I think he's right to be worried

John Hinderaker: Here We Go Again

“In the 2022 off-year election, nearly everyone expected Republicans to make big gains in Washington. But they didn’t: Democrats held the Senate and Republicans eked out a bare House majority. Meanwhile, gains in state elections were muted. In Minnesota, where I live, GOP hopes were dashed as the Democrats held the House, took the Senate, and won all the constitutional offices from the governor on down.

“Why these disappointments? The defining issue in 2022, on account of the Dobbs decision, was abortion. Even in states where there was no serious chance that the election would lead to any restrictions on abortion–like Minnesota–Democrats campaigned on nothing else. And it worked. Swing voters, including millions of suburban housewives, turned out to insure that the precious right to abort babies would not be undermined.

“Conservatives have hoped that this year, voters would move on to more urgent issues. But the Democrats have other plans. This account is from the London Times:

President Biden and Vice-President Harris will put the spotlight on abortion rights in a national tour that seeks to rally Democrats and marks a renewed push to make it a defining issue of the 2024 election.

On Monday, Kamala Harris will travel to Wisconsin to kick off a national campaign focused on preserving access to reproductive healthcare and highlighting Republicans’ support of abortion restrictions.

Then on Tuesday, she will join Joe Biden at a rally in Virginia, where Democrats recently took control of the state legislature and have proposed creating a constitutional amendment that would codify abortion access in the state.

It signals a renewed effort to put abortion rights at the forefront of Biden’s re-election campaign, throwing more weight behind an issue that has galvanised voters in the 18 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.

“The track record on the abortion issue is not encouraging:

Since that decision and the resulting abortion bans in 14 states, the voting public appears to have cooled towards restrictions. Whenever access to abortion has been on the ballot, the vote has gone in favour of protecting a woman’s right to choose, and more ballots ensuring the right to abortion at the state level are planned.

“Can the Democrats and Joe Biden ride abortion to victory in 2024? Very possibly. In 2022, conservatives thought that issues like crime and the economy, on which Republicans hold big leads with voters, would translate into victory. But it didn’t happen. Pro-abortion rights voters, now a clear majority of the public, tend to prioritize that issue over everything else.”

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UPDATE: One of my daughters reports that she has seen the first Joe Biden commercial of 2024. It is on…abortion.

FWIW: I’ll add this to Hinderaker’s comments: the absolutely dumbest move in the last election was that stupid, stupid Lindsay Graham’s introduction of a national anti-abortion bill in September 2022. It had exactly zero chance of passage, so it was merely symbolic, but it angered the pro-abortionists and confirmed what the Democrats had been shrieking about: Republicans were going to take away their right to kill their babies. It motivated otherwise indifferent people to emerge like locusts in the millions, and their votes put Biden over the top (or close enough that the Democrats could get away with inventing a sufficient number to accomplish the task).

For all the talk about “issues” this year, I find a complete, deliberate indifference to them among many people I speak with: “I don’t watch the news”, they tell me, “it’s too depressing” or “I can’t do anything about it anyway, so why bother”. These are people who actually know who that Kardashian creature is, and can probably name 50 Tik-Tok influencers, but that’s all they’re concerned about. Except that they do hold two big political ideas: they hate Trump, and they want the right to unlimited abortions preserved (“for my daughter” one 60-year-old, postmenopause friend told me, when I asked), and they’ll come out in droves to say so.

When Biden is taken off the ticket, and I believe he will be, Republicans will lose the biggest weapon they have against the Democrats, and that’s frightening.