Can any group really be this obtuse?
Throughout 2024, Americans had a simple and straightforward message for politicians. They were deeply unhappy with the economy. So the Democrats decided to run on abortion.
Granted it had worked to some degree in the 2022 midterm elections, but it’s easier to shift a midterm election from actual national priorities based on a single issue voter obsession.
Incredibly the Dems are still baffled as to why the country didn’t turn out for abortion.
“We hammered on it over and over again at all levels,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris and spoke about her own abortion to drive home the stakes of the election. “Apparently this issue was not as important to a wide segment of the American electorate as we thought it was, or that we hoped it was.”
Who could have seen that coming?
Abortion-rights activists say it’s imperative they figure out what went wrong in the wake of their worst setback since the fall of Roe two years ago
What went wrong was that they ran on an issue that most voters rated as marginal. Democrats huffed polls claiming that abortion was a top election issue for women under 30. Maybe. But a Gallup poll showed abortion in 9th place behind gun policy overall.
Democrats had been frantically hyping abortion and warning of mass deaths, but the reality on the ground was that little had changed except that those who wanted abortions had to travel out of state. The fall of Roe v. Wade had no significant impact on the number of abortions in America to the dismay of those on both sides of the issue. The Kamala campaign kept pushing the abortion button, but the swing voters they needed had already seen that nothing had changed on abortion.
And the women under 30 obsessed with abortion? They were going to vote for Kamala anyway.
Of course, the conclusion on the abortion side is that Kamala didn’t go far enough.
They are critical of Harris and most state ballot initiatives for promoting a return to Roe v. Wade’s standard of protecting abortion only to the point of fetal viability, around 22 weeks, rather than pushing for abortion to be legal at any point in pregnancy.
“They moderated their messages and chose the message that would align closest to the middle,” said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, the vice president of communications for the National Institute of Reproductive Health. “But what we see in the data is that the progressive base wants a clean, simplified rights structure that removes government from pregnancy decisions, full stop.”
If only Kamala had gone publicly all in on abortion until the moment of birth, they would have won.