A decisive defeat for abortion foes in the red state of Ohio, the seventh such loss since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, has sent alarm bells ringing among some Republicans and prominent conservatives over the clear salience of the issue.
“The Ohio result tonight, coming on the heels of the shellacking in Michigan and the unexpected loss in Kentucky, needs to be a five-alarm fire for the pro-life movement,” Patrick Brown, a conservative scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, tweeted late Tuesday.
But Republican strategists face a no-win conundrum. Retreating on abortion would infuriate the majority of their base that wants to ban the procedure, while their current strategy is alienating a formidable slice of swing voters who favor some GOP positions but oppose the party’s stance on reproductive rights.
The end of Roe v. Wade drove voters toward Democrats in the 2022 elections and since then, abortion opponents have lost a series of state elections: a ballot measure in Kansas, this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race and now Ohio’s Issue 1 ballot measure.
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“There shouldn’t be any sugarcoating over what happened last night. It was a major setback in what became a very public fight between pro-choice and pro-life groups,” Bill Stepien, the campaign manager for former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, said on Fox News. “This happened in Ohio, which is not a pink state anymore. This is a state that is red.”
The GOP’s creeping fear is that abortion could propel an unpopular President Joe Biden to re-election.
“The bigger concern is what this means for 2024. National pro-choice groups are at the ready — and ready to pounce,” Stepien said. “We know Democrats aren’t excited at all about Joe Biden. … These groups are going to provide rocket fuel to a pretty unenthusiastic candidacy and be on the ground and be knocking on doors. We’re going to be breathing life into a pretty unenthusiastic campaign.”
But the Republican Party remains divided. Anti-abortion activists want to lean into the issue and fight harder, while some GOP leaders prefer to downplay it and pivot to other topics friendlier to their party. Others say the Ohio defeat was about a spending advantage by pro-abortion rights groups that opposed Issue 1.
‘As long as sex is salient’
Democrats, meanwhile, sense new opportunities to wield the issue to damage Republicans in the 2024 election, when the White House and control of Congress are up for grabs.
“As long as sex is salient, as long as people can get pregnant, this issue is remaining very salient,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster. “And it’s very motivating.”
“This is going to be the roadmap for 2024. Because issues matter,” Lake said. “Democrats should just not underestimate this issue and should continue to utilize it.”
Conservatives say the GOP’s challenge is to come up with a coherent position that is palatable to swing voters and sell it.
“We haven’t figured out both the messaging and the substance to appeal to the voter in the middle who’s maybe personally conflicted about abortion but doesn’t like the idea of a really rigid ban,” Brown said in an interview with NBC News. “The pro-choice side has been really effective at finding language that resonates with Republicans and independents, and the pro-life side has not done the same thing in reverse. And we’re seeing the results play out, unfortunately.”
Brown said the solution is to turn the debate away from the idea of a national abortion ban.
“To me, the most frustrating thing has been the sort of circular firing squad that we’ve seen between various presidential candidates and some of the bigger pro-life organizations in D.C. about whether or not to push for a federal 15-week ban,” he said. “Right now, we have to stem the bleeding, and holding to the most purest conception of what it needs to look like, I think, is doing everybody a disservice.”
‘It’s an intensity issue’
Brown isn’t alone. When Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., introduced a 15-week national abortion ban last fall, GOP skeptics panned it as a “bad idea” and a distraction that wouldn’t play well with voters.
Still, other abortion foes insist that Republicans can win on the issue by reframing it around restrictions for late-term pregnancies and by portraying Democrats as the real extremists.
“It is a sad day for Ohio and a warning for pro-life states across the nation,” said an unsigned statement from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, blaming the defeat on “liberal dark money” that was used to “mislead” Ohioans amid a “silence of the establishment and business community.”
“That is why everyone must take this threat seriously and recognize progressives will win if their opponents are scared into submission by the pro-abortion Left,” the SBA statement said. “So long as the Republicans and their supporters take the ostrich strategy and bury their heads in the sand, they will lose again and again.”
In the 2022 campaign, some Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sought to downplay the battle, arguing that abortion proponents needn’t fear because his party won’t find the votes to restrict abortion at the federal level. A month after the 2022 election, McConnell attributed the GOP’s disastrous Senate showing to poor candidates, not abortion.
In Ohio, which Trump carried twice by a comfortable 8 points, the Issue 1 referendum was pushed by conservatives to raise the threshold to change the state’s constitution from 50% to 60%, in anticipation of progressives eying a ballot measure to protect abortion rights. With most votes counted, Issue 1 lost by 14 points.
“It’s an intensity issue. A lot of it has to do with intensity — who’s really fired up to get out there and vote?” former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who signed laws to restrict abortion while in office, said on MSNBC. “It wasn’t just Democrats that voted against this thing. There were a number of Republicans that did as well.”
Democrats see an opening with Trump
National Right to Life President Carol Tobias said she was “caught off guard” by how outgunned abortion opponents were after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
“Quite frankly, we’re being so outspent that it’s hard to counter the message that is coming out from our opponents,” Tobias said. “The biggest one for me that I was not expecting were the lies that were being told about women not being able to get treatment, that women are going to die.”
Electorally, it turns out Roe v. Wade was a gift to Republicans during its nearly half-century run. It turned a losing issue for the party into a winner by enabling the GOP to mobilize a passionate anti-abortion base in election after election for decades, without triggering a backlash among the majority of Americans who support legal abortion but didn’t believe it was in danger.
That’s over.
“Now our voters are more mobilized than theirs,” Lake said.
Lake said the Dobbs ruling gives Democrats an opening against Trump that they lacked in 2016. She lamented that voters didn’t believe Trump would actually fight to restrict abortion. But over his four years as president, Trump put three justices on the Supreme Court — all provided decisive votes to end the right to legal abortion.
“I was doing focus groups in Michigan with women, and I said: ‘Donald Trump is going to defund Planned Parenthood.’ And the women said, ‘No he’s not, that’s ridiculous.’ And I said I can show you the clip on TV, and I played the news for them,” Lake said. “And they said, ‘Are you kidding me? I don’t care what he says.’”
“So in 2016, it was very hard to make him anti-choice. After Dobbs, it’s not,” she said. “And the linkage to his court — the Trump judges and the MAGA judges is very, very clear to voters.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
