Coalescing Around Abortion Rights, Dems See Solid Wins
WASHINGTON, DC (IANS) – Democrats won decisive victories in elections across the country on November 7 by aligning closely with abortion rights.
Andy Beshear, the Democratic Governor in a deeply Republican state of Kentucky, was reelected by a convincing margin in a contest in which he had portrayed his Republican rival as someone who had supported the abortion ban.
Democrats swept both chambers of the Virginia legislature focusing also on the issue of abortion rights.
And voters in Ohio, a Republican state, vote overwhelmingly to include abortion rights in the state Constitution.
President Biden, who has been buffeted by bad poll numbers, found some reason for cheer as results streamed in.
“Ohioans and voters across the country rejected attempts by MAGA Republican elected officials to impose extreme abortion bans that put the health and lives of women in jeopardy, force women to travel hundreds of miles for care, and threaten to criminalize doctors and nurses for providing the health care that their patients need and that they are trained to provide,” he said in a statement seeking to blame the unpopular abortion ban on his predecessor and his supporters by branding them MAGA — Trump’s campaign slogan Make America Great Again — Republicans.
Abortion rights have become a powerful election issue for Democrats after the conservative-led Supreme Court, bolstered with the addition of three more conservative justices by Trump, struck down in June 2022 a constitutional right to abortion guaranteed in a 1974 ruling, sending the issue to the states to decide.
Democrats tapped into the widespread anger to overcome incumbency to perform far better than expected midterm elections later in the year.
Many Republican-ruled states have voted since to guarantee abortion, which ought to have warned the party that their continued opposition to abortion is not serving them well. But they are strapped with it now and chances are Democrats are going to deploy abortion rights to neutralize Biden’s unpopularity, inflation headwinds and the global crises such as the Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars that the United States is engaged in.
Biden and his team were hit November 7 morning by a The New York Times-Siena poll that showed that Biden was trailing Trump in five of the six critical states that he had won in 2020 to win the White House — Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia; Biden was ahead in the sixth, Wisconsin.
The poll came as a shock to the Democrats and some of them responded by calling for Biden to make way for someone younger.
David Axelrod, a political strategist who worked on President Barack Obama’s campaigns and in the White House, suggested in a string of posts on X that the President might consider getting out of the race.
“Only @JoeBiden can make this decision,” he wrote in one of them. “If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?”
The post created a storm, as some other Democratic party strategists jumped in with similar suggestions.
Biden’s age — he is 80 now and will be 82 when he starts his second term if elected — has been one of top issues for the Democrats going into 2024 and his sagging poll number mostly in the 30s or early 40s at best and inflation haven’t helped his case.
But Democrats are now contending that polls and real elections are different and between now and the 2024 election day, things could change drastically.
Riding the momentum of the recent results, Biden and his team are likely to go aggressively into election mode, highlighting the President’s achievements and setting up the contests as a fight between him and Donald Trump, who appears to be the likely Republican nominee as he is way ahead of the rest his his primary challengers, his legal troubles notwithstanding.
Pradeep Srivastava
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This article makes some valid and interesting points. Here is how I would respond to them.
1. The abortion issue was definitely a selling point in the November 7, 2023 election.
November 9, 20232. Abortion is not the only issue that favors Democrats. In the November 2022 election, Biden’s message of the Democratic Party being a pro-Democracy Party was also a selling point, especially in light of the January 6, 2021 insurrection propelled by Trump.
3. Trump politically and the Republican Party in general will also be harmed by the abortion issue because Trump took credit and gloated when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade, bragging that he was responsible for appointing three justices who voted in favor of overturning it.
4. The fact that Biden is currently trailing Trump in five of the six battleground states should serve as a wake-up call for the Democrats and hopefully motivate them to campaign harder for Biden. However, polls taken one year before the actual election need to be taken with a grain of salt because one year is lifetime in the election cycles.
5. Axelrod’s suggestion to Biden regarding getting out of the presidential race was imprudent. He should have made this suggestion to Biden in private, not in public. Axelrod is a Democratic strategist, so why does he want to harm the Democratic Party?
6. Biden’s old age is an age old issue and getting stale. It seems USA is still a youth oriented society and discrimination based on one’s age is one of the few areas of discrimination that is still socially acceptable. That’s unfortunate. Wisdom and good judgment that come with age are rare qualities that need to be admired in a person, not put down. I think Mark Twain had it just right when he stated, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”