Democrats are unlikely to see the surge of angry abortion rights voters they hope for on midterm Election Day.
Many are genuinely aggrieved by the expected rollback of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade, which was revealed by Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked majority opinion. But, as with so much that party officials flap in the public’s face, it is mostly a desperate, opportunistic attempt to deflect attention from the Democrats’ biggest political challenge this year.
As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York
argues
, voters are sour because President Joe Biden and the Democrats have turned a strong economy into a damaged and worrying one. Every issue other than this pales in voters’ minds, much though abortion is the more profound moral problem.
But even if Democrats could set aside the fact that economic woes crowd other matters out, it’s not clear they’d benefit electorally from controversy over Roe. They routinely overstate public support for the party’s abortion policies. Although 57% in
one poll
said abortion should be mostly legal, 43% want it banned outright or permitted only in special circumstances.
Fully 75% reject the claim that it is simply “a woman’s right to choose.” Most actually agree with the 15 weeks’ gestation threshold of the Mississippi law that the Supreme Court is adjudicating. Democrats call the law extreme, but the public doesn’t agree. Pro-abortion slogans from noisy protesters on the court steps don’t reflect public opinion. Activist rhetoric never does. Democrats are drinking their own Kool-Aid when they suggest otherwise.
Republicans, remember, were motivated to vote in 2016, giving President Donald Trump his victory, partly because
they hoped
for precisely the justices he nominated, who account for three of the five who subscribed to Alito’s proposed demolition of Roe. Recent evidence therefore suggests that the powder keg to which the SCOTUS leaker lit the fuse is as likely to backfire against Democrats as it is to detonate under Republicans.
My phrasing implies what I suspect, which is that the person who smashed the court’s traditional confidentiality was a pro-abortion activist intent on undermining the decisions and authority of a bench now dominated 6-3 or at least 5-4 by originalist and textualist justices. The Left has been doing this for years, for example with three decades of attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas for having the temerity to be both black and conservative.
The ripest in-genre ad hominem rebuttal came from Speaker Nancy, who said, “Several of these conservative justices, who are in no way accountable to the American public, have lied to the US Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation.” This string of falsehoods merely tries to shoot the messenger, cheaply linking conservatism, democratic illegitimacy, and dishonesty.
Pelosi sent me a fundraising email immediately after the leak, declaring, “I’m absolutely sick to my stomach” about the Alito draft. But it is doubtful that as many voters as she hopes share her sense of nausea. Still, you can’t blame Democrats for grasping at straws as they drown in an election year.
