Meyerson on TAP: How Democrats Can Now Defeat Anti-Choice Republicans

In the wake of the provisional promulgation of the Supreme Court’s revocation of Roe v. Wade, Republicans find themselves in the position of the dog that caught the car. Herewith, a few suggested ways the Democrats can convert their discomfort to defeat for the outrage they’ve finally inflicted on the American people.

Yesterday, The New York Times posted both a map and a table showing the polling on how each of the 50 states comes down on the question of abortion. That table offers a guide to how Democrats can actualize various states’ sentiments to elect more pro-choice Democrats in November.

Consider Florida, where 56 percent of residents want to keep abortion, in the Times’ phrase, “mostly legal,” while just 38 percent want it to be “mostly illegal.” Republican Gov. (and presidential wannabe) Ron DeSantis recently signed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and anti-choice zealots in the legislature will likely now want a new law making it illegal after six weeks or just plain altogether. If he wants the party’s presidential nod in 2024, DeSantis should probably go along with them; if he wants to be re-elected this November, he should try to duck the issue altogether. The Democrats running against him should do all they can to highlight his anti-choice stance, and if there’s still time to put an initiative on the ballot, they should force the question by letting voters decide abortion’s post-Roe legality—a question DeSantis won’t be able to duck without the kind of contortions that would in themselves weaken his prospects.

In the swing states of Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania—in all three of which both senatorial and gubernatorial seats are up for grabs—the supporters of abortion outnumber its opponents by 13 percentage points. In Michigan, where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will face a right-wing Republican challenger, abortion supporters outnumber opponents by 16 percentage points. In largely libertarian Nevada, where the incumbent Democratic senator and governor both face what have been thought to be strong Republican challenges, abortion backers outnumber its opponents by a whopping 32 percentage point margin.

If the pro-choice Democrats can’t figure out a way to win those elections, shame on them.

The pro-choice sentiment of the majority of Americans can play a role in numerous House contests as well. In California, where pro-choicers outnumber anti-choicers by 20 percentage points, the legislature is now planning to place a referendum on the November ballot that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. The debate around that referendum puts the three anti-choice Republican House members from the outskirts of the L.A. metropolitan area in even more serious peril of being unseated than they already are, and it could do the same to some of the Republicans now representing inland California as well. (By the way, the law that legalized abortions in California, without putting that right into the state’s constitution, was signed in 1967 by the state’s Republican governor—Ronald Reagan—before his party succumbed to fundamentalist Christianity.)

Speaking of which, the Times map of the individual states’ views on abortion illustrates that the opposition is centered not in heavily Catholic states, such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New Mexico, all of which strongly support abortion rights, but in the fundamentalist Protestant evangelical belt that runs from West Virginia to Mississippi and Arkansas. Historically, evangelicals had no particular position on abortion until the 1970s, when they began to see it as a feminist cause célèbre. Which is one reason why the Republican opposition to abortion can be quantified as less of a “pro-life” concern and much more as a rage against uppity women.