Former Obama Adviser: ‘We Need to Make Sure that Republicans in 2022 Don’t Become’ the ‘Party of Parents’
Former White House adviser Stephanie Cutter warned on Wednesday that Democrats faced a challenging road in 2022 if they allowed Republicans to “become the party of parents.”
She made the comment during a segment with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who said Virginia Democrats received “ghastly” numbers in Tuesday’s election, which included Republican Glenn Youngkin toppling Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the race for Virginia governor.
“In the Northern Virginia suburbs there was a chip,” Todd said, alluding to Republican margins in the region. “In the other suburbs, it was certainly more than that. Here’s what I haven’t seen in almost a decade is — when are Democrats going to chip away in rural America? They’re going to have to start trying because the numbers were ghastly.”
Todd’s comment led Cornell Belcher to opine, “America, especially rural America — they make sense of their lives through the prism of their values and their religiosity, and we are not connecting with them on that.” The remark prompted Cutter to hone in on the issue of education, which played a significant role in McAuliffe’s defeat. McAuliffe said in September that parents shouldn’t be allowed to opt their children out of sexually explicit classrooms discussions because it amounted to parents “telling schools what they should teach.”
“The one thing that we need to make sure that Republicans in 2022 don’t become is the party of parents,” Cutter said. “Because we need to be the party of parents. And we are, we’re the ones that care about school funding. We’re the ones that care about making sure that parents can send their kids to school because they have jobs to go to. You know, all of this, we need to own that agenda. We cannot let it go. And it’s not just about Critical Race Theory. It’s coming out of Covid, it’s parental frustration, it’s parents being involved in their kids’ schooling.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
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