LETTER FROM BIDEN’S WASHINGTON

WILL ABORTION BE
ENOUGH TO SAVE
DEMOCRATS IN NOVEMBER?
With Republicans strong on the economy, it’s not clear how much any other issue will
matter.

By Susan B. Glasser
October 6, 2022
October 6, 2022

National and state Republicans have publicly stuck with Herschel Walker, the
vocally anti-abortion Senate nominee in Georgia, since it was revealed he had
paid for an alleged abortion. Photograph by Elijah Nouvelage / Getty 
T his weekend, when I ran into the former Democratic National
Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile, she told me that she
was not super optimistic about the midterm elections—a
message she had shared in a recent meeting with top White House
aides about how to mobilize the Party’s voters. “Democrats have to
defy history,” she later told me. “It’s tough. That’s my worry.” There
was, however, one issue that gave Brazile some hope: the backlash to
the Supreme Court’s decision this summer to throw out Roe  v. Wade,
the abortion-rights decision from 1973. It has resulted in a brewing
voter rebellion neatly summed up in a T-shirt that Brazile recently
saw, which read “Roe, Roe, Roe to Vote.” She has taken to singing
the slogan like a refrain.

By Monday evening, the revelation of an alleged abortion paid for

by Herschel Walker, the vocally anti-abortion Republican Senate
nominee in Georgia, threatened to stop the G.O.P. from reclaiming
one of the state’s two Senate seats, a potential blow to the Party’s
hopes of capturing the chamber. The Walker abortion story, published
by the Daily Beast, swiftly escalated into something more than a tale
of Republican hypocrisy on an issue that Democrats hope to use
against many G.O.P. candidates in November. After Walker denied
paying for the abortion or even knowing the woman in question, she
responded by disclosing that she had also had a child by Walker.
(“Totally, totally untrue,” he said, of both claims.) One of Walker’s
sons, himself an outspoken conservative, publicly bashed his father as
an abusive liar. National and state Republicans, though, publicly stuck
with Walker, a former football player turned hard-right Christian
activist whose entrée to politics has been facilitated by his decades-
old ties to Donald Trump.

Just as in 2020, control of the Senate, which is currently deadlocked

at 50–50, may well come down to Georgia, lending the Walker
abortion scandal a national resonance that it might not otherwise
command. Democrats are attacking Republican candidates on the
issue of abortion in many other races this fall—if nowhere quite so
dramatically as in the Walker case. “Democrats stake their House
majority on abortion,” Politico reported this week, citing that the
Party has spent some eighteen million dollars on abortion-themed ads
for about four dozen battleground seats. In an exhaustive analysis of
more than three hundred of this season’s campaign ads, for the
University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, Kyle Kondik also found
that “abortion dominates Democratic advertising.” Many of the ads he
watched attacked Republican candidates for supporting a national ban
on abortion, or for opposing exceptions that would allow abortions to
protect the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest.

The Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg is one of those who believes

in the “Roe, Roe, Roe” theory for Democrats in 2022. “In terms of
over-all national mood, it’s been a game changer,” she told me, of the
Supreme Court’s June abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson
Women’s Health Organization. “Dobbs changed everything.”
Greenberg said she’s seen two types of attacks that are working for
Democrats: hits on specific candidates, such as Walker, whose own
words on abortion are being used against them, and more general calls
to action, particularly in Republican-dominated states where
legislatures are moving to restrict access to abortion. In those races,
it’s easier to make the argument that women’s rights are directly on
the ballot in November.

Rallying to save abortion rights has given Democrats, and particularly

younger women, a push to vote this fall, at a time when other
indicators for the Party have not been looking good. The Democratic
strategist Tom Bonier points to a spike in new registrations since the
Supreme Court ruling. “Substantially more women, especially
younger women, have registered to vote since the Dobbs decision,” he
told me—a notable data point, given that people who newly register
close to an election tend to vote at a higher rate. Bonier found that
there are more women registering than men so far this year, and also
an expanding gender gap in new registrations in forty-six states, a
change he called “unique.” The trend applies even in conservative
states, such as Idaho, where Bonier has noted that young women are
out-registering young men by twenty percentage points since Dobbs,
and in Kansas, where abortion-rights supporters scored a major
upset this summer by defeating a ballot measure that would have
banned abortion with few exceptions.
There is, however, clearly a limit to how much the abortion issue can
deliver for Democrats. Polls suggest that Joe Biden remains a highly
unpopular President, if somewhat less unpopular than he was at his
lowest point, over the summer. Republicans have seized on higher
crime rates and concerns about immigration in ads aimed at
motivating their voters to turn out. And Democrats, although they
lead among voters who prioritize other issues such as climate change
and health care, are behind in surveys that ask voters focussed on the
economy and the country’s highest-in-decades inflation rate whom to
trust. The Economist’s G. Elliott Morris, summing up a new
survey from the magazine and YouGov, called this an “Other than
that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?” problem, given how much the
economy tends to dominate American voters’ concerns.

The main impact of the abortion issue at this point may well be that it
got Democrats back in the game in an election that was looking like it
would be a blowout for Republicans as recently as a few months ago.
“Without Dobbs,” Greenberg said, “we’d have an election just about
inflation.”

T he stakes for getting it wrong, however, are fantastically high.

Something more than just control of the House or Senate is at
stake in these midterm elections, in the ongoing age of Trump.
On Thursday, the Washington Post published an analysis showing
that a majority of Republican nominees for the Senate, House, and
key statewide races have adopted the former President’s 2020-election
denialism as their own—a finding with profoundly worrisome
consequences not just for the next Presidential election or the balance
of power in Washington but for American democracy. Many of the
two hundred and ninety-nine election deniers identified by the Post, in
fact, are already all but assured election, for seats that are safely
Republican—a hundred and seventy-four of them, by
the Post’s count. They will constitute pro-Trump shock troops in
Congress and in state capitals for a Republican Party remade in
Trump’s image.

Many of the G.O.P.’s candidates in marquee races around the country

seem determined to conduct politics in Trump’s inflammatory,
divisive fashion. They’re not adopting only election denialism as their
own but the whole constellation of Trumpist provocation. In one ad,
the Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—whom
Trump has endorsed—smashes television sets with a sledgehammer
and lights a face mask on fire with a blow torch. She promises to
finish Trump’s wall. Seemingly unaware of the irony, Lake, a former
television journalist, trashes the “corporate media” for warning that
Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election were “extremely dangerous to
our democracy.”

Also on the Arizona ballot this fall is Blake Masters, a Trump-

supported Senate candidate whose ad “Invasion!” is a direct homage
to Trump’s false claims during the 2018 midterms about an
“invasion” at the southern border by a “caravan” of migrants. In it,
Masters demands that the government build Trump’s wall and “lock
this border down.” He warns that, “if we don’t do these things right
now,” in a phrase ripped right from Trump’s rally playlist, “we’re not
gonna have a country.”

Perhaps Masters forgot that Trump and the G.O.P. lost the House in
2018 with that message. Or perhaps, as with Trump’s 2020 defeat, he
simply prefers to wish away an unpleasant political reality.

But both history and an awful lot of the evidence are on the
Republicans’ side in 2022. The wishful thinking might well be on the
Democratic side this time around. “Dems can win,” Brazile wrote me
in an e-mail, on Thursday, but not unless voters are clear on the
consequences. “To the extent this is a referendum on Biden and
Washington, Dems lose,” she said. The only way it works out
otherwise is for the electorate to grasp that democracy itself is on the
ballot. ♦

Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer, is the co-author of “The Divider: Trump

in the White House, 2017-2021.” Her column on life in Washington
appears weekly on newyorker.com.
More:AbortionU.S. SenateDemocratic PartyRepublican Party (G.O.P.)Politics2022 Midterm Elections