Will the Biden Campaign Regret Telling Pro-Life Voters to Drop Dead in 2024?
There are good reasons to think the conventional wisdom overstates how much the abortion issue helped Democrats in 2022.
There are good reasons to think the conventional wisdom overstates how much the abortion issue helped Democrats in 2022.
A s the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision approached, Politico reported that Joe Biden “is poised to run the most overtly abortion rights platform of any general election candidate in political history as he and his team navigate the first presidential cycle in the post-Roe era.” Biden’s campaign manager told the publication that the Biden campaign intends to put the issue of abortion “front and center” in 2024.
On Friday evening, Biden offered a glimpse of what it might look like for the campaign to put abortion “front and center.” At a rally with Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and Emily’s List in Washington, D.C., Biden was introduced by a Planned Parenthood abortion doctor. In his remarks, he hammered South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham for trying to ban abortions (later than 15 weeks of pregnancy) nationwide, and he emphasized the need to enact the Democrats’ sweeping federal abortion bill. Before Biden spoke, Nancy Pelosi told the crowd that Senate Democrats would scrap the filibuster to do just that.
It’s become conventional wisdom among Democrats, the media, and even a significant slice of Republicans that the issue is a winner for Democrats in 2024. As one Democratic National Committee official put it at Biden’s abortion rally on Friday, “one of the most successful midterm elections in history happened” for Democrats in 2022 because of the issue of abortion.
But there are good reasons to think the conventional wisdom overstates how much the issue helped Democrats in 2022, and it’s entirely possible the Biden campaign could end up overreaching and regretting telling pro-life voters to drop dead in 2024.
In 2022, House GOP candidates — who are pro-life — cumulatively won more votes than their Democratic opponents in each battleground state: Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. The GOP’s failure to take back the Senate had more to do with kooky Trump-backed candidates than it had to do with the issue of abortion. In Georgia, for example, Republican governor Brian Kemp won his rematch against Stacey Abrams by nearly eight points after signing into law a six-week limit on abortion, but scandal-plagued GOP Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker trailed Democratic senator Raphael Warnock by a point on election night.
Democrats put the issue of abortion front and center in Wisconsin — the tipping-point state in the 2020 presidential race — but Republican Ron Johnson won reelection by a point (at the same time Wisconsin’s House GOP candidates cumulatively bested their Democratic opponents by two points). True, Johnson voted multiple times for a 20-week abortion limit but did not embrace Graham’s 15-week bill. GOP Senate candidate Ted Budd cosponsored the 15-week bill and won North Carolina by a little more than three points. Marco Rubio, another cosponsor of the 15-week bill, won reelection by 16 points in Florida.
Rubio and Johnson both effectively highlighted the extremism of their Democratic opponents on abortion by accurately explaining that the federal abortion bill which congressional Democrats almost unanimously back basically means abortion on demand even beyond viability until birth (whenever a health-care provider invokes a mental-health exception). This is a real vulnerability for Biden, who said in the 1990s that he wanted to “ban all post-viability abortions.” In a Senate debate at the time, Biden seemed to acknowledge that a mental-health exception for post-viability abortions would be a loophole which swallows up the rule. In 1997, he said he backed a measure to ban post-viability abortions unless the pregnancy would “risk grievous injury to [the woman’s] physical health.”
“This is not mental health. This is not a minor ailment,” Biden said. “This is grievous physical injury.”
Polling continues to show that voters nationwide think abortion should be illegal after the first trimester, which starts the 13th week of pregnancy. Gallup polling conducted in May of this year found that 55 percent of Americans said abortion should be illegal in the second trimester, while 37 percent margin said it should be legal. If the debate over abortion is between a 15-week limit (with well-defined exceptions) and Biden’s support for abortion through all nine months, that is a debate Biden could easily lose.
Of course, it’s hard to tell exactly how many votes any given issue will provide a candidate, either by actually proving decisive for any undecided voter or by bringing someone out to the polls who would have otherwise stayed home. Views of the current president and his predecessor — the main character in our politics for eight years — are very firm, and it’s hard to imagine many voters who don’t already know what they would do in a Trump–Biden rematch.
The issue of abortion could have more salience if a lesser-known GOP contender emerges as the 2024 nominee. The Biden campaign and DNC are already preparing for that possibility by branding standard-issue pro-life Republicans, such as Mike Pence, Tim Scott, and Ron DeSantis, as “MAGA Republicans” in abortion-themed ads. But abortion extremism isn’t what enticed the “return to normalcy” swing voters of the 2020 election to back Biden. And in a race against anyone other than Trump, those same voters may very well end up preferring a normal pro-life Republican to a Democrat in 2024, just as they did in 2022.