Tennessee’s overwhelmingly rural 4th Congressional District has a 20-point Republican partisan lead, and if history is any tell, its voters will send incumbent Rep. Scott Desjarlais back to Congress for the sixth time. But Christopher Hale has bet the last year of his life on two wagers: First, that Republicans voters are willing to trade in the scandal-ridden Desjarlais for a Blue Dog Democrat, and second, that the Democratic Party still has a place for pro-life candidates.
Hale looks a lot more like the Catholic, nice guy who won the Democratic presidential primary than the left-leaning coastal candidates who tried to beat Joe Biden. Hale, though nearly half a century younger than Biden, also thrives on retail politics and campaigning as a salt-of-the-earth centrist rather than a radical. As a millennial Obama alum, Hale’s social media game is strong, and if there’s any Republican incumbent in a blood-red district looking for a loss, it’s Desjarlais.
Desjarlais, like plenty of his predecessors, as well as President Trump, is famous for having multiple affairs. But Desjarlais has somehow survived politically despite the revelation that not only did his mistresses include patients at his medical practice, but that he had encouraged his wife and a mistress to get multiple abortions. So Hale isn’t just campaigning as the stand-up, moderate Democrat offering Tennesseans the chance to expunge Desjarlais from their consciousness, but also as the truly pro-life candidate to empower the waning coalition within the Democratic Party.
By his own admission, Hale’s definition of what it means to be pro-life differs somewhat from what the standard-bearers of the movement may find acceptable.
“My definition of what it means to be pro-life is not the Republican Party’s definition of what would it be to be pro-life,” Hale says on a call as he drives through yet another stretch of rural roads on the campaign trail. “To me, I think the Republican Party is oftentimes pro-birth. But as a Christian, as a Catholic, I think we extend the definition of life well beyond conception, so life might begin at the conception, but it doesn’t end there.”
Although Hale asserts that repealing the Hyde Amendment (which bans taxpayer dollars from being spent on most abortions) is a “non-starter” for him, he believes that abortion restrictions have to come with other public policy changes, such as greater healthcare spending for preventative planning, deregulating contraception, and better sex education. Hale cites European nations that have greatly lowered their abortion rates with combinations of abortion restrictions and more public health spending.
“It’s gonna be the bad Democrats and the bad Republicans that actually enact pro-life policies,” Hale says of the compromise he believes is required to reduce abortions in practice.
And if you look at the polling, not only is Hale’s hypothesis likely correct, but it’s also broadly popular.
Despite politics perhaps feeling more polarized as of late, the electorate has uniformly become much more socially libertarian in a matter of years. For example, the overwhelming majority of the country, including half of all Republicans, now favor marijuana legalization and gay marriage. The one issue that hasn’t followed suit is abortion, even as other feminist causes such as women in the workplace and contraception have near-unanimous support.
For more than two decades, the position of the public considering themselves nominally pro-choice versus pro-life has remained evenly split and mostly stagnant. But unlike the virtue signalers in the capital, these numbers alone obscure a broad public consensus: Almost nobody wants first-trimester, taxpayer-funded abortions, and almost no one views abortion as a positive good of any kind. While 3 in 5 Americans don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned and believe abortion ought to be legal in the first trimester, just as many think abortion should be illegal in the second trimester, and a majority think that purely elective abortion (that is, basically any abortion of a pregnancy that is not a product of rape or incest, or the abortion of pregnancy that doesn’t threaten the mother’s life) ought to be illegal as well.
In other words, although the loudest voices of the Democratic establishment have abandoned their mantra of “safe, legal, and rare” abortion for abundant, taxpayer-funded, and permissible for any reason, the overwhelming majority of the nation has not. After all, 1 in 4 Democrats still identify as pro-life, and the party’s embrace of laws that would effectively legalize third-trimester abortion, which only 13% of the nation supports, alienates its own electorate.
Hale knows this, and it’s a part of why he says campaigning as “pro-life,” however heterodox it may be, is a key part of his campaign.
“We were considered a dying breed of the party for the past decade or so, but I think what’s remarkable about it is that really the only pathway forward for a Democratic Party in rural America has got to include pro-life voices,” Hale says of pro-life Democrats.
Is Hale right? Pro-life Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, whom Hale calls a “gift to the progressive movement,” has survived the revival of the abortion litmus test among vast swaths of the Left, but Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois has not. Today, Marie Newman, a Democrat who primaried Lipinski from the left on the basis of abortion, will be elected to Lipinski’s seat (barring a GOP upset in a D+6 district).
Hale’s numbers are strong for a Democrat in such a red district. Even if he does lose, he’s positioned himself for a strong political career. But if a pro-life Democrat can’t unseat a serial adulterer who has personally supported abortions, where can a pro-life Democrat reignite the movement in his party?
