Terry McAuliffe’s abortion attack didn’t work and may have even backfired.
It may have even backfired.
I magine that on August 1, you had been told that Texas — the second most-populous state in the country — would effectively ban almost all abortions later than six weeks of pregnancy and that the U.S. Supreme Court would allow that law to remain in effect during the two months leading up to the Virginia gubernatorial election.
You might have reasonably thought, as Democrat Terry McAuliffe and many in the media did, that the issue would badly hurt Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in a state that Biden won by ten points. But you, like McAuliffe and the media, would have been wrong.
Since the Texas Heartbeat Act took effect on September 1, McAuliffe ran hard on the issue of abortion — hammering it in TV ads, speeches, and the debates. McAuliffe warned that — with the Supreme Court scheduled to hear a case in December that could result in Roe v. Wade being overturned — Glenn Youngkin would ban all abortions in Virginia and women would die as a result. McAuliffe even campaigned at an abortion clinic.
But the Democratic candidate’s abortion attack was an electoral failure. It may have even backfired.
On September 1, McAuliffe led Youngkin by 5.2 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Despite wall-to-wall media coverage of the Texas abortion law for the following two weeks, the polls continued to tighten in Virginia.
The exit polling found that 8 percent of Virginia voters said that abortion was the “most important issue,” and this group of voters broke 58 percent to 41 percent in favor of Youngkin.
What does Youngkin’s victory tell us about how voters would respond to a Supreme Court ruling next summer overturning Roe and letting the states enact their own laws on abortion?
The lesson would seem to be that what happens in one state won’t have much of an impact on how voters vote in other states.
Youngkin staked out a politically defensible position in Virginia, a state that voted for Joe Biden by ten points and a state where a majority of voters still say abortion should be generally legal. Youngkin countered McAuliffe’s attacks by highlighting McAuliffe’s own extremism on taxpayer funding of abortion and late-term abortion. McAuliffe executed a flip-flop-flip on whether he would sign Democrat Kathy Tran’s radical late-term abortion bill. Despite running hard on abortion, McAuliffe would not say if he’d sign a bill providing Medicaid funding for elective abortions — a sign of just how politically toxic it was for House Democrats to unanimously vote to kill the Hyde amendment in July.
During the debates, Youngkin pledged that he would sign a bill that banned abortions when a baby in the womb is developed enough to feel pain (during the second trimester), and he noted that he supports exceptions when pregnancy endangers the mother’s life or is the result of rape or incest. Youngkin said that if a Texas-style law — which is enforced solely through a system of civil lawsuits — landed on his desk, he would not sign it. When asked at a debate if he would sign a six-week abortion ban, with exceptions and enforced in a normal way, he dodged the question.
The results in Virginia don’t mean there couldn’t be particular candidates who say stupid or offensive things about abortion and pay the price at the polls in 2022. The results don’t mean that there couldn’t be backlash in some purple states if Roe were overturned and some states had abortion laws that go beyond what public opinion will sustain. But it’s worth noting that on Tuesday, the backlash against Democrats was in full-swing in Texas, too: A heavily Hispanic Texas house district that Biden carried by 14 points elected a Republican by two points.
What the results in Virginia do appear to signal is that if the Supreme Court does restore the right of the American people to enact laws protecting the lives of unborn babies, there would not be some sort of overwhelming nationwide backlash against Republicans at the polls in 2022.
On Tuesday, Democrats faced a backlash nationwide because of a variety of underlying issues — such as the economy and COVID restrictions — and until those issues subside or are fixed, Democratic attempts to demagogue abortion appear unlikely to save them at the polls.
Update: The CNN exit poll numbers were updated to reflect final adjustments.