ABORTION REFERENDUMS ARE GOOD FOR SECURING ABORTION RIGHTS, BUT DO THEY HELP DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES?

Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post's humor columnist, writes a sharp piece about Republicans and abortion:

Huh! It turns out “Well, with luck, you probably won’t die being forced to give birth to a nonviable fetus over the objections of your doctor!” — even if you say it in a warm, human-sounding way ― is not actually what people want to hear when deciding how to cast their votes. Fascinating!

... Maybe what Republicans need is a better slogan. “Sometimes, too many rights are actually a burden” and “Do you ever get tired of making decisions for yourself?” and “Relax: We’ve got it! But let us know if you think you’re bleeding to death” turn out not to be winners, as far as slogans go. Same for, “You Don’t Get a Say, and We Don’t Care if You Die,” even if you say it with a lot of warm eye contact. Also bad: “You Don’t Get a Say, We Will Laugh at What Your Doctor Says, and We Want You to Do Everything But Die.”

There's one problem with this piece: It's not clear that the party's stance on abortion will hurt them in the next election, even though it's hurt them in elections for more than a year. The party's all-but-certain presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is ahead in the polls by several points. On the generic congressional ballot, Republicans continue to hold a small lead.

As Kate Zernike of The New York Times notes, abortion rights referendums have done well even in red states, so well that Republican elected officials are trying to keep them off the ballot.

... Republicans around the country — the same people, in many cases, who once complained about Roe blocking the democratic process and imposing a one-size-fits-all rule on abortion nationwide — have turned much of their energy to keeping the issue away from voters.

Republican-controlled legislatures, shocked by the results of ballot measures that put the question of abortion directly to the people, are trying to make those measures harder to pass, and even abolish them as an option.

But anti-abortion Republican candidates are still winning elections in states where voters have supported abortion-rights referendums. Yes, Ohio's abortion referendum was approved by a double-digit margin. But in 2022, a few months after the Dobbs decision was released, Republicans in Ohio easily won the governorship, a Senate seat, and ten of fifteen House seats. In Kansas last year, an abortion rights referendum was approved by nearly twenty points in the summer of 2022; a few months later, the pro-choice Democratic governor won reelection, but Republicans swept all other statewide offices.

Campaigning on abortion rights can lead to election victories in red and purple states -- but it's not automatic. Earlier this year, Janet Protasiewicz won a special election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court by double digits, running as a supporter of abortion rights. But a year earlier, months after Dobbs, the vehemently anti-abortion Ron Johnson won reelection to the U.S. Senate.

So as Zernike notes, an increasingly pro-choice America can't change anti-abortion laws in many states because the voters in those states still vote for a lot of Republicans:

Victories for abortion-rights groups on ballot measures haven’t necessarily resulted in changes to the law, or opened up access to abortion. In Kentucky, even as voters rejected a ballot measure attempting to say there was no right to abortion, and then re-elected a Democratic governor who campaigned on his support for abortion rights, a court has upheld a near-total ban on abortion passed by the Republican legislature.

The reason is obvious.

... Republican voters are not showing an inclination to make abortion the deciding factor in their vote: While Democrats say abortion is more likely to drive their votes post-Dobbs, Republicans say it is less so. Republicans who support abortion rights probably aren’t going to vote against their party if they still agree with it on taxes. The American tradition of straight-ticket voting endures.

But are Democrats treating those GOP loyalties as an inviolate law of nature when they should be trying to flip some of those GOP voters?

There are clearly moderate voters who don't agree with their party's absolutism on abortion. Many of them don't agree with the party's absolutism on guns either. And it's actually not obvious that they agree with the GOP on taxes: polls show that many people across the political spectrum now believe the rich and big corporations don't pay enough in taxes.

I say this all the time: Democrats need to tell these Republican-voting moderates that nothing will change on these issues as long as Republicans are in power. They need to ensure that voters know about Republican absolutism on these issues.

I'm not convinced that every voter in America understands what can happen to abortion rights if Donald Trump is elected again. He's selling himself as an abortion moderate -- and Democrats aren't pointing out that if he's elected, every judge (and Supreme Court justice) he appoints will be an anti-abortion zealot. They aren't pointing out that he (or his running mate if he wins and then leaves office early) would probably sign a national abortion ban into law if a Republican Congress passed one.

Voters need to know that electing any Republican increases the threat to abortion rights. Democrats avoid making sweeping negative statements about the GOP, even if those statements are accurate -- and the country becomes more right-wing as a result.