last week, is making a series of appearances to set himself up as the antithesis of Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. (Mike Lang / Associated Press)

The national Democrats may finally have found their champion in the culture wars: California Gov. Gavin Newsom. His recently announced appearances in Southern red states, the Campaign for Democracy" mark a significant tactical turn for Democrats, whose hesitancy to engage on cultural issues has frustrated the governor.

Newsoms new tactical offensive most recently an appearance last week in Sarasota, Fla., to highlight conservative efforts to limit education marks the end of the When they go low, we go high brand of politics popularized by former First Lady Michelle Obama during the early days of the Trump era. Democrats believed that the vulgarization of the public square was beneath them, and that mindset was a losing tactic. The political reality is that the high-minded ideal doesn't work if you allow your opposition to choose the battleground.

Newsom has chosen to launch his national strategy by touring the Deep South and highlighting the progressive case for voting access, antidiscrimination laws, LGBTQ rights and academic freedom all currently under assault by the modern Republican Party.

This is a profoundly different approach for Democrats in the modern era of presidential campaigns, which was defined nearly three decades ago by a young southern governor named Bill Clinton. He adopted the informal campaign theme Its the economy, stupid to emphasize the New Democrats goal of focusing like a laser beam on economic issues in the post-Cold War era. Clinton, under the banner of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, pushed his party to focus on economic issues, not social issues, as it fought to win voters in the mainstream and get Democrats back in the habit of winning presidential elections.

Newsom is the right man at the right time to successfully employ this strategy. His famous move in 2004 allowing same-sex marriages when he was mayor of San Francisco, while proclaiming that social change was coming whether you like it or not made a lot of Democrats uncomfortable at the time, but also set his party on course to embracing rapidly changing social norms as a winning national strategy.

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Newsoms unapologetic embrace of such broadly popular social issues as same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana and the nations most progressive positions on gun control and reproductive rights gives the countrys largest blue state governor the bully pulpit to drive Democrats in a new direction.

While Biden is wisely focused on inflation and the war in Ukraine, Newsom has picked up the issues that animate the necessary coalitions to win elections. Lamenting the lack of a fight just weeks prior to the 2022 midterm election, Newsom quipped Where's my party? believing that by leaning into cultural issues, congressional Democrats had a better chance at fending off GOP attacks.

Newsom has good reason to believe this. The college-education divide is perhaps the single most significant dividing line in American politics. Those who have college diplomas are moving rapidly toward Democrats, and those without are moving just as rapidly toward Republicans. It is precisely these voters who are rejecting the social, cultural and race-based extremism of the GOP that cost Republicans in the 2018 midterms, got Joe Biden elected president in 2020, and helped Democrats mitigate a massive red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. The tenuous relationship that college-educated Republican voters have had with Trump's Republican Party has cost the GOP dearly in recent elections, and Newsom is betting there's more mileage to be had.

As a motivating issue, the economy is no longer moving key segments of voters as it once did. Republicans have chosen a path forsaking policy ideas about how to help workers in the post-industrial age and are focusing exclusively on opposing a changing America. That leaves both parties defaulting to culture wars.

For decades, Republicans have looked to Democratic cultural excess for success at the ballot box, but considerable demographic, social and technological change has transformed the traditional terms of political engagement. Simply put, American culture today is not what it was 30 years ago.

Unfortunately, Newsoms pushing his party headlong into the culture wars means Democrats will give even shorter shrift to their economic message, a drift that has seen them lose a growing number of Latino and Black voters. The likelihood of this strategy pushing Democrats further away from developing the aspirational working-class message they need to win over blue-collar workers is considerable. But for the moment, the framing of Newsom's effort as the Campaign for Democracy is as accurate as it is urgent.

The reticence of most Democrats to engage in this aggressive style of politicsneeds to be set aside. Newsom is showing a new generation of Democrats they can win the culture wars if they can muster the fortitude to play the hardball offense they are so accustomed to losing to.

Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and co-founder of The Lincoln Project.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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Opinion: How can Democrats win the culture wars? Look to Newsom's red-state tour - Yahoo News

I have just finished reading Schindlers List, a novel of the Holocaust and the efforts of German industrialist Oskar Schindler to save the lives of Jews. Though a novel, it adheres closely to the facts, gleaning information from written records and first-person accounts of survivors.

At the end of the novel, in an afterword, the author forces the reader to confront a very basic question: Had you been raised in Germany during the Weimar Republic years and been taught that the Jews were the reason you were suffering hardship then found yourself in the SS, how would you have behaved toward the Jews?

It is a frightening thought, but one does not have to go all the way to Europe to be confronted by such a question. In the generation before I was born, white men in the South were lynching Blacks, murdering in the name of racial hatred. What would I have done were I a part of that culture? What would I have done had I lived in the age of slave ownership?

My heart yearns to say that I would have stood on the side of right and virtue, but I cannot with absolute conviction make that statement. In Germany, my life and the lives of those I love would have been on the line had I sided with Jews. In the old South, I would have at least been denigrated and possibly even subjected to beatings and death myself for siding with Blacks.

As I confronted these questions, I suddenly realized that the culture war being waged in America right now is based upon the same things that caused the Holocaust: slavery, discrimination, and lynching. The base factor in all those situations is hate.

We are being taught by media and by certain politicians that those who are struggling with gender identity, for example, are somehow not like us, that we can freely discriminate against them. We are being taught that these people should be marginalized and denied medical treatment that would help them deal with a problem most of us cant even understand.

More: The culture war is a matter of law versus grace | GARY COSBY JR.

We are being taught that people attempting to immigrate to the United States are somehow less worthy of being a part of this country than we are or than our ancestors were. In the previous administration, there were American citizens who were willing to go to the southern border, armed, to patrol and presumably shoot people trying to cross into America illegally.

We have a choice to make, a chance to prove our worth, to stand on the side of right. Conversely, we also have the opportunity to be the accuser, the judge, the denigrator of other people. We are being presented the opportunity to stand either for or against the base hatred that has led to horrible tragedy throughout human history.

What will you do? What will I do?

The way we treat people who are dealing with these personal issues of sexuality or who are trying, at the risk of their lives, to come to America to escape situations in their home countries not one of us would willingly endure, is our litmus test.

More: The culture war is a political red herring | GARY COSBY JR.

The famous Christian author Francis Schaeffer posed the question How Shall We Then Live? in his book by that title. That question has never left my mind.

In many ways, it is a question that haunts me. I can never live apart from that question. It presses me to do what is just. It presses me to treat people, all people, as equals no matter their problems. It pushes me to fight for equality for all men. I am grateful for that question for it compels me to live toward my fellow man in a way that I I would want to be treated or that I would want my son or daughter to be treated.

I do not have a child who is suffering with questions of gender identity. I dont know anyone who does, but I ask you this: Could you look such a child in the eye and then deny them whatever care they needed, including a sex-change operation, to give that child peace? I cannot. To me, the flesh is unimportant in the eternal scheme of things, but the flesh is the source of our torment and the test of our own humanity, perhaps even of our spirituality.

More: Fighting the culture war for political gain | GARY COSBY JR.

If some mercy I can extend to a fellow human can ease their suffering, I am more than willing to do that because I ultimately believe that what lies inside the human is more important than what goes on in the fleshly shell that houses him, her or them.

For me, this culture war is a pointless exercise in hate or at least in an unwillingness to try to understand the plight of others. At least in this situation, I can say with conviction that I will not stand on the side of those who would deny or oppress the one who is already oppressed.

Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.

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Culture wars: How shall we then live? | GARY COSBY JR. - Tuscaloosa Magazine

As the general election approaches, the rights of trans people across the UK are coming under pressure amid increasing attempts to fight culture wars.

Here are some of the legal challenges facing trans people in the UK right now

Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, is considering making it easier to ban trans women from single-sex spaces.

The change to the Equality Act would see the protected characteristic of sex changed to biological sex - the sex assigned to someone at birth.

It follows a recommendation from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

In practise this would mean trans people holding a gender recognition certificate (GRC)could be excluded from same-sex spaces.

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 provides that the gender of a person with a GRC becomes the acquired gender for all purposes and recognised as their legal sex.

A change would mean trans people holding a GRC would then be banned from some women-only spaces, from some jobs, from participating in some sport.

Labour has also said it supports the EHRCs recommendation for the Equality Act to be amended.

Stonewall has warned the move is part of a manufactured culture war for which there is no demand.

In December the Scottish parliament passed a law which would have made it easier to change gender.

The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill was passed by 86 votes to 39.

It allows trans people to obtain a gender recognition certificate without the need for a medical diagnosis.

It also drops the minimum age for applicants to 16, and lowers the time required for an applicant to live as their gender from three years to two months. For 16 and 17-year-olds, this will be six months.

But the Bill was blocked by UK Scotland Secretary Alister Jack in January, who used Section 35 of the Scotland Act to stop it becoming law.

The UK government said it was concerned that this legislation would have an adverse impact on the operation of Great Britain-wide equalities legislation.

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Humza Yousaf, Scotlands new first minister, has said he will mount a legal challenge to this undemocratic veto.

Protections for trans people from conversion therapy will now be included in a new law designed to ban the practice.

But the move came after a fierce internal-battle inside the Tory party, after Boris Johnson had initially decided to exclude trans people from the proposed new law.

It has also been a longtime coming, with Theresa May having first promised to ban conversion therapy when prime minister in 2018.

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The 'Culture War' Challenges To Trans Rights In The UK - Yahoo Eurosport UK

I want to make an Easter appeal to the many decent people in all of our main parties: please pull the next election campaign back from the brink."

The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has warned politicians from all sides against divisive and inflammatory culture war rhetoric ahead of the next general election, adding that it could take the country to an even darker and more dysfunctional place.

In an op-ed for the Evening Standard, Burnham tells readers: Get ready for a general election like no other the culture wars election. Dont get angry with politicians presiding over the collapse of the NHS or living standards. No. Get angry with the trans community instead.

He calls it a simple look-over-there scapegoat strategy and one which could be easily enabled by the toxic energy of social media.

The Mayor of Greater Manchester drew parallels with the divisive general election of 1964, highlighting how it was a time of time of wage freezes, political scandal (Profumo) and rail cuts (Beeching).

He adds: When a cornered Conservative Party went to the polls, one of its candidates did something which is still, 60 years on, a unique stain on British politics.

In Smethwick, the sitting MP campaigned on a straightforwardly racist slogan: If you want a ****** for a neighbour, vote Labour.

The Conservatives failed to call their candidate out. He held his seat but the party lost narrowly and then more heavily in a second election in 1966.

The former Labour leadership contender warns that an aggressive scapegoat strategy in our polarised social media age would risk real harm to people and the cohesion of our communities.

He writes: I want to make an Easter appeal to the many decent people in all of our main parties: please pull the next election campaign back from the brink.

It could take the country to an even darker and more dysfunctional place.

Divisive culture war rhetoric, he says, poses risks to growth and trade, to the basic functioning of our country and to community safety.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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