It was an incredibly foolish miscalculation and now the Democrats are going into the elections with nothing but failures and massive screw-ups to their party’s name. Of these massive screw-ups, two of them stand out and it’s these two things that Republicans would do well to focus on them in the upcoming election if they want to do more than just pick up a couple of seats.

Firstly, it’s the economy, stupid. The Democrats brought the economy from bad to worse thanks to foolish decisions based mostly on virtue signaling about the environment. Since Biden’s campaign, he had declared war on the domestic oil industry and carried it out the moment he was in office. He thought he really owned Trump the day he got into office by stopping the building of the Keystone XL pipeline and the border wall but now it’s coming back to bite him as oil prices began skyrocketing and only went up further when Russia went to war with Ukraine.

Now the prevailing narrative is that the Biden administration isn’t holding back domestic oil production. Their claim is that those greedy oil companies are just price gouging and monopolizing. It’s not his fault.

Only as Ted Cruz pointed out, it is the Biden administration’s fault:

“In the past year with Joe Biden as president, the United States has lost its status as a net petroleum exporter, after achieving that goal in 2019 for the first time since 1949. Why? Because on day one of his administration, President Biden issued illegal and hostile orders aimed at American oil and gas producers, which have increased energy prices and directed profits to other oil exporting countries.

“These policies have poured billions of dollars into countries such as Russia and Iran, which use those funds to attack our allies and undermine the national security of America. President Biden has imposed more restrictions on U.S. oil companies than he has on Russian oil. With Iran, he has looked the other way as the regime busted through sanctions and raised their exports to more than one million barrels per day for the first time in almost three years. 

Gas prices increased the moment Biden got into office as the charts show and today is 48 percent higher than it was previously. This is all on Biden’s hands thanks to his virtue signaling and unwillingness to work with an industry he’s supposed to hate publicly in order to appease his base.

Republicans should be banging that drum relentlessly and remind them that the increased prices they pay at the pump, along with increased energy prices everywhere else, as well as a rapidly inflating economy, is all the fault of the Biden administration and the Democrats who support him. Republicans need to remind voters that before COVID we had an economy that was powerful and only getting more powerful by the day. Trump’s oil policies had gas under $2 a gallon and if we’re to begin a recovery from this hole the Democrats have put us in, it’s going to take far more economic sense than the Democrats possess.

Secondly, and more importantly, is the current issue plaguing the Democrat party, and that’s its unwillingness to defy the teachers unions and its hubris in thinking that they should be able to tell you what your kid should be taught and how they should be raised.

This has been a massive shot in both feet for Democrats who angered parents all over the nation enough to have them show up at school board meetings and demand they cease and desist all subversive activities concerning their children, and these activities range from introducing pedophilia to children to covering up a rape.

It’s made parents a political party unto themselves.

(READ: Democrats Created a Political Party Far More Dangerous Than the Republicans)

Republicans need to make it clear that they are on the side of the parents trying to save their children from the indoctrination forced on them by the teachers unions and their Democrat allies. Of all the issues that are plaguing Democrats, this one may be the biggest and reminding everyone that the Democrats were more than happy to sic the DOJ on parents, stop them from attending school board meetings, or even leave when they were trying to speak to them, would do a lot to bolster Republicans to the parents of America.

Republicans need to show up and show up big. While things are in their favor at the moment, the party of Reagan has a bad habit of snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory and it cannot afford to lose its way at this crucial moment.