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.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
The “Abortion Derangement Syndrome” that Democrats promoted pre-election about in their attempts to infect voter choice as even more important than PRO-choice, seems to have caused the Democrats more anxiety, and time spent with their therapists than that of the General free-thinking public. Weighing the scale of importance of the right to get an abortion, untouched in many states where a woman has a once or twice in a life time temporary problem on one side of the scale, versus the daily challenge to feed your family, buy gasoline to get to work, pay the inflated costs of home mortgages and rent on the other side of the scale, the scales of Democrat placed propaganda quickly fall from a person’s eyes. When your main goal and pleasure in life to acquire a posture of personal soul satisfaction is to promote and enable the killing of American innocent babies, you definitely are spending too much time with your liberal media indoctrinator, liberal college professors, and Democrat party vote grabbing propagandists,,, and not enough time with your therapist, who you often mistake as your minister. With Democrats, perception is always more powerful than reality, especially right before elections. In elections It does not matter that the majority of humanity abhors infant deaths up to the very moment of birth, all that matters to the Democrat is the people’s perception of it being the new norm promoted in false media messages.
I am sorry to say Mr. Harsanyi is out in left field on this one. It defies any common logic that the abortion issue was not the primary voting incentive for millions of young females in this country (who may not have even bothered to vote had the Roe/Wade SCOTUS decision not been made before the election). In fact this whole Roe/Wade/SCOTUS thing is beginning to smell. After 50 years the case is suddenly taken up by the court before the most important mid-term election in decades. That is interesting timing. The “Red Wave” turns into a trickle even against (IMHO) the most incompetent and unappealing democrat candidates in memory. Most of these races were won by the Socialists by razor thin margins. The difference absolutely had to do with women getting out to vote for democrats.
ANd seeing how many ‘exit polls’, SHOWED Abortion was a top consideration for THOUSANDS Of folk, not just women, how can this person, REALLY THINK It didn’t hurt the republicans?