Republican Party vs Women's Choice-- An Issue That Will Not Go Away

Works in A GOP primary-- not in a general election

Speaking on Fox yesterday about a Kamala Harris interview, former Trump Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said “she knows what is true, which is that the GOP has lost every single abortion ballot initiative post-Roe— every single one: Ohio, Kansas, not only that— record turnouts. Vox: ‘More Kansans voted on the abortion referendum than in any primary in Kansas’ history.’ NY Times: ’Twice as many people voted on the Ohio measure than cast ballots in primaries for governor, Senate and House. She knows that abortion ballot initiatives will be on ten states, at least, and swing states. So she wants to drive young women to the polls.”

Texas GOP backbencher Monica De La Cruz isn’t the only vulnerable Republican trying to avoid the topic. She’s gone from being “a vocal opponent of abortion rights to someone who never brings it up anymore. “Campaigning for a swing U.S. House seat in south Texas that year, De La Cruz proclaimed her belief that human life begins at conception. On her campaign website’s issues page, ‘Pro-Life’ was listed at the top. ‘As your Congresswoman I promise to fight for each and every soul and to always support the sanctity of life,’ she wrote. Now, four years later, De La Cruz is an incumbent congresswoman running to keep her seat in a competitive race. But on her campaign website, you won’t find her absolutist anti-abortion position. In fact, you won’t find any mention of abortion anywhere on De La Cruz’s website at all. Across three election cycles since 2020, De La Cruz appears to have gradually scrubbed abortion-related content from her online platform, making the language more ambiguous and less prominent until it disappeared.”

By February 2022, for instance, “Pro-Life” was no longer a listed issue on her campaign site. It was replaced instead by a “Constitutional Values” section where she vaguely promised to fight for “the Right to Life,” along with vowing to “stand strong for our Second Amendment” and ensure “true Freedom of Speech is protected.”

Now, ahead of what will likely be a competitive re-election race, De La Cruz’s website currently contains no abortion language whatsoever.

…The abortion issue’s disappearing act on De La Cruz’s website is a tidy example of broader Republican efforts to change the conversation on a losing issue. Since the Supreme Court revoked the national right to an abortion in 2022, Republicans have lost races across the country— including in GOP strongholds— as Democrats brand candidates as agents of an extreme anti-abortion agenda.

Ahead of 2024, Democrats intend to lean heavily on that playbook as an electoral silver bullet. By tapping into continued voter alarm over abortion access, the party’s candidates and various campaign arms are banking they can not only win seats like De La Cruz’s and re-capture the House, but keep the Senate and potentially re-elect an unpopular President Joe Biden.

Vulnerable Republicans now face a pivotal decision on how to handle the issue: champion their long-held anti-abortion positions on the trail and face voter wrath at the polls, or skirt the subject and abandon an issue critical to much of the GOP base.

The freshman Republican is not the only politician to get caught scrubbing their website of anti-abortion language or content. Ahead of the 2022 election, several GOP candidates for office— such as Blake Masters in Arizona and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania— did the same thing.

Last year, Pennsylvania state Rep. Rob Mercuri, who is seeking to challenge freshman Rep. Chris DeLuzio (D-PA) in a Pittsburgh-area swing seat, was busted by a graduate student for removing any mention of abortion from his website.

De La Cruz’s changes, of course, did not happen in a vacuum. They track closely with the rise in voter backlash to conservative efforts to roll back abortion rights, both nationally and in her home state of Texas.

In September 2021, before De La Cruz modified the abortion language on her site for the first time, Texas Republicans’ S.B. 8, which banned abortion in the state after five weeks of pregnancy, took effect. The legislation dominated local news cycles for weeks.

By February 2022, the nation braced for a potentially seismic ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson, which the Supreme Court heard in December 2021. With a conservative court primed to overturn Roe v. Wade, political operatives on both sides were preparing to fight out a 2022 midterm campaign around the issue of abortion access and the GOP’s efforts to roll them back.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened—and that November, Democrats delivered stinging defeats to Republicans in an election which was predicted to be a “red wave.” Sorting through the disappointing results, many Republicans publicly called for the party to figure out a better way to communicate with voters about their positions, resulting in plenty of debate and finger-pointing between factions of the party.

De La Cruz, apparently, has decided— at least for now— that saying nothing about abortion on her campaign platform is better than saying anything.

While in office, De La Cruz has consistently backed Republican-led anti-abortion policies— all of which have been stonewalled by the Senate’s Democratic majority. For her voting record, she nabbed an A+ rating from anti-abortion advocacy group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

This cycle, Vallejo is running again— one of several Democrats vying to challenge De La Cruz— and hitting her hard on abortion.

“It’s not right for politicians like [Texas Gov.] Greg Abbott or Monica De La Cruz or [Texas Sen.] Ted Cruz to be involved in these very private decisions,” Vallejo said in a recent interview with Roll Call.

Florida is likely to have a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on the ballot in November. Just like in other states, “Abortion rights supporters have collected enough verified signatures to move the question to the November ballot. Pulling out all the stops to block the measure is the state’s Republican attorney general, Ashley Moody. She has asked the Florida Supreme Court to block the proposed amendment, claiming that the summary that would appear on the ballot intends to ‘trick’ and ‘hoodwink’ voters through ‘misleading’ language into supporting something they did not understand. Attorneys general in Ohio and Missouri tried the same English-language obfuscation tactics. What is happening in Florida is another attempt to derail direct democracy— voters’ right to decide on how states handle certain policy questions. The Florida details are different, but the goal is the same. Confronted with angry citizens grappling with the post-Roe chaos, Republican trifecta states are merely doubling down on enacting as many obstacles as they can to derail ballot measures before anyone gets to vote on them.”

There are as many as 5 congressional seats that could flip if the abortion amendment is on the ballot, ridding the Florida congressional delegation of Maria Salazar, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills, Anna Paulina Luna, and possibly Carlos Giménez. 

Missouri may also have a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November, and although there are no House seats it could impact enough to flip a seat, it could help replace Senator Josh Hawley with Lucas Kunce.