Is it possible they are having an epiphany?
This is very, very interesting:
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s lead over Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke narrowed to 6 points last month, according to a poll conducted by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. That’s a smaller gap than when Republican George W. Bush ousted Democrat Ann Richards in 1994 with a 7.6-point win.
Abbott’s unfavorability ratings are also the highest they’ve ever been at 44%, according to the poll, which was conducted after the deadliest school shooting in state history and almost entirely before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.
Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, said the mass shooting in Uvalde and scrutiny over how it was handled could have contributed to Abbott’s increased unfavorability, but it’s hard to say how much exactly.
The political poll did not include specific questions related to the shooting in Uvalde, but it did ask participants to rate Abbott’s performance on handling gun violence. About 36% of participants said they approve of how the governor has handled this issue, while 45% said they disapprove.
The mass shooting in Uvalde and the overturning of Roe v. Wade have laid the groundwork for a contentious final four months in the race to lead the state. While O’Rourke works to harness the anti-incumbent energy spurred by the seismic events of the past few months, Abbott is banking on a general election centered on stronger issues for him: the economy and the border.
Mounting expectations over how the Supreme Court would rule on abortion access could be another factor that contributed to Abbott’s weakened ratings, Henson said. Although the poll ended the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned, it included questions about abortion access that show how voters feel regarding the issue. About 36% of participants said they approve of how Abbott has handled policies related to abortion access, and 46% said they disapprove.
Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Texas is poised to completely outlaw abortion access, it will likely be a pivotal topic in the upcoming months, Henson said.
“If we look back at the half dozen times we’ve asked the standard abortion questions since 2014, no more than a quarter of Republicans have ever said that by law abortion should never be permitted,” he said.
Voters will see that reality reflected in how Abbott and O’Rourke discuss abortion access in the upcoming months, he said.
“In terms of that affecting the election, we can expect Democratic candidates to talk about this a lot, and we can expect Republican candidates to not want to talk about it very much,” Henson said.
I don’t want to get my hopes up. It’s Texas. But it does make me question this conventional wisdom that since the polls don’t show abortion as a priority that it won’t be a motivating issue in November. Mid-terms need heavy base turn-out, after all.
Dave Weigel discussed this in his newletter:
Pat Ryan signed up for one of the worst jobs in Democratic politics — a swing-seat special election in New York at a lousy moment for his party. His plan to win on August 23? Exactly what Democrats refused to do in 2018, when they flipped the state’s 19th Congressional District.
“We are going to nationalize this race,” Ryan said in an interview. “I believe this has to be a national referendum on Roe. It’s our first chance to send this message, that the country is not going to tolerate this erosion of our fundamental rights.”
Just days after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, suburban Democratic candidates put it front and center in their paid messaging, marched at abortion rights rallies, and seen an uptick — small but noticeable — from online donors. They see an issue that can motivate liberal voters who are running out of other reasons to vote. When pollsters find the electorate furious at President Biden, but ready to elect a Democrat to Congress, strategists suspect the invisible hand of Justice Samuel Alito.
The evidence? It’s not in polls, which continue to find abortion badly trailing inflation and other economic questions as voters’ top concerns. It’s in a race that Democrats lost last week, a special election in Nebraska that Republicans expected to win by double digits and ended up winning by 6 points.
“I think that the Dobbs decision helped me get people geared up and paying attention,” said Nebraska state Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks, the Democrat who lost last week’s election to Rep.-elect Mike Flood, a Republican. “If the decision had come out a week earlier, it would have been even more helpful.”
Democrats have waited for a post-Roe backlash to emerge, and hoped they saw one even before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was handed down. They were hopeful, when Texas Republicans passed an abortion restriction that polled terribly, that it could help them polarize last year’s election in Virginia; at the very least, maybe it could be used against Republicans in Texas.
That didn’t happen, and the Nebraska result was still a defeat. And days earlier, Texas Republicans flipped a majority-Latino House seat that national Democrats decided not to aggressively contest. Their theory was that GOP nominee Mayra Flores would win under the current lines, but lose when the November election was held on a friendlier, bluer map; the losing Democrat’s campaign manager told the Texas Tribune that the party groups had “failed at their single purpose of existence.”
But Lincoln, Neb. is not heavily Catholic South Texas. Neither is the Hudson Valley, where Ryan is running; neither is Alaska, whose sole House seat will be filled in a three-way special election next month. In each race, the Democrat pushed the Dobbs decision in her or his messaging, while Republicans briefly reacted and moved on.
Pansing Brooks went on the air about abortion two weeks before the election, and shortly before the Dobbs decision, with a spot that covered both a “Supreme Court assault on women’s rights” and voters’ economic jitters. “I’m the only candidate for Congress who will defend women’s rights and fight inflation,” Pansing Brooks said in the spot. Flood’s advertising hit inflation, but did not touch on the conservatives’ victory over Roe.
The result was a close race in a district then-president Trump had carried in 2020 by 15 points. It was close thanks to Democratic strength in Lincoln, the district’s biggest and most liberal city, and other eastern Nebraska suburbs.
Flood, who had been challenging a scandal-plagued incumbent who resigned after a campaign finance conviction, won everything in rural Nebraska; Pansing Brooks carried Lincoln’s Lancaster County by nearly 10,000 votes. “We can’t win all the conservative districts,” the Democrat said, “but we can narrow the gap.”
On the air, Pansing Brooks did not get terribly specific about what should happen to legal abortion after Roe, a stumbling block for other Democrats. In a short time frame, she didn’t need to. Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, had discussed banning abortion in the state, and Flood cheered the Dobbs decision.
The Democrat showed up to abortion rights marches and opposed an abortion ban, and the shock of the decision drove up turnout, with Lancaster, always the district’s biggest source of votes, making up more of the electorate than it had two years ago.
In New York, Ryan was employing a similar strategy, in a district that actually voted for Biden in 2020; it became vacant when newly appointed Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado left the seat to run statewide. Ryan’s first paid ad went up the day of the Dobbs decision, starting with a recap of his military service and how he fought for “freedom,” before the candidate turned to camera to say something else: “Freedom includes a woman’s right to choose.”
The timing of the decision, said Ryan, changed his campaign — he spent the weekend after it going to emergency rallies across the district, and had the best fundraising days of his campaign since his launch. (The decision came one week before the quarterly fundraising deadline, making the impact somewhat harder to trace.)
“We saw a massive influx of grassroots support,” Ryan said in an interview, describing the weeks after a draft Dobbs decision leaked to Politico, and activists began to mobilize. “We immediately made the decision that this is the central issue in my campaign.”
Republicans say that Democrats are making an error with this strategy. But they’re not saying it very loudly. When approached for comment last week before the July Fourth break, the Molinaro and Flood campaigns did not provide an on the record response. Molinaro had previously reacted to the decision by emphasizing that nothing would change in New York.
Before Dobbs, Molinaro had released a newsy poll that showed him cruising to a win; after Dobbs, Ryan put out a poll that found the race narrowing to single digits once voters focused on abortion. If there is a unified Republican message on abortion, it’s not about the policy, but about why Democrats are so interested in discussing it when voters are far more focused on inflation.
“Pat Ryan is either ignoring every recent poll or living in a dream world if he thinks this election is about abortion,” said National Republican Congressional Committee spokeswoman Samantha Bullock in a statement. “Voters care most about soaring prices and they hold Democrats responsible.”
For now, national abortion rights groups haven’t said much about the race Ryan calls a “referendum” on abortion; they didn’t respond to questions, either. Far more attention is going to a vote that’ll happen before New York’s court-delayed primary — the Aug. 2 primaries in Kansas, where a measure that could ban abortion in the state Constitution, pushed and endorsed by Topeka Republicans, is on the ballot.
But having lost Roe, Democrats are acting on the poll-tested belief that voters didn’t want it to go, and that the Republican position in each race will be tougher to explain and sell. In Alaska, which has not elected a Democrat to Congress since Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, two Republicans are now facing one Democrat in a runoff.
The Democrat, Mary Peltola, immediately reacted to the Dobbs decision by condemning it, and raising some money. The Republicans, Nick Begich and ex-governor Sarah Palin, said little on social media, then said at a candidate forum that the court had done the right thing, returning the issue to the states — stopping short of endorsing the national abortion ban that Democrats want to campaign against this year. A referendum on abortion, right now, sounds better to Democrats than a referendum on just about anything else.
They need something and you’d think that a GOP trying to force 10 year old girls to endure childbirth and shrugging off people being mowed down with automatic weapons every other week would be one way to do it. These are NOT POPULAR.
High gas prices are bad but they are temporary. Most people understand that. This other stuff is killing people and destroying the country permanently. Maybe there are enough people who actually care about that.