Republicans have, for decades, made significant political advancements by exploiting voter ignorance and turning relatively minor issues into major, life-or-death controversies. The debate over critical race theory played prominently in the Virginia election and across the nation in local school board elections even though the theory is not a part of public school curricula. Republican candidates made it an issue anyway, turning a discussion about the ongoing effects of past, racially biased laws into a righteous defense of white children's (and their parents') hurt feelings.

The list of offenses blamed on Democrats goes back decades. Since the 1970s, flag-burning has been a reliable red herring. Republican candidates turned videos of radical activists burning a flag at isolated protest settings into the official policy of their Democratic opponents, suggesting the entire party stood in defense of flag desecration.

In the 1990 election, eight out of nine eastern Missouri Republicans seeking election to Congress listed flag-burning among their top-priority issues. Each of the eight called for a constitutional amendment to ban it. The ninth opposed an amendment but did favor a law banning it. No such constitutional amendment ever came to pass yet, amazingly, America survived as a nation, and Old Glory continues to fly uncharred outside the homes and offices of Republicans as well as Democrats.

More recently, the hot political non-issue was professional sports figures kneeling during the national anthem. Then Republican attention turned to bathrooms and transgender people. Those issues provided a steady stream of outrage for Republican candidates. The bathroom issue quickly died down after North Carolina's legislature passed a law banning transgender people from using bathrooms in government and public buildings if the bathroom didn't correspond with the gender on the user's birth certificate. At that point, a court battle and nationwide boycott forced the state to back down.

Republicans seem in constant search of cultural wedge issues designed to distract from substantive issues while making unwitting voters feel that their families and way of life will come under attack if the Democrats aren't stopped — even in cases where the Democrats aren't even pushing such issues.

This is exactly the tactic at play with critical race theory, which Republicans successfully pasted on Democrats in school board races around the country as well as in Tuesday's Virginia gubernatorial race. The Virginia winner, Republican Glenn Youngkin, hammered on critical race theory and pledged that, under his administration, "What we won't do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race. On day one, I will ban critical race theory." He was aided by relentless coverage of the subject on Fox News.

It's a sad statement about the GOP that it must prey on an uninformed or misinformed electorate instead of campaigning on issues of substance. Perhaps even sadder is that Democrats haven't found more effective ways to counter these bogus tactics.

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