Senate hearings for the confirmation of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett could help Republicans on Election Day by boosting turnout with evangelical and religious voters while diverting attention from the administration’s coronavirus response and picking up often GOP-leaning late voters for the president.
Republicans have set Oct. 12 as the target start date for Barrett’s confirmation hearings, with Democrats poised to oppose her nomination.
“The timing of the hearings could potentially stand to give a late shot in the arm to Republican voters down the stretch into Election Day — which could be critically important in offsetting any deficits from early voting,” veteran Republican pollster Robert Blizzard told the Washington Examiner, pointing to “the expected Democratic surge in mail-in, absentee balloting.”
Blizzard added, “Much of their base vote will likely be in before we even get to the first committee hearing.”
Billed by one White House official as “an accomplished, compassionate, working mother of seven from America’s heartland” and featured in a new campaign ad alongside six of her seven children, Trump has seized on Barrett’s potential appeal in the suburbs, where Republicans are eager to recapture ground lost in 2018.
At the White House on Saturday, she offered a homespun picture of her life as a “room parent, carpool driver, and birthday party planner.”
“He needs the evangelicals,” said a former Trump campaign official. “The majority of Christians don’t come out to vote, and you know her stance on Roe v. Wade. If you’re looking at this just through a political lens, you’re talking about every evangelical out there.”
Barrett’s strong Christian faith could also energize older voters who tend to be more conservative, particularly on abortion, said Ed Goeas, president of the Tarrance Group, a Republican survey research and strategy firm.
“Older Republicans are showing a little bit of reluctance on Trump right now,” he said.
Goeas is paying close attention to voters who approve of Trump’s policies but object to his “tone and tenor.”
He added, “Unfortunately, some of those senior Republicans have moved away from him because of how he acts.”
One Ohio suburbanite, a fervent Trump supporter, explained how the abortion issue could animate voters such as herself. Sandra Mae Lee said she renounced her Catholic faith before returning to the Church later in life and was inspired by Barrett’s own life as a mother with an accomplished professional life.
“I was a hippie chick,” she said. “I also was very pro-abortion. If you were going to make love every five minutes, you were going to get pregnant.”
This acceptance “was damaging to young people in so many ways,” she said, adding that talk of Barrett’s potential to move the court to overturn Roe v. Wade could appeal to women whose views, like her own, had shifted over time.
A U.S. Court of Appeals judge on the 7th Circuit in Chicago, Barrett is a favorite among conservative activists and Catholics. But Republican operatives say her appeal is much broader, and that this isn’t lost on the Trump reelection effort, which on Wednesday launched a new television advertisement touting her “conservative values.”
“Supreme Court nominees were a huge issue for voters in 2016, and they will be again in 2020,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “Voters elected President Trump in 2016 and expanded the Republican majority in the Senate in 2018, so they expect action on this new vacancy.”
Said the former Trump campaign official, “It’s a matter of how do we galvanize the rest of the swing states on a winning issue that is purely conservative down conservative lines, what would that be?
“It’s abortion.”
