Liesl Hickey, a Republican consultant, said Democrats made the mistake over the past few years of thinking they had won over suburban voters for good.

“They were renting them. They never owned them,” Hickey told Yahoo News. “Suburban voters have always been center-right. The last couple of cycles, they were voting on personality. When they voted on policy, they voted center-right.”…

Republicans say parents are still upset and want to punish Democrats and their allies in the teachers’ unions. The GOP is also looking to stoke that anger, portraying the Democrats as hypocrites who go unmasked while insisting that young children, who were always at low risk of serious COVID complications, stay masked up in schools.

“This has never been about medical science, it has always been about POLITICAL science,” tweeted Dee Duncan, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee. His organization paid for a TV ad produced by Hickey’s firm that calls on Democrats to “give kids their childhood back.”