Republican strategists are exploring a shift away from “pro-life” messaging on abortion after consistent Election Day losses for the GOP when reproductive rights were on the ballot.
At a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans this week, the head of a super PAC closely aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., presented poll results that suggested voters are reacting differently to commonly used terms like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, said several senators who were in the room.
The polling, which NBC News has not independently reviewed, was made available to senators Wednesday by former McConnell aide Steven Law and showed that “pro-life” no longer resonated with voters.
“What intrigued me the most about the results was that ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ means something different now, that people see being pro-life as being against all abortions … at all levels,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said in an interview Thursday.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the polling made it clear to him that more specificity is needed in talking about abortion.
“Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things. So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted. So if you’re going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific,” Hawley said Thursday.
There’s a lot to unpack in this article, I encourage you all to actually read it. It sounds like a fundamental disconnect between Republican Congresspeople (who enact laws at the Federal level) and the State-level Republicans. These Senators supported overturning Roe specifically did it to “send the matter back to the States”, and did not propose any law at the Federal level to replace it, only to find that those Republican states enacted extremely strict laws that are now affecting the Republican brand elsewhere. (Because of a simple reason: Republicans in those states really are that extreme!)
But, they’re stuck with it now. Their messaging is tied to what actually happened in those states. And these Senators can say all they want that they wanted exceptions all along, but you know they will never make a Federal law that weakens the strict bans in those states. They would never win a primary after that. But the strict bans are not popular outside the statehouses where they were enacted.
As long as there are states like Texas, who aim to criminalize abortion to the point that they will be monitoring the roads going out-of-state for pregnant women to harass, there will be no chance to define the pro-life movement as anything else.
It’s really not a lot to unpack. It’s disingenuous bullshit from Republicans who are trying to back track after decades of campaigning on banning abortion. It’s happened and now it’s wildly unpopular and they are about to pay that bill that’s come due. So now they are trying to spin it like “that’s not what we meant”.
They don’t have principles. It’s about retaining power and control.
For what it’s worth, they could pass a law right now that would give access to abortions (aka give women the right to control their own body). So this is all bullshit.
There’s no disconnect. The cruelty is the point.
Were there truly a disconnect, Republicans in Congress would work on a bipartisan bill that would get enough Republicans on board to pass the House. From there, it will almost certainly pass the Senate and Biden will almost certainly sign it.
The Republicans want to say they’re being hamstrung by Texas while doing absolutely nothing about Texas, because in reality they want everywhere to be like Texas.
The disconnect is that Republicans with a National profile totally misunderstood how much simply overturning Roe would backfire on them. They wanted to give more power back to states, so that each state would define its own policy but in reality it is the most restrictive states’ legislation that ends up getting stuck in voters’ minds as the default Republican position now. This is extremely unpopular nationwide, but has broad support in the party, to the point that if any of these Republicans with a National profile tries to fix it, they’ll be run out of the party. So that bipartisan bill simply can’t happen.
This is a big reason why so many Republicans are pushing the lie that Democrats support abortion “right up to birth”. Since they know they can’t fix it, all they can do is try and convince people that Democrats are just as extreme in the other direction, which of course isn’t true.
I grew up a Catholic Republican and I can assure you it was never about giving power back to the states. It was always about banning abortion, period.
The “power back to the states” line is what the Supreme Court said with its ruling, but that was never the end game of the Republican party. Search “republicans national abortion ban” in the engine of your choice: you’ll see that there are already talks of pushing national abortion ban legislation.
The end game is and always has been to make the entire US’ laws like Texas.
Right, but the distinction I’m making is that the “power back to the States” bit is the legal fig leaf they thought they could take advantage of, to say the most restrictive laws are only in some states, at first, and based on the will of the people in those states. But the rest of the country is (justifiably) seeing through that.