President Joe Biden and the Democrats are resting their hopes in 2024 on a single issue more than any other: abortion.
And it just might work, because the voters for whom abortion is an important issue seem willing to sacrifice almost every other major public policy priority to protect “a woman’s right to choose.”
I know this from my own community, the Jewish community, where abortion is the issue that seems to define Jews as Democrats.
No one is quite sure why or how that happened.
Jewish law is not permissive regarding abortion (though it allows abortion to save the life of the mother, and does not consider abortion to be murder).
I seem to remember Norman Podhoretz arguing that Jews had not been pro-choice until Roe v. Wade in 1973, whereupon abortion became central to the Democratic Party. That made it important to liberal Jews, whose politics often shape their faith.
What I saw myself, fifteen years ago in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, was that abortion trumped support for Israel, at least among most Jewish voters.
Given a Republican who was clearly strong on Israel but vaguely pro-life, and a Democrat who was vaguely pro-Israel but clearly pro-choice, Jewish voters would typically choose the latter. Only an extreme anti-Israel Democrat, bordering on antisemitic, could lose the support of pro-choice Jews.
Abortion is a symbol of a whole range of other social issues — gay marriage, gender identity, gun control, and so on — that have little to do with one another, except that Christian conservative voters seem to know where they stand. Liberal voters, Jewish and otherwise, tend to define themselves in opposition to that perception, especially when they fear that Republicans might try to enforce traditional norms through the harsh machinery of the state.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is an expert at fanning those fears. The governor, who has done almost nothing for his state in two terms in office, has been leading the Democrats’ effort to paint Republicans as extremists on abortion.
The Democratic position — abortion up to birth — is actually the extreme view, but the problem is that Republicans haven’t found a consensus, meaning that it is easy to pin them to the most strident, simplistic view.
Former President Donald Trump tried to cut the Gordian knot on Tuesday, saying that he would favor an abortion ban at around 15 weeks of pregnancy (though he maintains it should be a state, not federal, issue). That is roughly the international norm, even within supposedly liberal Europe.
Give Trump credit for having the political courage to tackle the issue, and adopt a position that neither side really likes. On the other hand, he didn’t have a choice.
Trump has to stanch the bleeding.
Even before the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision in 2022, Democrats had used the prospect of that reversal to mobilize voters, especially single women.
The 2022 midterm elections were supposed to be a Republican “red wave,” but that wave crashed against a wall of pro-choice voters. Even conservative states like Kansas and Ohio have seen pro-choice initiatives win at the polls.
The stakes are high. We are governed by an administration that is placing the survival of the Republic at risk. The world is on fire; the southern border is a disaster; inflation is destroying the American dream. The party in power is abusing its authority to persecute its political enemies and suppress free speech.
Yet Biden — as decrepit as he is — could be reelected on the basis of abortion alone.
Can liberal voters put country first? How about conservatives?
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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