Republicans suddenly silent on abortion — they know the chickens are home and roosting

Abortion continues to resonate with voters, a problem for many Republicans, while Democrats would be mistaken to downplay the crime issue.

Those are the two takeaways from elections last week, in which progressives won a Wisconsin state supreme court race and the Chicago mayoralty contest.

The Wisconsin victory, giving the Democrats a majority on the state’s highest court for the first time in decades, has huge local implications for a gerrymandered state legislature and U.S. House seats and voting rights. But that’s not what generated the double-digit victory for Janet Protasiewicz in a state used to razor thin margins. “The driving force in this election was abortion,” says top Democratic pollster Jim Gerstein, who polled for the Democrats, though theoretically it was a non-partisan race.

It’s instructive to compare the outcome in two different voting blocs.

The conservative candidate carried the heavily Republican affluent Milwaukee suburban counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — the WOW counties — but in each by at least ten points less than a state supreme court race four years earlier. In liberal Dane County, centered in Madison, there was a huge turnout, up almost 60 percent from the 2019 contest.

There, no doubt, were other factors — the quality of the candidates and the huge amount of money from both sides — but these outcomes strongly suggest the abortion issue enables Democrats to make some inroads among Republican or independent voters, while strongly motivating their own base.

Separately, in Chicago, the progressive candidate, Brandon Johnson, was elected after his opponent accused him of being soft on crime. The political left is likely to paint this as proof that the crime scare is exaggerated. But the losing candidate, the former head of Chicago schools, Paul Vallas, foolishly veered to the right, even criticizing Barack Obama. Johnson, while more liberal, specifically rejected the notion of defunding the police in a city that has been hit by a crime wave.

Wisconsin is only the latest pro-choice message. Last year, voters in liberal as well as conservative states — Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan — sided with abortion rights.

Still the right-to-life forces have stepped up efforts to ban or severely restrict abortions at the state level, including Kansas and Kentucky, despite last year’s votes. Florida, among other states, is moving to impose a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Some women, at that stage, aren’t even aware they’re pregnant.

Republicans in Florida, as well as Ohio and Missouri, are moving to limit citizen-initiated referendums on issues like abortion: They fear the outcome.

Much of this is done out of the public eye, notes Gerstein: “It used to be Democrats didn’t want to talk about abortion, now it’s Republicans that don’t want talk about it.”

The flashpoint this year in the abortion fight may be over the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of the distribution of Mifepristone, an oral tablet which, if taken in the first ten weeks, blocks the continuation of a pregnancy. It has been found to be safe and effective.

But conservatives venue-shopped, and — late Friday — a conservative federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, blocked any prescription or distribution of the medication, claiming it had been approved with insufficient evidence of its safety.

This unprecedented ruling flies in the face of not only the Food and Drug Administration, which approved the pill more than 20 years ago, but also of most leading medical and health organizations.

Less than an hour later, another federal judge — in Washington state — issued a contradictory ruling. Ultimately this likely will have to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Politically, this is a fight abortion advocates relish. Polls show an overwhelming number of Americans — two thirds — want medication abortions to be legal.

This cuts across all groups, according to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “The unanimity of opposition to restriction of access to medication abortion was stunning and almost equal across all states,” she told New York magazine. “You would have thought it would have differed a lot between California and Mississippi, but it didn’t.”

In Congress, House Republicans are moving slowly on any stringent anti-abortion proposals. The Wisconsin vote likely will only reinforce that caution.

The only political downside for Democrats is if they focus too much on protests and demanding President Biden and Vice President Harris take the lead in drumming up pro-choice support. Presidents, on either side, rarely have been able to use the bully pulpit to sway public or political opinion on abortion.

The success of the anti-abortion advocates since the 1970s was fueled by work and support at the grass roots level.

And that was what also worked for the pro-choice side last year in states like Kansas and Michigan.

Next year, abortion in many races will be a major issue, as will jobs, taxes, spending, health care and the war in Ukraine.

Add crime to that list, too: In last year’s congressional elections, Democrats, caught off guard, lost four or five New York House seats largely on the crime issue.

If Democrats talk more directly about crime, they may have a good partisan counter to Republican charges. The violent crime rate in Bakersfield, Calif., is higher than Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York City. Bakersfield is the home of House GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.