Erickson told me that Third Way research found that voters in Virginia who voted for Biden in 2020 and then switched to the successful Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in 2021 resembled the swing bloc here: lots of suburban parents and non-college-educated women, of all races. They didn’t necessarily buy into a panic about “critical race theory” being taught in schools, but they did feel that Democrats were looking at the wrong issues.

If they voted, their opposition to GOP culture-war issues might make them vote Democratic, and they are a big enough group to make a significant difference in election results. Navigator’s polling found that they opposed the signature Republican culture-war priorities by wider margins than the general population, often 15 to 20 percentage points. Republican leaders have mostly avoided policy proposals ahead of the midterms, but Navigator asked about economic policies proposed by Senator Rick Scott and found that this subset of the population overwhelmingly disliked those too. But many of them aren’t voting: Only 59 percent of the group voted in 2020, versus 71 percent of the overall electorate.

This group of voters who might not otherwise cast a ballot and don’t like Republican ideas is an opportunity for Democrats, says Bryan Bennett, Navigator’s lead pollster. “Progressives need to be going on offense: ‘They’re not focused on lowering costs. They’re focused on banning books in your children’s schools.’”