Thursday, March 28, 2024

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ Houston Problem

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (photo credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff via Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (photo credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff via Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

It was a shocking election, shocking to Democrats who fell victim to their own bubble propaganda that social issues are going to be the key to their comeback, and shocking to establishment conservatives who have fallen victim to the “truce strategy” of silence on social issues, which feeds the Democrats’ overreach.

How could Hillary Clinton have gotten herself in the position of endorsing the “right” of biological males to shower in girls’ locker rooms?

Houston was supposed to be the beachhead of a great expansion of transgender rights, by a political elite that mistakes GOP submission, and public quiescence in the face of a celebrity coming-out session by the former Bruce Jenner, for broad public support. The Human Rights Campaign’s internal polls (I am told) showed them ahead by seven points in the final weeks of the referendum on the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). They poured as much as $650,000 into the campaign, with supporters outspending opponents by three to one or more. Instead they got slaughtered by Houston voters, in a Democrat-controlled city led by a lesbian mayor, 61 percent to 39 percent.

And in Virginia, Planned Parenthood and Clinton-ally governor Terry McAuliffe’s well-funded plan to regain the state-senate majority by painting Republicans as social-issues extremists similarly failed.

Here’s the thing though: Hillary, the Democratic frontrunner, was in a Twitterfight with Texas Governor Greg Abbott (bless him) . . . As far as I can tell not a single top-tier GOP candidate for president saw this an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with the black Church and its rebellion against Democrats’ prioritizing of their rich white gay donors over black pastors’ concerns. In the many years I fought at the frontlines of the gay-marriage war, we got used to this frustrating dynamic: Democrat politicians all in, Republican politicians wary of speaking, lest they alienate their donors or catch the ire of the media.

Read the full article at National Review.

Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project.

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