It would be dangerous to assume that the predicted red wave will actually materialize next Tuesday, but already progressive commentators are both a) attacking the GOP as extremist on social issues in an attempt to smear them prior to the election and b) increasingly admitting that it is Democratic extremism on social issues that is eroding their support.
Left-wing Politico claimed that the GOP is playing a vicious game in which they literally attack children for votes:
Ads targeting transgender children have spread in at least 25 states across the political spectrum — from Texas to Illinois to Michigan — in the last month, according to the Human Rights Campaign.America First Legal has made more than $4 million in radio buys across Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit — cities in competitive states with significant Black populations. The radio ad features a man speaking over ominous music, claiming that children have been pushed to take puberty blockers and get gender-affirming surgery.
“The Biden administration is pushing radical gender experiments on children,” the narrator says in the original radio spot. “Tell Joe Biden and left-wing leaders across America, ‘Hands off our kids.’”
That framing is taken directly from transgender talking point directives. GOP candidates and operatives are not “targeting transgender children” — they are speaking out against “sex change” surgeries, cross-sex hormones, and other irreversible “treatments” for minors as a wave of de-transitioners takes the stage to decry what they endured as children. This is precisely the opposite of “targeting children” — it is protecting them from lifelong medicalization and medical interventions that will eliminate their ability to ever have children before they are old enough to vote for those enabling and supporting these things.
It’s not over until it’s over. Go vote!