Trump’s campaign team desperately, passionately wants 2020 to be about socialism, abortion, gun control, left-wing anti-Semitism, gender pronouns, the news media, and identity politics. It’s their safe space, and Democrats who get lured into playing the Social Justice Olympics of Political Correctness are going to lose forty-plus states.
The 2020 election is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to break bad habits, rebrand the party, and win seats that looked off-limits before Donald Trump. The Democrats won forty-two seats in 2018 in large measure because they stayed out of the culture-war quicksand.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential race is the perfect example of this winning approach. Clinton understood that the Ted Kennedy flavor of Democratic politics was hopeless as an electoral strategy, so he wisely became a champion of both job creation and deregulation. Even more wisely, he adopted a line on abortion that defused the cultural potency of it with a large fraction of the Republican base. The line was simple, brilliant, and devastatingly effective: “I want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare.”
Compare that to the flailing, blazing political stupidity of Virginia governor Ralph Northam and other Democrats swinging for the fences to defend abortion in the last moments of pregnancy. Of course Trump turns that into vivid tales of doctors killing newborns. Why?
Because you let him. Because you are so determined to never, ever let any question about the morality of the pro-choice stance get in the way of ideological purity. Because today, “safe, legal, and rare” is too far to the right for you.
I’m not trying to change your minds on the moral question of abortion in the last trimester, but I am trying to tell you that the vast majority of Americans disagree with you, and that there are political consequences. Get this number in your head: 13 percent. That’s the percentage of Americans who think abortion in the third trimester should be legal. Legal, not acceptable.
Sixty percent think it should be legal in the first trimester, and 28 percent in the second.1 This is part of America’s uneasy truce on a painful issue; the nation is split down the middle on abortion, with equal numbers saying they’re pro-life versus pro-choice. (And please, don’t quibble over the terms. No matter how you cast it in the surveys, the results end up in the same band of 50-50 percent.)
Donald Trump’s greatest culture-war victory will be the Democratic nominee on camera making excuses for something only 13 percent of Americans approve of. Expect Trump to talk about late-term abortion. This will be an electoral tentpole for his messaging. He understands that a solid evangelical base is mandatory for reelection, so more tweets like this one won’t surprise anyone: “Democrats are becoming the Party of late-term abortion, high taxes, Open Borders and Crime!”2
Because it’s Trump, you should know that he’ll cast it in the most vivid, dishonest light possible, just as he did at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on April 26, 2019: “The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
Execute the baby. I am not shocked that he said it; Northam made it easy for him by conducting a radio interview that sounded more like ideological-purity-check idiocy. Trump has a keen appreciation for the things that rev up his base, and this was a slow pitch over the plate.
Would it kill you to talk about third-trimester abortions in a better framing? Even in the third trimester, a majority approves when the “Bush rule” conditions apply: the life of the mother, rape, or incest. Would it kill you to say, “For women whose pregnancies are in the third trimester, outside those rare and narrow conditions, we hope they’ll also at least consider adoption, and we should give them the help they need to do so”? Generations of pollsters have studied this question, and try as the pro-choice purists like, there’s still a stubbornly pro-life element of the population, and it’s not all old white dudes.
I know you’re mad reading this. Good. Because the lesson is about to get even more pointed.
You know those swing states Trump stole from you? Ohio. Michigan. Wisconsin. Florida. Pennsylvania. Remember those? The pro-life movement in each of those states is organized, and relies on their large Catholic and evangelical populations. Oh, you know who else isn’t as far to the left on abortion as you might think? Hispanics. And African Americans.
Trump may be wildly exaggerating on abortion, but those voters are listening, and Democrats ignore them at their peril.