With off-year elections just days away, Democrats are doubling down on the same LGBT and immigration issues that likely cost them the White House and both chambers of Congress last year.

In New Jersey, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill suggested that she would make LGBT content in classrooms mandatory. “I believe that parents have the right to oversee their children’s education,” she began. “I would push an LGBTQ education into our schools. Parents have a right to opt out of a lot of things, but this is not an area where they should be opting out, because this is an area of understanding the background of people throughout our nation,” she continued. The comments were made in a May gubernatorial debate against Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli.

New Jersey already has a law, signed by outgoing Governor Phil Murphy (D), requiring state middle and high schools to include LGBT content in classrooms. “A board of education shall include instruction on the political, economic, and social contributions of persons with disabilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, in an appropriate place in the curriculum of middle school and high school students as part of the district’s implementation of the New Jersey Student Learning Standards in Social Studies,” the law stipulates.

However, LGBT issues have proven relatively unpopular in the Garden State. According to an American Principles Project survey conducted earlier this year, 68% of New Jersey voters oppose allowing biological boys to compete in girls’ sports, and 60% oppose LGBT content in classrooms. A previous poll found that nearly 80% of New Jersey adults (including over 60% of registered Democrats) support policies requiring school officials to inform parents of students’ requests for social gender transition accommodations.

In Virginia, a staffer for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger has been exposed for making derogatory comments about Spanberger’s Republican opponent and slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In a video shared by Human Events, Spanberger Campaign Organizer Maame Ama Deegbe was asked specifically about the September 10 assassination of Kirk. “I can’t legally talk about the Charlie thing, but if you want to talk about the Charlie thing, I have all the ears for you in the world,” Deegbe said to a man posing as a curious Virginia voter. She did, however, say that the man she was speaking to seemed “like a good person,” adding, “I would be sad if you had died.” Laughing and rolling her eyes, she continued, “Can I say the same for Charlie? I’ll just leave that there.”

In a separate video, Deegbe was heard making rude comments regarding both Spanberger and Republican gubernatorial nominee and incumbent Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. Deegbe referred to her employer as a “CIA agent, literally, which is crazy, like, ‘Yeah, vote for the CIA agent, guys.’ Like, what the f***.” Referring to the choice between Spanberger and Earle-Sears as “the darkest timeline,” the Democrat campaign organizer continued, “Our only choices are between a black woman — which, ordinarily, all for — but this time you think we should bring back slavery, Winsome.” She added, “Even with that, it’s like, either vote for the black woman who thinks that slavery should be brought back or vote for the white woman who was in the CIA.”

Spanberger and her campaign have been criticized for not calling on fellow Democrat Jay Jones, who is campaigning for the role of Virginia’s attorney general, to suspend his campaign following the publication of text messages in which he discussed shooting a Republican opponent in the head and wishing the Republican’s children would be shot and killed, referring to the children as “little fascists.”

In Minnesota, a Democratic mayoral candidate is campaigning not under the Stars and Stripes, but under a foreign nation’s flag. Socialist Omar Fateh, the Democratic nominee for mayor of Minneapolis, was seen at a recent campaign event waving the Hiiraan State flag from Somalia and leading a crowd in chanting in Somali, urging Somali immigrants to elect him. Fateh has been likened to Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan-born socialist and the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. As The Washington Stand recently reported, Mamdani’s family has said that he is “not an American at all.”

In comments to TWS, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter explained, “Polling since the 2024 election has consistently shown the Democratic base favors as much confrontation with the administration and their Republican opponents in Congress as possible.” He continued, “In such a political environment, Democratic candidates either find permission to show who they really are by approving of the base’s disdain for traditional values, American sovereignty, and callousness toward political violence, or they embrace these things to signal that they are with the most radical element in the Democratic base.”

“Either way,” Carpenter concluded, “the political discourse in this country is dragged low by candidates signaling to a dwindling few on the Left who want children indoctrinated in schools, care nothing for the sovereignty of America, and laugh at political assassination.”