San Francisco is 3,076 miles from Concord, New Hampshire. But the City by the Bay just sent a message to Democrats in the Live Free or Die state.
So why aren’t they listening?
Wednesday morning, the media blared the news that the most progressive city in America just threw three far-left school board members out of their jobs on a blowout election.
“From liberal San Francisco, school board recall is a three-alarm warning for Democrats,” wrote left-leaning L.A. Times columnist Mark Barabak.
Later that same morning, every Democrat in the New Hampshire state Senate voted to kill the Education Freedom Accounts program. Sen. Donna Soucy (D-Manchester) and her fellow Democrats literally voted to drag the more than 1,800 kids out of the classrooms and ed programs their parents picked, and frog-march them back to the public schools they fled.
On Thursday, House Democrats will join the attack on the EFAs, siding with school bureaucrats and teachers unions, and against parents.
And that’s not all.
Just weeks ago, Democrats were fighting to block a Board of Education rule protecting parents and kids from eternal “Zoom school.” Under the proposal, schools facing a COVID crisis would be free to cancel class and make it up later. But they can’t go to remote learning unless parents ask for it.
Why? Because “laptop learning” has proven to be an educational disaster, one that hits low-income and disadvantaged kids the hardest. Test scores are plummeting and children are suffering a mental health crisis.
Not to mention, parents — aka “people old enough to vote” — hate it.
Once again, New Hampshire Democrats are backing policies parents hate.
Across the state, from the legislature to local school boards, Democrats are still pushing mask mandates on children, even as the state’s restaurants and bars are packed with the unmasked. Is there anyone left who doesn’t know children are at the lowest risk from COVID of any group?
More to the (political) point, are there really Democrats left who haven’t figured out parents are going to punish you for this in November? Or put another way: What part of the Virginia election did you not understand?
Democrats are quick to point out that San Francisco isn’t New Hampshire. They’re right, of course. But how the heck is that good news?
If anti-parent politicians are getting crushed at the ballot box in Nancy Pelosi’s backyard, what do you think is going to happen in a state that actually has Republicans in it?
Some California progressives tried to argue that the 3-to-1 shellacking these progressive school board members just suffered was due to the Bay Area’s secret GOP vote. Board of Supervisors president Shamann Walton blamed the recall on “closet Republicans and most certainly folks with conservative values in San Francisco.”
As Jim Geraghty of National Review noted Wednesday, “closet Republicans in San Francisco can actually meet in a closet, there are so few of them.”
In New Hampshire, Republicans control the entire state government. And that was in an election Joe Biden won. Today, he’s -10 among Granite State voters. And falling.
Local Democrats know the November environment will likely be brutal. All of the issues voters are focused on — inflation, crime, energy costs, and mishandling COVID — work against them. U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan is polling at 43 percent against GOP nobodies (nothing personal, guys), and Gov. Chris Sununu is facing only token opposition.
And what is the hottest, most powerful political force at the moment? Parents. “They are mad, and they want to hold someone accountable,” Hickey says. And in every place parents have had the chance to vote, that “someone” turns out to be elected Democrats.
People on the left love to talk about “The Science.” Isn’t there anyone left who can still do “The Math?”
