Will a growing pro-choice tsunami turn November into a blue wave election?
Recent events show a Republican Party struggling to grapple with the real-world consequences of its anti-abortion crusade
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
This past week should go far to settling the question of whether the issue of abortion rights will play a dominant role in the November elections. With the Arizona Supreme Court upholding a draconian 1864 state anti-abortion law (passed at a time when women couldn’t even vote), we’ve seen Donald Trump and other Republicans openly flail about to avoid a growing backlash against restrictions that the GOP itself has long worked to impose. But as Paul Waldman writes in a deeply clarifying essay about how abortion politics and public opinion have evolved since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the GOP has ended up making real the previously more abstract stakes of the abortion rights struggle. He observes that, “[i]n practical political terms, there are only two paths to take on abortion, one toward securing rights and one toward undermining them. The “middle” position means more restrictions that ultimately lead to abortion being outlawed. And we all know it.”
The reason “we all know it,” as he goes on to describe, is because powerful elements of the GOP have used the Dobbs decision to impose extreme limits on abortion, with real-world, devastating impacts on women’s health in multiple states. If before Dobbs the GOP could seek to gain advantage by rousing its base with promises to end abortion even as those in the middle and on the left had trouble believing that this right would ever go away, the aftermath of the Court decision has introduced the reality principle to American’s pro-choice majority.
And as this Washington Post analysis by Aaron Blake notes, Donald Trump’s attempt to find a safe space by averring that states can now do what they want on abortion and that what they do is always right is not exactly a brilliant strategic move. Rather than clearing Trump of responsibility for abortion restrictions, this position essentially links him to whatever bonkers limits that GOP state governments decide to impose. For instance, when Trump was asked if doctors should be punished for abortions, Trump said that it would be up to the states. It is difficult to believe (and this is backed up by polls) that Americans are eager to start jailing physicians around the country, yet Trump’s “states’ rights” logic leads him to take no clear stand on such a damaging question for himself and the GOP. As Blake writes, “It’s one thing to say states should handle policy; it’s another to provide basically no judgment on what is acceptable policy [. . .] The fact is that leaving this to the states — some very red — is likely to lead, and has led, to policies that the national Republican Party would rather not account for.”
I don’t doubt that the Trump campaign and the broader GOP will continue to cast about for an abortion message that they believe will minimize the damage to the party’s election prospects. But not only are they fighting against an actual reality they themselves created (as Waldman makes clear), they are also stuck with a uniquely tarnished party leader where this issue is concerned. Not only is Donald Trump the person most responsible for the destruction of abortion rights — a responsibility which Trump himself has repeatedly and loudly proclaimed — he is also obviously untrustworthy on this topic and thus likely unable to sway pro-choice opinion even if he stumbles upon the ever-elusive right thing to say. Both Jamelle Bouie and Josh Marshall hammer this point home in recent pieces, which when paired with the undeniable fact of abortion restrictions the GOP itself is implementing around the country simply leaves the party very little room to maneuver.
But why should Republicans even expect to have room to maneuver? The GOP accomplished its long-time anti-abortion policy goal of overthrowing Roe v. Wade through a combination of persistence and Supreme Court norm-breaking, and have made it a part of our shared reality, to the great detriment of the causes of freedom, equality, and women’s bodily autonomy. The problem for Republicans is that their success is deeply, seismically unpopular, and in fact is likely to grow still more unpopular as stories of pregnant women suffering and dying due to lack of abortion access become more widespread. The basic truth of the matter is that religious extremists, on and off the Supreme Court, have imposed on millions of Americans a theological vision of life and reproduction, with predictably catastrophic consequences for ordinary Americans. It does not help the Republican cause that major elements within the GOP want to further restrict abortion access, with the ultimate goal of federal legislation that would effectively outlaw the procedure, with all the compounding chaos such “success” would produce.
I don’t think we should underestimate the amount of damage the GOP’s immoral anti-abortion position may yet inflict on the party — a vulnerability that has been hidden to date by an unhealthy mainstream media focus on horse race presidential polling that tells us very little about how things will shake out in November. Not only has the Republican Party’s success shown itself to in fact be unpopular and repressive, but the GOP is ultimately at the mercy of a man who has no compunctions about lying and dissimulating about the abortion issue. The GOP’s continued attempts to scam its way out of the abortion trap it has set for itself seem just as likely to produce the opposite of the intended effect, leading Americans to turn even more strongly against the evisceration of women’s reproductive rights as the GOP shows that it doesn’t even have the fortitude to stand by its own policy wins.
In turn, the fact that GOP gains on the anti-abortion front are actually a tremendous liability for the party should remind us that while it is still likely that the November presidential election will be close, it is also within the realm of possibility that the party is vulnerable to a more significant loss at the presidential and other levels. The Biden campaign’s apparent understanding that they must implacably tie Trump to the Dobbs decision and the mayhem that has followed signals that the president understands this vulnerability and is more than willing to exploit it.
But this fight goes beyond political maneuvering and the scoring of points, which is why it’s both so important that Democrats press the pro-choice attack and unsparingly condemn the GOP’s medieval attitudes. The attack on abortion rights reveals a larger GOP animus towards women, a view of them as fundamentally second-class citizens whose control over their own bodies must yield to the judgment of men who know better. In vowing to restore the right to abortion torn away by the evisceration of Roe, the Democrats are also fighting for a fundamental equality among Americans, regardless of gender. Most Americans intuit this point; the Democrats only stand to gain by making it more explicit and denying the GOP the false piety in which the party cloaks its misogynistic anti-abortion crusade.