Opinion | Katie Britts big fail shows why the GOP cant connect with women

Practically from the moment freshman Sen. Katie Boyd Britt began delivering the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address, it was clear where things were headed: straight to a cold-open parody on “Saturday Night Live.”

The 42-year-old, a rising star in her party, was to be presented as “America’s mom,” according to talking points that were sent around to conservative influencers before she spoke from her pristine kitchen. As her fellow Alabama senator, Tommy Tuberville, explained, “She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator.”

A housewife? Britt is a lawyer, one who served on Capitol Hill as chief of staff to her predecessor, Richard C. Shelby; who headed Shelby’s task force on judicial nominations; and who was deputy manager and communications director of his reelection campaign. She was also the first woman to lead the Business Council of Alabama, which is the state’s chamber of commerce, as its president and chief executive.

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How Britt was presented to a national audience, however, says a lot about why the GOP struggles to connect with suburban women. Her breathy, overwrought delivery would have embarrassed any self-respecting high school drama club.

And the setting sent another message that was not helpful at a moment when Republicans are trying to shake their image as a party that wants to send women backward in time. As veteran GOP pollster Christine Matthews put it on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter: “Not sure whose genius idea it was to put a U.S. Senator in the kitchen to deliver the response to the #SOTU. In the panel work I have done w/swing women since 2014 we have tested ads like this — ie women talking health care in the kitchen — and it just sets women voters off.”

Yes, giving the State of the Union response is always a risky assignment, one that rarely enhances the political career of the person who gets the dubious honor of delivering it. But Britt’s was an epic fail, a disaster that eclipsed Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s belly flop in 2009, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) gulping water during his in 2013, and Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) showing up with ChapStick smeared over much of his chin in 2018, leading viewers to think he was drooling.

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What tipped Britt’s performance from merely tone-deaf to egregious was its darkest moment, when she told a horrific story that, at least by implication, turned out to be a big fat lie.

It was about a woman Britt met when she visited the Texas border. “She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped,” Britt said. “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

Except that some checking, led by journalist Jonathan Katz in a TikTok video that went viral, showed that though the woman and her experiences are real, they happened in Mexico, not the United States, and between 2004 and 2008, which was well over a decade before Biden became president. The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded Britt four Pinocchios for the way she twisted this tragic story to make a cravenly partisan point.

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This being the MAGA era, Britt predictably followed the shameless example that former president Donald Trump sets whenever he is caught in a whopper. Her spokesman put out a statement insisting that her account was “100% correct.” And in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Britt accused her critics of trying to “silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked.”

What didn’t disappoint was “Saturday Night Live.” Scarlett Johansson, playing Britt, nailed the show’s opening, capturing the senator’s weirdly manic enunciation and declaring that she was “auditioning for the part of Scary Mom.”

“Like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking,” Johansson’s Britt said. “Rest assured, every detail about it is real except the year, where it took place and who was president when it happened.”

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Britt might find solace in the fact that she received at least one boffo review. “She was compassionate and caring, especially concerning Women and Women’s Issues,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Her conversation on Migrant Crime was powerful and insightful. Great job Katie!”

In MAGA world, there’s no higher praise and no audience more important to please.

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