Time to abandon the unborn to their fate? (UPDATED)
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go forth, and don’t multiply
Just as in 2020, and 2022, it’s still all about abortion, all the time.
Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin was handed a stunning defeat in Tuesday's General Assembly elections, with Democrats flipping the House of Delegates and retaining the state Senate.
While Republican donors have been urging Youngkin to make a late entry into the 2024 presidential race, the first-term governor said he had to gain control of the General Assembly first - vowing to push through a 15-week abortion ban.
Virginia's voters rejected that, with Democrats estimated to win at least 21 state Senate seats, retaining their majority, and 51 seats in the House of Delegates, gaining control from Republicans.
And
The Virginia results were part of an overall good night for the Democrats, which saw Kentucky's Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear win reelection and abortion rights preserved in the red state of Ohio.
Ohio voters, who voted for former President Donald Trump twice and GOP Sen. J.D. Vance last year, also voted to legalize pot.
… Democrats put abortion rights at the center of their campaigns. The issue has been crystalized as one that can galvanize swing voters ahead of the 2024 election amid rampant inflation, global unrest and Joe Biden's disastrous approval rating.
The same result came in Kentucky, despite the otherwise hugely unpopular Governor of that coal mining state announcing on Monday night, hours before the polls opened, that he’ll be closing two coal-fired powerplants and another one fueled by natural gas in favor of wind and solar power, with battery storage facilities yet to be invented, let alone built.
The numbers explain this odd, single-issue fixation on abortion by left-wing women.
Around 20% of all pregnancies are terminated by abortion: 620,321 in 2020, per the CDC, or 930,160 according to the pro-abortion rights organization The Guttmacher Institute. (Neither number includes abortion pills obtained outside of clinics or physicians’ offices).
That’s a huge constituency, especially when so many of those people, and some of their impregnators, are single-issue voters; they don’t care about the ongoing destruction of our energy infrastructure, inflation, the weaponization of our judicial system and intelligence services, failing schools, or, it seems, anything just so long as they’re free to screw without having to endure the inconvenience of using birth control.
And it’s those numbers that provide the answer to this commenter’s question, Why does the ‘party of abortion’ keep winning
Pro-life Republicans will lick their wounds, blame each other, and point to uniquely unhelpful factors in each race. But the pattern is now so obvious as to be irrefutable. Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the ballot, the party of abortion keeps winning.
The pro-abortion electoral tide could be stemmed in next year’s presidential elections, when turn-out will be much higher and the highly mobilized “reproductive choice” lobby will have less sway. But for the Democrats, who are losing on the economy, on immigration and so much else, the tactic is clear. We can expect the party of abortion to add ballot “reproductive rights” measures in every state in November next year to drive up their support. And Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic whose Church teaches that abortion is an excommunicable sin, will make it a major campaign issue — assuming his re-election campaign isn’t itself terminated in the coming months.
Glenn Reynolds adds that Donald Trump saw this coming.
Trump may be the only Republican who can carve out a middle ground on this issue without permanently alienating the 38% of Americans who oppose most restrictions on abortions. If anyone else tried to do so, I suspect a large block of voters would stay home on election day and hand victory to the Democrats. My personal opinion on abortion is that I don’t like it, but yielding on the issue may be the only way to save the country from its enemies. And, unfair as it may be to the poor infants who will never be born, I can’t say I’m totally against leftist nitwits not reproducing if it will thin out their ranks in the future. As Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
UPDATE: Over at HOTAIR, Ed Morrissey tosses in another element in Republican losses: Trump. Morrissey is no Trump fan, but he’s right, in my opinion, to point out the pathological, visceral hatred of Trump by the Left — I’ve experienced that myself, and certainly, the Republicans’ election failures since 2018 suggest that that hatred is causing real damage.
… But abortion doesn’t explain everything that happened last night. In Kentucky, a reliably red state for presidential elections, incumbent Democrat governor Andy Beshear unexpectedly [in fact, it WAS expected, but never mind — ed[] sailed to an easy re-election over Republican AG Daniel Cameron, by five points. Four years ago, Beshear barely edged out Matt Bevin in a relatively good national political environment, 49.2/48.8. Granted, Beshear has a strong family name in Kentucky politics and has managed to govern as a moderate Democrat, but in the current environment, Republicans should have beaten him. And abortion wasn’t a top issue in the campaign in Kentucky, either.
Something else was, however. Or rather, someone else was. Late in the evening, when the scope of disappointment became clear, Dan O’Donnell offered an eight-point analysis of the failures. He cited both abortion and marijuana (the other issue on the Ohio ballot), but a larger problem that motivates and unites Democrats even more:
3. That problem, as much as many don’t want to admit it, is largely in voter hatred of Donald Trump as the larger-than-life standard-bearer of the Republican Party. Beshear tied Daniel Cameron to him often and it worked. …
5. This continues a trend of Democrat over-performance from pretty much every special election this year. The liberal won by 11 points in a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, where vote margins are normally razor-thin, and according to analysis by the New York Times have outperformed expected vote totals by an average of 11 points in each race.
7. How is this possible when Joe Biden is polling at historically low levels? Biden himself is seen as senile and incompetent, but his Democratic Party is still generally preferable to Trump’s Republican Party.
8. On issues like abortion and marijuana, Republicans are not with the majority of Americans, and as a result voters are rejecting them. Add to that the general dislike of Trump, and it has all the makings of a bona fide disaster for Republicans next year.
For evidence of this, we can go all the way back to 2018, when the current Republican losing streak started. At that time, Trump was wildly popular with his base but deeply unpopular everywhere else. The midterm losses were not historically large, and perhaps even somewhat limited given the Russia-collusion hysteria whipped up by the Democrats.
But the losses continued in 2019 elections, including in Kentucky where a Trump ally contended for the governor’s office. They continued in 2020, resulting in the loss of Senate control as well as the presidency, although Trump’s allies insisted the elections were illegitimate. All of that took place before the Supreme Court even agreed to hear the Dobbs case and reverse Roe and Casey.
The specter of Dobbs and abortion clearly overshadowed the 2022 midterms, but then again, so did the specter of Trump and the January 6 riot. Trump-endorsed candidates that campaigned on the 2020 election lost winnable Senate races. If it hadn’t been for a revolt against Bidenomics in New York, of all states, Republicans would have fallen short of control of the House in 2022’s midterms as well. The only place where a midterm red wave materialized was in Florida, even with DeSantis backing a heartbeat-based abortion bill.
And now we have last night’s results to add to the list of disappointments. Given the turmoil within the Democrat Party, this might be the most surprising of them yet. Abortion certainly contributed to their unity of purpose yesterday, but so did their use of Trump and the “ultra-MAGA” betes noires they used effectively in 2020, 2022, and will certainly exploit in 2024 if given the chance. Even with polls that say Biden’s losing to Trump, which raises big question about just how predictive those polls will be, those attacks were very effective. Biden’s voters came home with a vengeance last night.
UPDATE 2. I didn’t watch the debate — why break a perfect string of indifference? — but Nikki Haley’s take on the issue, reported here, is pretty good.
