Kevin argues that Blake Masters has disqualified himself because he’s a coward and flip-flopper on abortion; he cites Donald Trump as an example of a Republican politician with a late-in-life conversion on abortion of dubious sincerity, although Trump (for all his other flaws) ended up being an unyielding friend of the pro-life movement in office. Michael argues that Masters is still more pro-life than his Democratic opponent — by a mile — and cites Mitt Romney and George W. Bush as examples of Republican politicians with late-in-life conversions on abortion of dubious sincerity. In Romney’s case, he claimed two conversions, one in the early 1970s from pro-life to pro-choice, the other in the late 2000s in the other direction. As I noted during the 2012 primaries, “his explanation of how he became a pro-lifer over the stem cell issue (oddly, an issue on which many pro-life Mormons are not on the pro-life side) is less personal and less convincing than his prior narrative of how a family experience led him to be pro-choice. The dual conversion narrative leaves both positions sounding hollow and insincere: St. Paul only went to Damascus the one time.”
Of course, both Kevin and Michael are right. Kevin is right that Masters is a calculating politician, rather than the brave BUT HE FIGHTS warrior he claimed to be in the primary; Michael is right that your typical establishment Republican is also a calculating politician, and yet, that nearly any Republican is better on life than just about every Democrat. And all of us were right that Republicans across the country needed to be thinking through long in advance how to respond if the Dobbs case resulted in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which was entirely foreseeable in 2021, but which few Republicans (Masters included) seem to have planned for.
Masters has not disqualified himself from your general-election vote by his current stance on abortion, or by his visible retreat from his previous rhetoric on the issue. But he has disqualified the credibility of a lot of people who claimed that Masters was somehow a braver man than Mark Brnovich, who withstood far-more-difficult tests from both parties without buckling. It turns out that Masters is not so different from ordinary Republican politicians, after all.