It must be a chilly day in Satan’s realm because here I am, about to share with you an excellent video from CNN. Elle Reeve talks with several women who support DeSantis, despite their other political differences with him. The reason is something I’ve thought all along may be America’s saving grace, and that’s the damage that the left is doing to America’s children.
The women to whom Reeve speaks all support DeSantis for the same reason: He had the political courage to re-open schools very early in the COVID era. Other places did, as well, but DeSantis was one of the first to do so and, because Florida is such a large and important state, he took the most heat.
Here’s the video, and I’ll follow with one point:
These women are the type of women around whom I raised my children. They are all college-educated, middle- to upper-middle-class, and they are socially on the left. However, when it comes to their children, everything other than their children’s well-being falls by the wayside.
My children were all grown by the time COVID hit, but I strongly suspect that, with one or two exceptions, the mothers I knew would have become agitated by the social and educational deficits their children were developing because of school lockdowns. They would have educated themselves and sided with the women in the CNN videos for their children’s good. DeSantis would have earned their goodwill.
However, one of the other things to know about Democrat-voting college-educated, middle- to upper-middle-class white women is that they are single-issue voters, and that issue is abortion. Because they no longer hew to traditional religion, they have no higher morality imposing the right to life on them. That means their feelings and convenience take precedence.
As the women in the video note, DeSantis’s willingness to sign a bill banning abortion after six weeks is a serious problem for them. Frankly, it’s a serious problem for any Republican candidate associated with pro-life ideology, from Trump on down.
What mystifies me is why it’s a problem. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs makes clear that abortion is a state’s rights issue. The federal government should stay out of it rather than trying to apply a one-sized fits all morality to the question. And that’s the position that conservative federal candidates should take: Leaving the question of abortion rights to the states is a small government approach. It allows the nation’s fifty laboratories of democracy to see which policy works best for a thriving state.
In DeSantis’s case, he should say that the Florida voters, through their elected representatives, wanted to limit abortion in their state, and he had neither reason nor right to naysay this via a veto. Other pro-life Republican candidates should sing much the same song: It’s not a federal question; end of story.
To understand how important it is to handle this issue right, look at the Lindsey Graham effect on the 2022 election. I happen to believe that one of the reasons 2022’s Red Wave was a Red Puddle was because of Graham’s announcement that, if Republicans controlled Congress after the 2022 election, he would move to ban abortions as of 16 weeks.
That announcement got the white suburban women to the polls, harming Republican chances. It was so obvious that this would happen that I must believe, given that Graham is not stupid, that the Vichy Republicans intended this result.
My sense is given weight by how cynical Graham’s proposal really was. In America, roughly 92% of all abortions take place before the 16th week. Graham’s “ban” would have had almost no effect on the abortion industry. The only effect it had was to agitate Democrat women, who might otherwise have taken a second look at candidates who promised that they would never again lock America’s children out of the classroom.
It's great to see leftist women gravitate to conservative candidates because of their Mama Bear instincts about their children. It’s now up to those conservative candidates not to put a big abortion stop sign in the path of these new Republican voters.
Image: CNN YouTube screen grab (edited).