Which Party owns that car in November?
Ever see those signs on mountain roads warning of boulders occasionally falling on the highway? Yesterday’s leak of a draft of the SCOTUS opinion aggressively overturning key decisions Roe and Casey, authored by Justice Alito, is a bit like that. The questions are the size of the boulder, and how it’ll impact the highway, or, in this case, the 2022 elections.
Professor Richardson thinks it’s a big boulder:
Democrats are outraged; so are the many Republican voters who dismissed Democratic alarms about the antiabortion justices Trump was putting on the court because they believed Republican assurances that the Supreme Court justices nominated by Republican presidents and confirmed with Republican votes would honor precedent and leave Roe v. Wade alone. Today, clips of nomination hearings circulated in which Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and even Samuel Alito–—the presumed majority in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade—assured the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that they considered Roe v. Wade and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision upholding Roe settled law and had no agenda to challenge them.
Those statements were made under oath by those seeking confirmation to our highest judicial body, and they now appear to have been misleading, at best. In addition, the decision itself is full of right-wing talking points and such poor history that historians have spent the day explaining the actual history of abortion in the United States. This sloppiness suggests that the decision—should it be handed down in its current state—is politically motivated. And in a Pew poll conducted in February, 84% of Americans said they believed that justices should not bring their political views into their decision making.
Suggesting that she believes this issue will be burning in the minds of independents in November.
Erick Erickson, who I already quoted here in his defense of the proposed decision, also said this:
Fifth and, for now, finally, everyone wants to know about the political implications. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there really won’t be many. We are in May. The election is in November. The people who care passionately about this issue are already on sides. Few are actually directly impacted by it. The economy, inflation, supply chain issues, crime, wokeness, etc. will be big issues people are regularly grappling with.
[My bold] I think Erickson’s blinded by his own position, perhaps best described by his epithet for Democrats: Baby-killers. His position is absolutist, and he projects that attribute on everyone.
But many voters, particularly independents, are old-style voters: we evaluate and weigh across a spectrum of point, from competency to ideology to various issues, like abortion, death penalty, economic management, and, for the more adventurous, foreign relations. They are not generally single-issue voters, a variety of voter that I’ll generally loathe, with exceptions. They look at the whole picture.
So if he thinks the voters are already decided on the upcoming election because everyone is already set on this issue, he doesn’t understand how this works. If this were true, hell, every election would go the same way. Looking at results over the decades, they don’t – sharply, they don’t.
The common thread tying each of these messages together is obvious: Democrats are telling voters that if they’re opposed to what Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices are doing to reproductive rights, the proper response is to vote for the party that supports reproductive rights.
Democrats can seize on this from a position of relative strength because they and the American mainstream are roughly on the same page. For years, polling has been consistent on public attitudes: Most of the country wants the Roe v. Wade precedent to remain intact. In fact, a well timed Washington Post-ABC News poll was released this week that showed Americans, by a nearly two-to-one margin, want to see Roe upheld, not overturned.
What’s more, there’s reason to believe Americans don’t yet realize what’s poised to happen. The week after the justices heard oral arguments in the Dobbs case, a Politico/Morning Consult poll found that nearly two-thirds of the public “either said they didn’t know how likely the court was to overturn Roe or said the court isn’t likely to overturn the precedent.”
In my earlier response to Erickson, I noted that one part of his defense was how the Republicans “followed the rules.” But, as Benen notes, the non-political segment of Americans, which is roughly 85% on just a guess, is getting a surprise, and, worse yet, as numerous commentators have point out, the SCOTUS Republican majority looks exceedingly awful in terms of their shared morality. While Thomas is well-known for his anti-Roe v Wade sentiments, and thus suffers no degradation of reputation, Justices Barrett, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are all on tape affirming Roe as “settled law,” implying they would not overturn it.
They look awfully mendacious, now, and I think that’ll rebound terribly on the Republican Party.
So that leads to the question: how will each side prep for 2022?
I suspect the Republicans will try to take cover under the Democrats’ botched management of the transgender issue, they’ll try to blame inflation and shortages on Biden, and we’ll continue to see the fringe-right (Greene, Gaetz, etc) continue to agitate to the benefit of Moscow, rather than Kyiv, using a variety of imaginary reasons.
The Democrats, meanwhile, will have the January 6th Insurrection incident, the refusal of certain Republican members of Congress to testify to the investigating Committee, and the abortion issue. The chance to pass a Federal level law supposedly overriding State level laws will be dangled, in order to get out as many voters as possible.
It’ll be interesting to see what other issues are used in the upcoming election campaigns.
