Polls show the Democrats losing on the economy, as well as on the border, crime, foreign policy and just about everything else. But they have one ace in the hole: abortion. Apparently the most popular thing a politician can stand for in today’s America is killing unborn babies. Or not necessarily unborn: in Minnesota, where I live, you can kill babies in all cases up to and including the moment of birth. But also, in a stunning civil rights breakthrough, in some cases you can kill babies after they have been born!
This regime is so popular with voters that Democrats in my state are desperately searching for a way to keep abortion alive as an issue. And they are not alone:
Democratic campaign committees, PACs and groups aligned with the party are shelling out more than $125 million in battleground states as part of an unprecedented drive to make abortion a key election issue.
That is, to get people talking about something other than the cost of living and the border.
A spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which serves House members, told The Post the committee will be holding vulnerable Republicans in New York and across the country accountable for their “extreme anti-choice record.”
Nothing extreme about killing babies as they are being born–or after–of course.
On Wednesday, the ACLU also announced $25 million for a Voter Education Fund aimed at “protecting and expanding abortion and voting rights up and down the ballot” through direct mail, digital ads and other organization efforts.
Those will include spending on abortion-related ballot measures in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, as well as in Montana, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, Florida and New York.
“This is the most amount of money that we’ve spent in an election cycle,” ACLU chief political and advocacy officer Deirdre Schifeling told NBC News….
And so on. More at the link. You can say the Democrats’ abortion distraction is a Hail Mary–possibly an inappropriate metaphor under the circumstances–but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. My understanding is that wherever abortion has been on the ballot it has hurt Republicans, even in red states. What is stranger is the issue’s ability to hurt Republicans even when it is not on the ballot, and there is no serious prospect of a state’s abortion laws becoming more restrictive.
So I would not discount the possibility that the Democrats’ seizing on the abortion issue could be successful.
