By Dave Andrusko
I hope you don’t mind but I am writing a separate post on what pro-abortion Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large, wrote about the impact of abortion. The headline cuts right to the chase: “Did Democrats place a losing bet on abortion?”
To jump ahead, the conclusion is “The Point: Elections are about choices. Democrats may have made the wrong one.” In the body of the story, he is much more blunt: “With just six days left in the election, it appears as though that gamble may have been a massive mistake.”
As we’ve talked about many times, some senior Democrats strategists and officeholders warned that the abortion lobby (hugely influential within the party) was missing the boat: this election is about inflation, the soaring interest rates, crime, and gas.
They were ignored.
In a sense that makes a kind of sense. In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, everyone on the pro-abortion side said there would be tsunami of women racing to the polls to vote against pro-life Republicans. Cillizza puts it this way:
In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Democratic strategists insisted the 2022 midterms had fundamentally shifted.
Rather than an election about the economy – focused on rising gas prices and inflation – they argued the election would now be a referendum on abortion rights and the Republicans working to limit women’s choices.
In the month of October alone, Democratic campaigns and groups spent $214 million on broadcast TV ads that mentioned abortion, according to a CNN analysis of AdImpact data. That accounted for nearly half (45%) of all the ad money spent by the party over that time.
And it dwarfed ad spending on other topics. The next biggest issue for Democrats was crime, with the party spending $79 million on the issue, less than 17% of its overall ad expenditures last month.
But that was not where people’s priorities were.
In a new CNN national poll, 51% of likely voters said that the economy was the most important issue in deciding their vote for Congress. Abortion ranked second, but with just 15% naming it as the most important issue.
Depending on how the question is framed, abortion can rank as low as 5%-10% in the category what is the most important issue when voting for Congress.
We’ll pick up this conversation in Part Two.