Buss: Manufacturing abortion outrage could cost Democrats in 2024
Kaitlyn BussSo far, abortion isn’t motivating voters in the 2024 election-campaign season. It’s not polling as a top issue and even the most recent controversy over the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on in vitro fertilization has not produced as much backlash against Republicans as Democrats hoped.
If this is the issue that’s supposed to win Democrats the presidency and beyond this November, party strategists may want to think again.
Right now, the Biden campaign and Democrats are still intensifying their efforts to manufacture abortion as a key ballot box concern.
With a dismal record on immigration, inflation and other top priorities for voters, Democrats are hoping to rile up those for whom abortion is a vote-moving issue — and stoke fear that former President Donald Trump and Republicans would ban the procedure nationwide.
But Democrats will likely struggle to whip independents and moderates into a frenzy over reproductive rights.
Just 12% of voters say abortion is the most important issue, according to a March Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Fifty-two percent say it is a “very important issue but not the most important.”
Those for whom it is the most important issue are disproportionately Black voters, Democrats, women voters, and voters ages 18 to 29.
Clearly abortion can be a motivational issue. Just look at Michigan and Ohio.
In the wake of the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrats have made it more important to protect the right to abortion than to protect the women exercising the right. The approach risks being off putting to Americans who have moral reservations about allowing abortion anywhere at any time.
Even in Michigan, where abortion is now enshrined in the state constitution, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other leading Democrats continue to fear monger about the potential for it to be ripped away.
Meanwhile, they ransack the protections for women that previously existed. The environment in Michigan is far more open now than it was before Roe was overturned.
Do women here really feel access to abortion is imminently threatened? No, but Biden can’t win without making voters think about something other than immigration and inflation.
“Those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America,” President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address last week. “They found out though when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022, 2023, and they will find out again, in 2024.”
It’s worked in the past and they’re hoping it will work this time, too.
That’s why Vice President Kamala Harris visited a church in Grand Rapids earlier this month on her “Reproductive Freedom” campaign tour.
It’s why on Thursday she toured a Minnesota Planned Parenthood facility in the first visit by a president or vice president to a clinic that provides abortion services.
Biden scratched the word “abortion” from the State of the Union, choosing instead phrases such as “reproductive freedom,” “freedom to choose” or “her ability to act.” His demure approach was criticized by abortion activists as being dishonest.
While most Americans believe abortion should be legal at least up to a certain point, their concerns about the Southern border, foreign wars and how to pay for gas, food and rent are trumping the kind of extreme abortion activism Democrats are selling — a state of mind Democrats can’t afford.