Save Jersey’s Matt Rooney: It’s time to re-engage on social issues

Matt Rooney, editor of the conservative political blog Save Jersey went on the record yesterday and issued a strong argument for New Jersey Republicans to re-engage on social issues.  Rooney didn’t equivocate:

If I’ve heard it once, Save Jerseyans, I’ve heard it a 1,000-times:

Republicans can’t win in blue (or even purple territory) running as “social” conservatives.

It’s not just Republicans who’ve surrendered the so-called “culture wars” to the insurgent Left. The West’s original conservative institution — the Catholic Church (of which I am a member, albeit a disgruntled one) — can’t even muster the institutional strength to excommunicate New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Catholic-in-name-only, for enthusiastically legalizing abortion up until the moment of birth. That’s not a late term abortion, folks; it’s early murder.

Infanticide. And they think TRUMP is the Nazi?!? Excuse me?

By the way: polling shows the American public overwhelmingly in opposition to the NY law. Meanwhile, Catholics actually commemorate the feast of Holy Innocents every December 28th recalling the massacre of Jewish children by King Herod. It’s going to feel like a rather hallow gesture next year in light of the current leadership’s latest moral failure.

The Church leadership in America and Europe isn’t just cowardly. That’s true to a degree but an over-simplified judgment all the same. Bishops made the same poor political calculation as Republican politicians to their great detriment: “we can’t win young, educated women in blue states unless we stick 100% to economics and taxes.”  

How’s that working out?

I wrote about this phenomenon last January (2018) after Phil Murphy’s landslide here in New Jersey but before the midterm massacre. My conclusion (which is self-evident from the latest results): Republicans are losing suburban voters who could care less about high taxes. They should care! Democrats are unambiguously worse for the economy. Consider, for example, how the U.S. as a whole just created 300k+ jobs under President Trump in the same month that New Jersey LOST thousands of jobs under Phil Murphy. Our worst-in-America property taxes are the stuff of legend. Now New Jersey is poised to tax rain. RAIN! Yet educated suburbanites in Burlington, Somerset, Morris and Bergen counties are trending hard-left.

Most Leftist voters don’t mind high taxes. They’re willing to PAY for their values.

Which values, you ask? Hard to say. A better question is what motivates the new Left, or what they’re against: kids in cages, affronts to “reproductive rights,” and politically incorrect tweets.

Adjudicating who gets to pee in which bathroom (with which set of anatomy) is a bigger priority for these voters than questions of war, peace and prosperity.

Said another way, the Democrats are their “moral” party. Much the same as Nixon successfully harnessed the sentiments of the “silent majority” in ’68.

So yeah, doubling-down on a economics-only “reasonableness” argument will continue to fall on deaf ears. We know this. The proof is in the pudding.

If the Right ever wants to compete with the Left again in places like New Jersey which are at the tipping point of becoming one-party states like California, Republicans and their natural allies need to immediately abandon debunked “conventional wisdom” and reengage the culture wars with renewed energy.

Learn from past mistakes, speak from the heart, and push back HARD against the Left’s vile excesses and overreaches.

Yes, they’re overreaching. Believe it and have confidence in it. I just saw a mainstream poll where roughly 80% of Americans opposed late term abortions akin to what’s happening up north. As a young-ish attorney living in a blue county (Camden), I know plenty of intelligent, moderate, under 40 professional women who  hate Donald Trump, and typically vote for Democrats, but who also aren’t exactly enamored with the Democrats. We can find common ground on the fiscal issues as-is, yet we can’t get them through the door without first crafting and delivering a coherent, compelling argument concerning why we deserve their support on the “other” issues.

They want to know we CARE about people as much as mathematics.

You may find that worldview frustrating, but the problem is also nothing new. Any great leader in the vanguard of a popular movement knows the head and the heart require equal treatment in the public discourse.

The good news? I’ve talked to countless educated younger voters on matters ranging from the NY abortion law to New Jersey’s wacky gender neutral birth certificate law.

Guess what? They think the Left’s positions on these issues are BONKERS and, in the case of the NY law, utterly revolting.

There are other topics, too, like school choice, illegal alien driver’s licenses, free college tuition for illegals, chemical treatments to delay puberty in suspected transgender children, the rights of disabled Americans and the sexualization of school textbooks where Republicans can and should reclaim some ground with these voters in battleground jurisdictions.

But Gretzky was right: you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Fire away, GOP, or forever hold your peace in Blue America.

MATT ROONEY is a practicing New Jersey attorney, regular panelist on Chasing News with Bill Spadea, and the founder and blogger-in-chief of Save Jersey.  You can check out his blog here: https://savejersey.com/

The Hill: What conservatives got wrong in 2016

Conservative 'social issues' are winnable

— if the GOP grows a backbone

December 20, 2016

By: Frank Cannon

NB:  In the November 8, 2016, election, Republicans picked up one State Senate seat, extending their majority to 35-15, and Republicans maintained their 74-46 advantage in the State House of Representatives.

When Gov. Pat McCrory (R-N.C.) dared to sign HB2, a bill that repealed a Charlotte ordinance which would have forced private businesses and charitable religious organizations to allow grown men who “identify” as women to use the same public bathrooms and showers as girls, the left banded together with its allies in corporate America, the entertainment industry, and the mainstream media and spent the next eight months carpet bombing the state of North Carolina.

As my colleague Terry Schilling pointed out in The Federalist:

“They launched corporate boycotts. They took away the NBA All-Star game. They cancelled sold-out concerts. And then, after ensuring the economic pain would be as excruciating as possible on residents of North Carolina, Roy Cooper and the Democrats placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of McCrory.

“The left essentially staged an economic crisis in order to win an election. Nasty.”

This blitzkrieg by progressives, an obvious attempt to bully the GOP into submission on the “gender identity” issue, made McCrory’s race one of the most consequential of the 2016 cycle.

He was outspent by nearly $8 million and was up against an avalanche of opposition from progressive elites, who dominated the news media and pop culture.

And despite all of this, McCrory barely lost. Just one or two million dollars more in financial support from conservative donors likely would have put him over the top. Unfortunately, these donors largely froze. Why?

One of the big fads among conservative organizations and donors is spending millions and millions of dollars in an attempt to change institutions that are virtually unchangeable — academia, the mainstream media, pop culture, the entertainment industry — institutions over which the left has a complete stranglehold.

This is misguided, at least when it comes at the expense of engaging in critical political races.

Politics is the only part of the culture that can easily be driven by ordinary people. Everything else — academic institutions, Hollywood, the entertainment industry, even corporate America — is all controlled by the progressive elites.

We can’t decide what books are published, what TV shows are produced (and what agendas those TV shows push), what universities teach, or what corporate America sells. The idea that we are going to direct all our money attempting to change those aspects of culture, rather than the one aspect of culture where we can have a real impact and reverse cultural trends — by winning in politics — is insanity.

So why aren’t conservative organizations and donors spending more on politics? Why didn’t they protect McCrory, go on offense fighting the culture war, and save themselves tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in future spending on efforts to play defense?

Conservatives don’t succeed by persuading the elites. We succeed by persuading the people.

There was no academic work in favor of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. It was opposed by every elite. Yet ultimately, Reagan’s tax cut model became GOP orthodoxy… because Reagan won.

Trump’s policies on trade, immigration, and even abortion were universally derided by GOP elites during the campaign. Now, he is completely transforming GOP policy and preparing to affect real change on those issues, despite being opposed by elites. Why? Because he won.

Winning elections is not only an efficient and cost-effective way of affecting cultural change, but for conservatives, it is perhaps the only way to do so successfully.

The irony of ironies is that McCrory would have almost assuredly won had conservative organizations and donors pitched in just another $1 or $2 million — relative pocket change when compared to multi-million dollar projects being funded merely to study how conservatives might use different messaging on social issues in future elections.

While those projects go on, and while Washington policy wonks wonk out, winnable political battles are being outright surrendered — such as what happened in North Carolina, where voters, by and large,  supported the actual provisions in HB2.

Now, with a political establishment that is in all likelihood unwilling to go the way of McCrory, believing that fighting on social issues is a death sentence, conservative organizations and donors are going to pour their money into legal efforts to defend against activist courts and academic efforts to write white papers no one will read.

Amazingly, despite Republicans now holding the House, the Senate, and the presidency, those of us who believe that men probably shouldn’t be showering with women are preparing for 2017 as if we were relegated to minority status!

The underlying message of not letting men shower with our daughters is a winning one, but only if it is actively promoted. That doesn’t happen unless conservative donors pony up.

Liberals and their corporate and entertainment allies spent millions of dollars driving home the shameful idea that, if North Carolina voters didn’t vote Democrat, liberal institutions would abandon the state, and people would lose jobs. Extortion was their central campaign message!

This was an easy message to counter, especially given the extreme nature of the Left’s position — that grown men have a civil right to shower with young women, and that any business or organization that dissents from this view should be removed from the public square.

But driving home a message takes money, and the money wasn’t there.

Conservative organizations and donors pinched pennies and refused to go all-in to help McCrory, and now those same donors are going to spend ten times, twenty times, maybe even a hundred times as much fighting the narrative created by the very election they abandoned — the idea that progressive gender ideology cannot be defeated or discussed in politics without it spelling sure defeat for the Republican.

Get ready, donors, to spend millions of dollars in court fighting the practical implications of “gender identity” being considered a protected class.

Get ready to spend millions more fighting the Left’s new “proven” strategy — that by colluding with corporate elites, the entertainment industry, and the mainstream media — they can get literally anything they want, and the GOP will just cave.

This could have been prevented. We could be celebrating a popular defeat of progressive gender ideology. Instead, we are up against a narrative, promoted even by the likes of establishment conservatives like Sen. Thom Tillis, that “controversial social issues” cost us big league.

What a shame. The only question now is, will conservative organizations and donors learn this lesson for the next North Carolina? Or will we continue channeling Don Quixote — tilting at windmills we can’t defeat, while refusing to fight the battles we can actually win?

Frank Cannon is the president of American Principles Project.  Follow him on Twitter @FrankCannonAPP..