Did the Democrats pick the wrong electoral cycle to jump their particular abortion-cheering, fetus-destroying, and sensibility-unsettling shark? For a certain kind of Republican voter, who has problems with Donald Trump’s temperament and with the programmatic agenda of the national Democrats, the decision to vote”‘no” on the Democrats and on their agenda just got a whole lot easier.
For years, the polling in the U.S. and the world has been unchanged and unchanging: 60% or so of respondents support permitting abortion in the first trimester, 30% or so in the second, and down to the low teens in the third. For years, presidential candidates on both sides have threaded the needle, appeasing the base while giving those who dissent leeway enough to vote for them anyhow. Then, sometime in the winter of 2018, the needles were tossed, the goalposts upended, and the word went forth to any Democrat even dreaming of running for office that the new rules were unquestioned support for all abortions anywhere under any conditions, to the moment of birth and beyond.
“The changed composition of the Supreme Court and the supposed imminent danger that [Roe v. Wade] will be overturned is the excuse that pro-abortion extremists have seized upon to do what they want to do anyway,” George Will informs us. Their aim is “to normalize extreme abortion practices expressive of the belief that never does fetal life have more moral significance than a tumor in a mother’s stomach.”
The question now is how these views may play out against a highly beatable Republican candidate. But haven’t we seen this same story before?
It was 2016 when Hillary Clinton, our first female nominee, ran for president with a more aggressive and rigorous abortion rights platform than had been seen in a major party’s agenda before. Gone was her husband’s abortion rights platform of “safe, legal, and rare.” Gone were the moral concerns voiced by Obama. In their place was was her dictum that pro-life sentiments should never be voiced in her party at all.
The first candidate openly endorsed by Planned Parenthood, Hillary barnstormed with its statuesque leader, surrounded by mobs of overbearing and shrieking young women, holding boisterous rallies throughout the Midwest.
Then with the election, the verdict came due: “Hillary Clinton lost the overall Catholic vote by seven points — after President Obama had won it in the previous two elections,” wrote Thomas Groome in the New York Times over two years ago. “In heavily Catholic states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, she lost by a hair — the last by less than 1 percent. A handful more of Catholic votes per parish in those states would have won her the election.”
What 2016 proved is that people will vote for someone they don’t like if the opposition is made to seem even less attractive. That’s precisely what the Left’s new approach to abortion is likely to do. In 2016, Will says, ”[Democrats] produced a candidate whom Donald Trump defeated by 17 points among the 18 percent of voters who had negative views of both him and her. … he won by 51 points among the 15 percent of the electorate who thought neither was qualified to be president.”
Voters have proved that they will vote for Trump. He was elected by people who didn’t much like him. Will this be the result in the 2020 election? We’ll see.
