In 1992, the late Gov. Bob Casey was denied a speaking slot at the Democratic convention. It was not, as some believe, just because he was fervently pro-life, nor was it because he had failed to endorse Bill Clinton for president (at least one other convention speaker had also failed to do so). It was because he actually wanted to deliver a pro-life speech.
Casey was forced to watch (as he put it in his book) from the nosebleeds as a supporter of his pro-abortion Republican challenger from 1990 addressed the convention instead.
Even Casey’s rejection came nowhere near the newest development in Democratic politics: DNC Chairman Tom Perez’s declaration late last week that pro-life Democratic candidates are dead to him, and can expect no help from the party’s formal apparatus.
It is puzzling that the head of a political party, whose job is to win elections, would send such a clearly exclusionary message to officeholders and candidates without whose victory his party would probably remain a minority forever. It is even more puzzling that he would do so on an issue where deviations from Democratic orthodoxy are most often a rhetorical tool for getting elected than anything else.
Gov. Casey was rare because he actually wanted to change his party’s direction on the abortion issue. That direction has changed today, and not in the way he would have hoped. Democrats have since veered toward the center (“safe, legal and rare”), then back to the left in the late 2000’s this decade (“on demand, without apology”). Today, they have moved still further toward the fringes of societal opinion, holding that elective abortions should be federally funded (per Hillary Clinton’s promise to abolish the Hyde Amendment) and that other federal funding streams for abortion providers should be protected from any discretion on the state government level.
Today, the pro-life Democratic officeholder is an endangered species, but before 1994 it hadn’t been so. Even in recent times, Democrats briefly came around on the politics of this issue and won stunning victories as a result.
Without dropping their party platform’s commitment to abortion, they recognized during the Bush era that insistence on abortion orthodoxy was putting too many elective offices out of reach for them, poisoning their brand in too many states and cities and U.S. House districts. In order to compete more widely, the DCCC under Rahm Emanuel (who supports legal abortion) recruited a host of House candidates — Heath Shuler, Jason Altmire, Steve Dreihaus, Brad Ellsworth, Charlie Melancon and Joe Donnelly, and more than two dozen others — who at least said they were pro-life, and in some cases even voted that way. By 2010, there were 40 nominally (or better) pro-life Democrats in the U.S. House — an essential part of the party’s short-lived majority whose extinction has made a House takeover seem nearly impossible. Most of them are gone now. Republicans’ current majority is just under 30, pending a few special elections.
These candidates ran in rural southern and white ethnic working-class midwestern districts where the abortion issue was not necessarily definitive, but was at least an obstacle to Democratic competitiveness. Emanuel refused to accept that this obstacle had to be left in place. And it was not a new idea: The DCCC merely harnessed the same formula that other Democrats had independently used to make such districts both Democratic and uncompetitively so for years — Marion Berry, Ike Skelton, Bart Stupak, Alan Mollohan, Gene Taylor, and Collin Peterson, to name just a few examples.
Emanuel’s big-tent flexibility did not merely extend to abortion, either. In other parts of America, where it made sense, Democrats recruited pro-choice candidates who would campaign as moderates on other issues. And his willingness to tolerate some diversity, plus an environment of Republican scandal, turned the 2006 election into a stunning success — a repudiation of the Bush presidency and, ironically, a boon for the cause of legal abortion in the years that followed.
Was the strategy disingenuous? Perhaps. Democratic control of Congress automatically means that a pro-life agenda is going nowhere. But it worked. It made it a lot easier for voters with soft pro-life opinions to continue to identify as and vote for Democrats when others left the party. And many of these voters, by the way, overlap with the working-class demographic that we hear so much about today.
Tom Perez’s excommunication of pro-life candidates from his party implies that the winning strategy won’t be used again. The tent is now closed, and smaller than it was before. The remaining Democratic voters who had fooled themselves up to now in order to help their ancestral party are being spat upon, a sign that party elders have learned neither from own recent electoral experience in 2006, nor from their soul-crushing loss in the 2016 election.
Democrats’ more qualified, more experienced nominee just lost to Donald Trump, surely the worst presidential candidate in at least 50 years. She lost a race that should never have been anywhere near close enough for Russian propaganda or even her own mostly inconsequential but still unethical behavior in office to matter.
What’s more, Trump carried the industrial Midwest with the votes of typical working-class Democratic voters who are not necessarily abortion enthusiasts — voters who, in many cases, have voted Democrat for years in spite of the issue and not because of it. Does Perez’s message for pro-lifers to drop dead seem consistent with the idea of winning these voters back? (Something similar could be said, by the way, of many Latino Democratic voters, if we’d like to discuss a more trendy demographic whose influence will matter more in the future.)
In 2006, Republicans’ arrogant quest for a permanent majority was cut off thanks to a concerted Democratic effort to make their tent bigger than just the upper-class white urban gentry whose values they had by then already embraced. But Democrats, believing they have hit rock bottom, are unlearning the lessons of their own electoral past. They may discover — not necessarily in 2018 or 2020, but over a longer timeframe — that they have a bottom to hit that is deeper still.
