By any measure, Democrats exceeded expectations this midterm. Though listening to the triumphalism today, you’d think Joe Biden was Hannibal at Cannae. A fractured Republican Party has won the House, which means the agenda portion of Biden’s first term is effectively over (save the executive abuse).
As expected, though, the lazy Dobbs-sunk-the-GOP narrative quickly solidified on the left. “It turns out women enjoy having human rights, and we vote,” Hillary Clinton tweeted. Dem cheerleader Joe Scarborough called it a “massive backlash.” “It will take a while to sort out exactly why Republicans did so much worse than expected,” writes Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. “But there seems little question that abortion was a big part of the story.”
Listen, if anyone had told conservatives 30 or 20 or even a year ago that the political price for overturning Roe v. Wade would mean taking back only one chamber of Congress in the subsequent midterm, they would never have believed you. So, even if the left’s tenuous claim that Dobbs saved them in 2022 is to be believed, the price for ridding the nation of the legal and moral abomination of Roe would be well worth it.
But it is a tenuous contention.
It’s humorous that Goldberg begins her piece lamenting how she was hoodwinked into believing in a red wave by right-wing preelection wishcasting. A Politico/Morning Consult poll, she notes, had warned us “that 48 percent of respondents intended to vote for Democrats for Congress and only 43 percent for Republicans.” But the GOP ended up winning the (irrelevant) popular vote this week. Politico/Morning Consult was wrong.
It doesn’t seem like an army of enraged women and young people flooded the polls to exact revenge on the court. If CNN’s exit polls are to be believed, Democrats lost support among women in 2022 compared to the last midterm in 2018. The Associated Press/Fox News exit poll found that 52% of voters were women in 2018, and 52% of all voters in 2022 were women. It is a myth that young people came out in droves. Democrats lost support among younger voters, as well.
Beyond that, Goldberg’s column offers not a single piece of tangible, statistical evidence to back up the theory that Dobbs played a “big,” or even a minor, part in the GOP’s 2022 underperformance.
It’s true that pro-lifers lost abortion referendums, including, incomprehensibly, one in Montana that would have compelled medical care for “infants born alive.” It’s also true that numerous Republican candidates are either unable or frightened to articulate coherent pro-life views. These are problems for Republicans.
On the other hand, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott and Brian Kemp (in a state where the Senate race is in a runoff) all signed heartbeat bills and easily won reelection. John Fetterman might have beaten a dubious carpetbagging conservative in Dr. Mehmet Oz, but pro-life Republicans J.D. Vance and Mike Lee had no problem.
Notice that every Republican loss is chalked up to abortion by the media, the reverse is not. In Iowa, Cindy Axne, an incumbent who made abortion the issue of her candidacy — pledging to pass a national bill legalizing abortion from conception to birth — was beaten by a strongly pro-life Zach Nunn. In Virginia, incumbent Elaine Luria, who ran endless commercials on the abortion issue, fell to pro-life nurse practitioner Jen Kiggans.
None of this is to contend that there aren’t people moved on the abortion issue. It mattered in 2020 and 2018, as well. Unmarried women might now be Democrats’ most reliable demographic, but they were already headed in that direction. Nor is it to say Republicans are winning the issue nationally.
Conversely, we have no idea what the 2022 midterm environment would have looked like had the Supreme Court let Roe stand. It may well have depressed social conservative turnout. Elections are complicated and regionally unique. But there is little evidence that Dobbs produced a political earthquake or even that it changed very much at all.
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I respectfully disagree. I recently had a conversation with my 30 yr. old unmarried niece and the first the she said about the election is “abortion is a women’s right”. Exit polls tell us that 63% of voters aged 18 to 29 voted Democrat and we better start paying attention. Abortion was a much bigger issue that was brushed off by the GOP with some Republican idiots like Lindsey Graham even giving ammunition to the Democrats by introducing a bill to ban abortion after 15 weeks. It’s not that it’s a bad idea. Whether you agree or not, that directly contermands the Supreme Court decision that the overturning of Roe vs. Wade was neither pro or anti abortion; simply a correct ruling that it was never a Federal Government decision, but a State by State decision. Graham and any Republican that supported that bill did nothing but add fuel for the fire for Democrats that screamed the lie that Republicans would ban abortion. So the GOP was practically endorsing that lie, instead of contradicting it. Remember, like it or not, that most young people are so indoctrinated with “my body my choice” that they think of abortion as little more that another method of birth control. Abortion has been legal for almost 50 years and it will take many years to overcome that mindset that a fetus is “not a life”.
Our youth are also indoctrinated with every other leftist message as what few political views they hold come from Twitter, Snapchat, and Tic Tok. We know that all the social media censor anything that doesn’t uphold the leftist/Marxist agenda. We are also learning about the indoctrination of our youth from CRT and gender “choice” from elementary school through middle school and we already know that 71% of College professors say that they are liberal or “very liberal”, while only 6% identify as conservative. But it’s even worse. Almost every high school now provides computers to students for their use in research and writing papers during the school year. Almost every school uses Microsoft, whose search engine is called “Edge” which, even more than Google, will always post first news from left wing sites like the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, etc. That’s where all of America’s students are directed when they get on the internet to do “research”. Just as parents are beginning to fight CRT in elementary and middle schools, they better start paying attention to what their children are learning in high school and college because it’s completely shaping our youth in a one party direction and will ultimately determine the fate of our country.