Republican delusions on abortion, Trump lose elections

Eventually, voters hew to the center.

In Kentucky, Democrat pundits fretted that President Joe Biden would sink Gov. Andy Beshear’s re-election. They shouldn’t have worried. Donald Trump endorsed Republican challenger Daniel Cameron early on, and in the end, that might have mattered more than Biden’s numbers (but probably didn’t in a meaningful way). Beshear is a popular, likable governor, who effectively used his ability to out-raise and out-campaign his opponent. Essentially, Kentucky’s 2023 gubernatorial race was Georgia’s 2022 race, but swap the party.

Image: DALL-E

At the state level, voters are motivated to hew to the center, or to react to extremes. Beshear is a center-leaning governor, who doesn’t take extreme positions on hot-button issues like using education to turn kids into transgender patients without parental consent, or removing all testing and measuring from educational opportunity to focus entirely on racial outcomes. So the difference between Beshear and Cameron boiled down to abortion—Cameron supports a near-total ban—and Democrats rallying against anyone with the Trump touch on them. It also didn’t help that Cameron, a Black man, refused to charge white Lousville officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her apartment in March 2020 during a raid on the wrong address, leaving it to the feds. This didn’t play well with the Black community.

Democrats bested Republicans in Virginia’s legislative elections, with voters handing the party control of the House of Delegates and the State Senate. Now the state house in Richmond is split with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Youngkin refused to endorse anyone in the 2024 presidential election when asked after the polls closed. The governor’s term ends in 2025.

In Ohio, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution, voting 56.6% to 43.4% to approve “Issue 1.” The amendment gives individuals the “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” and prevents the state legislature from enacting any ban on abortion that does not factor in viability of the baby to live outside the womb, which is roughly 23 weeks. Those bans must also allow for exceptions if the patient’s doctor deems it necessary.

Let me surprise you here. I am as close to a “single issue voter” as they come. I believe abortion is a sin because it takes life. I believe the psychological effects to the mother are both profound and long-lasting. However, I would not support a total ban on the procedure. I think it’s delusional to try to force that on any populace using the power of government. I think it’s counterproductive to prosecute doctors and mothers for seeking early term abortions. I believe mothers need compassion, not condemnation. And I believe that regulating or banning 90% of abortions, especially late-term, and regulating abortions done purely for economic reasons, is better than going for all abortions and ending up with what happened in Ohio.

Evangelicals got what they wanted, and what the country needed, when Roe v. Wade was overthrown. It was bad law. It’s equally bad law to try to push total bans on abortion. This kind of rhetoric produces a pushback because it raises fears in voters. I am just fine with Ohio’s constitutional “right” for women to decide what they want. Abortion is still a sin, but so is a whole variety of things Christians do, knowing they are sins. God doesn’t remove our free will, and neither should government, as long as babies have a fighting chance to live. That’s best accomplished in ways other than proscriptive laws.

Republicans are suffering from a variety of delusions, mostly about what Democrats want to do. Yes, there are insufferable Democrats like Rashida Tlaib, who joined the chorus of “from the river to the sea” and earned a Congressional censure for it. Everyone knows what that statement means: the destruction of the State of Israel and the—disposal—of its Jewish residents, i.e. genocide. There are corrupt Democrats like Sen. Robert Menendez. There are political hacks like, well, our current president. But Republicans have version of all the same defectives: MTG, George Santos, and the King of All Defectives Donald J. Trump.

GOP voters, and more importantly, GOP candidates and political consultants, hewing to delusions like total abortion bans, the political persecution of Trump, and culture wars, loses elections. These issues might gain temporary power in certain states like Florida and Mississippi, but they are not lasting gains. Eventually, voters hew to the center. Georgia Democrats learned this lesson, though Stacey Abrams has yet to accept it—Abrams pursued her own “stolen election” story and was repeatedly trounced, while her party contemporaries sit in the Senate.

The latest polls showing Donald Trump beating Joe Biden in a year in swing states may have some validity, but they don’t tell the whole story. The only polls that matter are the ones that close on the first Tuesday in November. The voters spoke last night, and they said they valued sanity over extremism, even if by a small margin.

Trump’s delusion is that he will beat all his serious felony charges and use that to justify a wide-ranging weaponization of the federal government and abuse of power if he returns to office. This alone disqualifies him for the job of president. It doesn’t matter, because Trump has self-disqualified so many times that if people still aren’t convinced, they are never going to be. But as much as these times look grim and, frankly, nuts, I still trust the voters to hew to the center. I still believe the delusions lose elections, and the results of this election have not disappointed.