Pro-life Democrats are planning to meet ahead of their party’s presidential debate Tuesday with the hope of drafting a pro-life Democrat into the 2020 presidential nomination bid.
The pro-life Democrats are planning to hold a press conference Tuesday outside the debate venue at the Fox Theatre in Detroit to call for their party to welcome those who are pro-life.
“None of the men or women vying to be our next president are seeking the support of the 21 million Democratic voters who would like to see abortion less necessary and less common,” said Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life.
The Democrats currently running for president have embraced elective abortion on demand and the feminist abortion industry’s view that unborn babies are insignificant compared to a woman’s desire for autonomous control over her body.
A Marist poll released in January, however, found 75 percent of Americans want substantial restrictions on abortion, including 60 percent of those who identify as Democrats and 61 percent of those who describe themselves as “pro-choice.”
“An abortion litmus test and asking Democrats who support life inside and outside the womb, to leave the Democratic Party is a losing strategy,” said Day. “Instead of advocating for deregulation of the abortion industry and easing abortion time limits past fetal viability, we urge the candidates to seek a more progressive solution to women experiencing crisis or unplanned pregnancies.”
Jacob Lupfer, a political strategist with The Relay Group and spokesman for the Pro-Life Democratic Candidate PAC, said, “The best way to force a national debate about our broken and extreme abortion politics is to draft a pro-life Democrat into the 2020 presidential nominating contest.”
In a recent opinion column at Religion News Service, Lupfer admitted how extreme Democrat Party leaders and candidates have become on the issue of abortion.
“No candidate who favors ending abortion in the U.S. can win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president,” he wrote. “Party leaders are more stridently supportive of unrestricted abortion rights than they have ever been.”
Acknowledging the abortion industry’s “unprecedented power over the party,” Lupfer observed the 2020 election “opens up an amazing opportunity for a pro-life Democrat.”
The best argument for drafting a pro-life candidate, the strategist said, is “a statistical one.”
“About a quarter of Democrats believe abortion should be generally illegal,” Lupfer noted, citing Gallup polling. “Nonwhite Democrats, a group that is already rumbling about being taken for granted, are more opposed to legal abortion than white Democrats.”
As potential “pro-life” Democrat 2020 candidates, Lupfer pointed to Gov. John Bel Edwards (LA), Sen. Bob Casey (PA), and Sen. Joe Manchin (WVA). However, all of these men have touted pro-life views while they have also caved to Planned Parenthood and their party’s shift to the left on abortion at various times.
Lupfer is hoping to allow for more discussion about abortion within his party, with the ultimate goal for the Democrat Party to win in 2020, with its pro-life members included, and to defeat President Donald Trump, whom many in the pro-life movement call “the most pro-life president in modern history”:
The presence of a pro-life Democrat in the 2020 race would give voice to these 21 million disaffected Democrats — not least in the devoutly Christian precincts in Iowa, where such a candidate would likely dramatically outperform expectations in the February 2020 caucuses, instantly becoming a national story just as the media are looking to see who will come out of the outsized Democratic pack.
Some may object that white Christian Iowans are all in the Republican caucuses, but it’s worth testing empirically a charge that’s been made anecdotally for years: that many anti-abortion voters would defect from the Republican Party (especially one run by Trump) if offered another pro-life choice.
Lupfer said the challenge is for both the current Democrat 2020 candidates and the pro-life movement.
“If the Democratic candidates only want votes from Americans who support legal abortion for any reason up to the moment of birth, they should say so,” he said. “And if the pro-life movement does not want a champion for the unborn competing in the Democratic debates and primaries, its leaders should be asked why not.”