Abortion, Democrats, And Understanding The New Map

Running From Abortion Fights Only Hurts Us Now

In 2014, the exit polls asked voters their views on a number of questions, but the one that has my attention was views on gay marriage. In Wisconsin, 52% of the state supported legal gay marriage, and those voters broke for the Democratic nominee for the Governorship that year by 29%. Scott Walker won voters opposed to gay marriage by 44%, and that’s why Democrats lost the state by a shade under 6%. In 2020, as Democrats won the state narrowly, they lost voters who think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases by 61%, but they managed to win the state because they got a 49% win with those who think it should be legal in all or most cases. (For those inclined to complain about mixing and matching my data here, the 2014 exits didn’t ask state-by-state abortion questions and the 2020 exits didn’t ask about gay marriage. This is the best we have.)

This isn’t surprising information by any means, and a 2014-2020 swing map would show huge declines in Democratic fortunes in the rural areas and big increases in their vote in greater Madison and the Milwaukee collar, but it does change the political calculus in a way that not many people properly understand, which is to say that abortion is no longer a political problem for Democrats, and the instinct of the old Democratic leadership to run from a fight on abortion is wrong.

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It is probably unsurprising that I have a detached perspective on the issue of abortion, given the fact that, barring some immense complication with a future surrogate, I will never have to contemplate it in my own life, but I do understand why the old Democratic position was Safe, Legal, And Rare. Nobody is pro-abortion, because even the staunchest defenders of the practice understand it to be a medical procedure, and no one would be pro-abortion for the same reason nobody is pro-knee replacement surgery. We might be glad it is available to us if we need it, but nobody is glad about it. And, back in the 90s, and even into the Obama era, we needed pro-life voters to win in a real, substantial way. Only getting 28% of anti-gay marriage voters wasn’t enough for Democrats to even get particularly close in 2014 in Wisconsin, but getting 19% of pro-life voters in 2020 was enough to win the state, because the coalitions have changed substantially.

When the winning strategy for Democrats was “lose the rurals by a small amount, get smashed in the suburbs, and win the cities,” Safe, Legal, And Rare made a lot of sense, because it was a policy that signaled enough of a difference with the GOP for the cities while not signalling enough of one to turn off the rurals. It was a policy which made sense, and while it was inevitably not sufficiently full throated for some on the left and too accepting of abortion at all for some on the right, it did its job. And now, it doesn’t, because the voters it appeals to are voting for the GOP anyways, and we need to flip voters who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. We won Wisconsin because Biden did 20% better with those voters, and that’s the path to flipping Texas, where a majority of voters hold pro-choice views.

Why did we lose North Carolina, a state where 54% of voters think abortion should be legal in all or most cases? We only won those voters by 44% while the GOP won the remaining 46% by 58%. In Texas, the GOP won pro-life voters by 50%, we won pro-choice voters by 37%. In Iowa, we lost pro-lifers by 70%, and only won pro-choice voters by 36%. This is our problem - not that we lose pro-lifers by increasingly large margins, but that we can’t match their margins. Far from needing to run a Joe Manchin for every state, the answer is to cleave off even more social liberals from the GOP. How do we do that? Abortion.

I know of at least one (non-safe state) state Democratic Party that steadfastly refuses to track social issues in internal polling and data, and I suspect that that state is not the only one, and their reasoning is that they don’t want a fight on social issues. To them, social issues - and, really, that means abortion and gay marriage - is a losing proposition in their eyes, and it shows a lack of understanding for the ascendent Democratic coalition. Joe Biden has gone from being personally pro-life and that being used by some as a selling point for the Obama-Biden ticket in rural America to saying if the Supreme Court struck down Roe, he’d just tell Congress to enshrine it into federal law. This is the trajectory a lot of social liberals have been on, and more importantly, the voters who will vote against us for a more muscular defence of abortion are already gone. They’ve left already, and they ain’t coming back, short of the GOP becoming a radically more liberal party than they currently are. But the voters we need are the voters who agree with us on abortion, and yet still vote for the GOP, and yet, we refuse to use the issue properly.

Greg Abbott has signed two horrendously anti-choice bills this year, first signing a ban on abortion once there is a fetal heartbeat (which can happen before people even are aware they’re pregnant), and then signing a bill that will make abortion entirely illegal if Roe is overturned. As horrible as these bills are, and as much as we should dismay at the GOP for passing them, we should be using these bills, and the dozens of others either currently being debated or on the books across the country, as cudgels with which to beat swing state Governors and swing district state legislators who held on in 2018 and 2020 in increasingly Democratic suburbs. The path to an increased House majority will run through beating Republican members in increasingly blue terrain like Maricopa County, the Philly collar, and the Low Country of South Carolina, in whatever form the districts currently repped by David Schweikert, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Nancy Mace take up after the new lines are drawn. We don’t yet know what the Texas and Georgia maps will look like, but if the GOP are aggressive, they could end up drawing dummymanders that could break if we manage to flip these social liberals who agree with us on abortion, and even in a place like Virginia, where the Charlottesville-based seat came close-ish (heavy on the -ish) to flipping last time, if and when it does flip, it will do so because of these kinds of social liberals.

Democrats are queasy about ever making this a proactive part of the message, but it is a winning issue for us now, because we have the majority position - even in Trump states - and even more than that, the voters we need to flip these marginally red states agree with us on it. A staunchly pro-choice message is the path to the next Democratic victory in more than a few places, and at some point the party needs to understand this fact, or we will continue losing winnable races.