Liberal: Jersey Parents’ Revolt
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s “narrow victory was a dumbfounding rebuke of the state’s Democrats, who went into the election with the drink-clinking serenity of the ensemble in the first act of the Poseidon Adventure,” warns New York magazine’s Adam Rice. The growing consensus: “It was the schools. . . . For a lot of parents, it was pretty simple. The public schools were closed for much longer than necessary, and Murphy did too little to open them.” In summer 2020, he was “edging toward a more proactive role” — until August, when “the state’s largest and most powerful teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, declared that it was unsafe to return to classrooms, and Murphy immediately reversed himself.” Hence the Election Day revolt. “Maybe the suburban Democrats will return in 2022” or “maybe the effect will end up lasting longer” because “people tend to get mad — incandescently furious — when they think you’re hurting their kids.”
Democrat: Meet the New Swing Voters
“Increasingly, Latinos are swing voters,” Dem strategist Maria Cardona declares at The Hill, and Democrats “risk continuing to lose voter share from the largest and fast-growing ethnic minority in the country.” Hispanics “were devastated by the pandemic” but also “concerned about what shutdowns would do to their already pulverized businesses. They want leaders to show them how they will get the economy back on track, how they will keep their communities safe, how their kids can have a top-notch education.” Above all, “They want a hopeful, aspirational idea of what their lives can be like in America.” Election 2021 proves Dems can’t “assume Latinos will support Democratic candidates moving forward. . . . Hispanics must be wooed.”
Conservative: Trickle-Down Bidenism’s Toll
Just 10 months “of relentless Bidenism” has made a grim “difference in America ,” observes Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. “Weld together a hard-left socialist agenda” with “the combined forces of progressive woke media, Silicon Valley, the corporate boardrooms, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Wall Street borg,” and it’s no wonder the country is “almost unrecognizable.” Take rising fuel prices: Liberals have “slashed natural gas and oil production by cancelling new federal leases and pipelines” and cut fracking. “Never has America deliberately created shortages amid a sea of our own gas and oil.” Or the supply-chain crisis: Jen Psaki calls it the tragedy of the delayed treadmill. “Yes: cars, lumber, food — all the irrelevant treadmill trinkets that people don’t need.” Honestly, “does the Biden socialist cadre who engineered these self-induced calamities have any clue about the damage they have done to America?”
Media watch: Dem ‘Deceptions’ Hurt the Public
Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of researcher Igor Danchenko for allegedly lying to the FBI “doesn’t look good” for the bureau or the Democratic Party, observes Bloomberg’s Eli Lake. Danchenko supplied info for Christopher Steele’s “infamous dossier,” which led to the Russia-Trump probe, but he allegedly hid his ties to pro-Dem p.r. exec Charles Dolan Jr. — the likely “source” for several dossier items, according to authorities. That is: The dossier was based not on “well-sourced Kremlin intelligence,” as media coverage claimed, but “rumor conveyed in part by a Democratic partisan.” Though Durham seems to paint the FBI as a victim, it didn’t actually need to know about Danchenko’s ties to discredit the dossier. No, “the real victim” of these Democratic Party “deceptions,” says Lake, was “the American public.”
From the right: Who Loses in the War on G&T
“What we’re witnessing in New York City and elsewhere is not a discussion about how to do gifted education better but a woke assault on conventional notions of merit and excellence,” warns Frederick M. Hess at The Dispatch. And “when schools abandon gifted learners, affluent families will move their kids to private schools or pony up for tutors, enrichment programs, and online courses. It’s the low-income students who will get lost along the way.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board