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Yesterday, Politico reported on the topic. Democrats and their media echo chamber have long posited that real threats to Roe would mobilize Democrat turnout. Republican consultants often fret the same. The Republican consultants afraid to undo Roe is frankly one reason we have a populist uprising on the right. The establishment got power and generally refused to use it till Trump forced them.
All one needs to know is the name Ed Stezler. He is a State Representative and authored the fetal heartbeat law in Georgia. His district had trended Democrat. Stacey Abrams won it in 2018 and he barely hung. In 2020, after the Georgia legislature passed Ed’s bill, he became the most highly targeted state house Republican in America. Democrats from across the nation poured money into beating Ed. They made their entire campaign about abortion. They targeted voters. They sent door knockers. They had phone banks. They had celebrities. They outspent Ed Setzler and the Republicans.
Biden beat Trump in his district. The Democrats picked up both Senate seats in his district. Ed won with 50.5% of the vote. Making the race against him about abortion failed.
In Texas, Abortion Barbie a/k/a Wendy Davis, ran for both Governor and Congress. She tried to run on other issues, but had defined herself on abortion as the abortion candidate. Both times, the abortion candidate lost.
In Virginia, Terry McAuliffe ran hard on the issue of abortion and what the GOP might do. But exit polling showed voters who cared about the issue more than any other wound up leaning Youngkin.
In 2020, with the United States Supreme Court literally on the line in a 4-4 split with Scalia’s seat in the balance, Trump won.
Abortion is an issue that excites the already excited progressive base. It excites the media because the media leans left and women in the press are some of the biggest abortion advocates in the nation. Pro-abortion coverage gets disproportionate airtime. But it does not really move the needle even in swing seats like Ed Setzler’s seat in Georgia.
Over the next year, we will get a ton of unbalanced and unreasonable media coverage that the threat to Roe will help the Democrats. The reality is that most swing states and red states already have restricted Roe so in the daily lived lives of Americans, abortion is not an issue. Progressive states where Roe really matters have already locked in abortion rights legislatively. So they won’t be impacted either.
Roe plays well with the women on CNN and MSNBC and the progressives who already live in states where they will have abortion on demand till Kingdom come. It doesn’t play as a deciding factor anywhere else. We have ample data on this point despite Democrat claims and media hysteria.
"Stare decisis" (literally, "to stand in the things that have been decided") is the key argument the defenders of Roe v. Wade seem to be making here. Those people argue that nothing substantial has changed since Roe to justify modifying or even overturning it. That position is simply untenable, based on the advances in medical sience in the 48 years since Roe.
Also, that doctrine is untenable in the event that the Court determines that a precedent was, to use the argument of Justice Kavanaugh, "wrongly decided". The Court accepted the validity of that argument in 1954 when it issued the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which overturned the truly dreadful 1898 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Frankly, there's no reason why this Court should at the very least recognize that medican science has largely made the trimester scheme of Roe, which has been effectively abandoned by subsequent decisions, at best in dire need of upgrading.
Dinesh D'Souza disassembles the left's arguments in defense of their most sacred secular sacrament here: https://www.theepochtimes.com/an-unprecedented-disaster_4135758.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=opinionia&utm_campaign=opinionia-2021-12-07
Erick, you wrote:
"Over the next year, we will get a ton of unbalanced and unreasonable media coverage that the threat to Roe will help the Democrats."
You forgot to add, "unhinged".