OPINION:
The media fixates on the gender gap while ignoring the family gap. The latter is another sign of the Democrats’ decline.
This year, President-elect Donald Trump won voters with minor children living at home by a margin of 9 percentage points — 53% to 44%. In 2020, 52% of these voters supported President Biden.
All of the hot topics in the 2024 campaign concerned families. The cost of food, transportation and shelter has increased from 22% to 50% in the last four years. Monthly mortgage payments have increased by 89%. Many young families can only dream of buying a home.
Democrats’ open border — 11 million unvetted aliens, including gang members — has taken a terrible toll on families across the country.
Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan who entered the country illegally, was just convicted of murdering Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. In Texas, two illegal aliens are charged with murder, sexual assault and kidnapping in connection with the death of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray.
The Democratic governors of New York, Illinois and California have vowed to oppose Mr. Trump’s plan to deport criminal aliens. That’s how much they care about America’s families.
Families across the country are suffering because of “woke” policies. Rep. Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, broke with his party and said he didn’t want his daughters run over on the field by boys on girls’ teams.
In 2022, 17-year-old volleyball player Payton McNabb was hit in the face so hard by a ball speared by a biological male that she suffered partial paralysis.
The 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race put the war at the heart of the family. In Loudoun County, Virginia, parents protested sexually explicit material in school libraries and transgender policies.
A man was arrested at a school board meeting over a temper tantrum over the 2021 attack by a boy in a skirt on his daughter, a ninth-grader, in a girls’ restroom at the school. At the request of the National School Boards Association, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to investigate dissenting parents as a domestic terrorism threat.
In a most telling moment, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe — a Democrat running for office again in 2021 — declared, “I don’t believe parents should be telling schools what to teach.”
In other words, parents must provide the resources for public education, subject their children to indoctrination, and keep their mouths shut.
Families were so appalled by his comments that Mr. McAuliffe was defeated in November by political newcomer Glenn Youngkin, who was running on a parental rights platform.
Vice President-elect JD Vance, a father of three, said the Democratic Party leadership is made up of “childless cat ladies” who have no interest in the future. Vice President Kamala Harris has two adopted daughters but no biological children.
While they oppose procreation, progressives have a burning desire to control the education of your children.
You are helping your minor daughter have an abortion without your knowledge or consent. If your teenage son thinks he’s really a girl, they’ll help him make the transition.
“The left has become explicitly anti-children and anti-family,” Mr. Vance said. “They have encouraged young families not to have children at all because of concerns about climate change,” despite impending depopulation due to rapidly declining fertility.
In 2018, a feminist article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. declared, “Reproduction is becoming a public health concern rather than a personal choice.” Climate totalitarians believe they can get away with anything by framing it as a public health issue designate.
The left’s war on families goes back to Karl Marx.
In the “Communist Manifesto” (1848), Marx and co-author Friedrich Engels called for the abolition of the “bourgeois family,” which they believed was based on the oppression of women and children, comparable to the capitalist exploitation of labor.
Revolutionary movements have adopted this doctrine as a core principle. Black Lives Matter proclaims: “We are disrupting the nuclear family structure prescribed by the West.”
The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights described the family as “the fundamental group unit of society” and as such “entitled to protection by society and the state.” As president, Barack Obama repeatedly tried to repeal this language.
If the 1948 U.N. definition of the family were in a resolution before Congress today, how many Democrats would endorse that language, which would likely be denounced as heterosexist and hateful?
Families with underage children are the future. Their move to the GOP shows which party is on the side of history.
• Don Feder is a columnist for The Washington Times.
