Editorial: Can abortion boost Democrats chances in midterms? – Boulder Daily Camera
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Joe Biden wants voters to focus on abortion rights.
On Tuesday, just three weeks before the midterm elections, the president said that if Democrats do well in the November midterms, he’ll push for the party to codify as law the right to abortion that was granted by Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that was overturned in June by a newly conservative high court.
Biden and congressional Democrats have been hoping that concerns about access to abortion will boost turnout in the midterms, where Republicans had been sitting pretty before the June decision. With his remarks this week, the president was doubling-down on that line of reasoning.
This is good, obviously, as far as it goes. But it’s likely to go only so far.
Here was Democratic political operative James Carville, one of the architects of Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential contest, speaking on this matter recently:
“A lot of these consultants think if all we do is run abortion spots that will win for us. I don’t think so. … But if you just sit there and they’re pummeling you on crime and pummeling you on the cost of living, you’ve got to be more aggressive than just yelling ‘abortion’ every other word.”
He’s surely got that correct.
When voters cast their ballots, will they be influenced more by concerns about abortion rights than by worries over inflation, the economy more generally, rising crime, especially in big cities, the mess at our nation’s southern border? This is the fundamental question that won’t be answered until the results are in the books, which may not happen until weeks after Election Day. Hang onto your hats.
If the GOP wins the majority in the House of Representatives — no matter what transpires in the Senate — the political world come January will look nothing like it did for the past two years. There’ll be investigations aplenty, to be sure, but that will be only the half of it. Biden’s agenda will die on the vine. Republicans in the House will stage vote after vote meant to show what they’d be getting up to if they could win back the White House in 2024. And there’ll be increasing talk from Democrats who’ll be looking to move beyond Biden. He’d be the lamest of lame ducks.
It’s no wonder he’s looking to rally the base.
—The Republican
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