How Not to Talk About Abortion, and a Better Way
Some thoughts on a major misstep by Glenn Youngkin, and a model message for Republicans struggling to navigate a divided electorate.
It is one of the great paradoxes of American politics that so many people whose careers depend on persuading a majority of voters in a state to check their name on a ballot are so abysmal at speaking persuasively to people about controversial subjects.
The latest example is Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, who has a new ad responding to Democrats’ efforts to paint Republicans as “anti-choice” extremists:
NARRATOR: It’s just not true, their lies about abortion. It's disinformation. Politics at its worst. Here’s the truth: there is no ban. Virginia Republicans support a reasonable 15-week limit with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. It’s a common-sense position that most Virginians support too. But Virginia Democrats support no limits on abortion, all the way up to 40 weeks, reasonable limits or no limits at all. that's the truth.
On the whole, Youngkin has been pretty good for Virginia, but has also pretty clearly fallen short of the full-on conservative warrior we need nationally, and this ad’s efforts to appease the mushy middle and center-left is a perfect example. On Tuesday, my LifeSite colleague Matt Lamb published a great op-ed covering the moral substance of the issue, including that a 15-week ban would only stop around 3% of abortions.
Unfortunately, if moral arguments guided most Republicans we wouldn’t be having this conversation, so here I’d like to focus on the political rationale behind Team Youngkin’s idiotic messaging, and suggest an alternative approach that can appeal to reachable moderates without signaling to committed pro-lifers that one has abandoned the youngest of the preborn.
Polls show that supermajorities oppose late-term abortion, but also that there is not a clear majority for banning most abortions (i.e., any not sought for rape, incest, or medical emergencies) starting at conception, and significantly less support for banning abortion without exceptions. That, combined with the pervasive scapegoating of abortion for the “red wave” not materializing in the 2022 midterms, has convinced the GOP consultant class and the party “leaders” who outsource their thinking to them that we need to do two things: shift the focus to Democrats’ pro-abortion extremism (sound advice), and bend over backwards to demonstrate Republicans couldn’t possibly be considered “extreme” (utter snake oil).
The first step in understanding why the second half of that advice is a fool’s errand is understanding that abortion wasn’t the reason Republicans barely retook the House and failed to reclaim the Senate. I reviewed the actual evidence here, which suggests that maybe abortion gave Democrats a marginal turnout boost, but it certainly wasn’t anything that would have been a problem if we hadn’t also been weighed down by Donald Trump helping nominate Republican candidates so bad that Democrats spent millions to help them win their primaries and siphoning donations away from candidates and to himself, or Republican congressional leadership essentially expecting Joe Biden’s atrocious job performance to do the heavy lifting for them instead of modeling any sort of confidence-inspiring leadership alternative.
Indeed, some of our weakest candidates last year were the opposite of the anti-abortion fire-breathers the narrative would have you expect. Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly, for instance, explicitly said his position on abortion was to not talk about it because his personal opinion was irrelevant as a judge, which allowed Democrats to define him on the issue without any pushback. Also, he lost by almost the exact same margin as he lost by in 2020, before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Senate candidate Blake Masters in Arizona changed his abortion messaging within weeks of winning his primary, going from a “100% pro-life” champion of federal personhood legislation and other specifics to a mere proponent of “banning extreme late-term abortion and otherwise letting states decide how to handle the issue.” It was a classic example of telling two different things to two different groups without having thought through how to sell either, drawing more attention to his views on the issue than they would have otherwise gotten.
In Minnesota, gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen went so far as to declare (while, bizarrely, holding a baby) that he was “not running” to ban abortion and attempt to mollify all concerned with birth control and pregnancy services. Backed by this brilliant strategy, he lost by 7.7 points.
As Ron DeSantis campaign pollster Ryan Tyson said earlier this year in a donor meeting that Trumpworld shamelessly lied about:
Democrats are gonna message on abortion regardless of what your position is. That’s what they’re gonna say. And what we found in the general elections in 2022 is it’s a kill shot if you're a piss-poor candidate and if you’re getting hit on abortion issues, but what the 2022 general election also proved is that if you’re a good candidate you can survive that. Look no further than Governor Kemp in Georgia. Signs a heartbeat bill right before the primary, he waxes Stacy Abrams by seven, eight points, or even more. It was closer to ten. Same thing happened in Ohio, DeWine dramatically overperformed.
That’s key: Democrats are going to paint you as extremists anyway! Preemptively moderating gets Republicans no credit, so Republicans might as well shoot for the best policies possible and ensure that the most passionate segment of the party’s base is as motivated as possible to turn out.
The approach counseled by the above Republicans (plus Kari Lake and the Susan B. Anthony group) essentially approaches politics as if voters are automatons and persuasion a simple matter of matching one’s positions to the predetermined numerical values they display for a given issue.
But politics isn’t that tidy because people aren’t that tidy. They have all sorts of values, priorities, and perceptions, in all sorts of proportions, and sometimes they contradict one another. The correct way to navigate them is not for a candidate to pretend not to be at odds with anything a major voting bloc thinks and to contort himself to offend as few voters as possible, but to treat them like human beings who can be reasoned with and appealed to—and, most importantly, to respect them enough to trust that the reasonable among them can handle disagreement like adults, rather than giving voters the impression they’re being played because that’s exactly what you’re doing.
That means making sure your core message is sufficiently compelling and responsive to whatever voters’ primary concerns may be—the economy, crime, schools, immigration, etc.—that you can be honest with them about differing on some things and a majority will still support you because of that core message. That’s how DeSantis dominated Florida last fall, and it’s also why Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite briefly advocating “some form of punishment” for women who abort (on top of his myriad other repulsive handicaps that most Republicans don’t share). Electorates are not merely the sum total of their positions, and neither are winning candidates.
To that end, Youngkin would have been much smarter to tell Virginians something more along the lines of the following:
I am pro-life. I believe we should work toward a day where all children are protected in Virginia law, and to that end I will sign any law to save any number of babies that reaches my desk. I recognize that not all of you see this as a matter of protecting children. That’s understandable—for generations, the abortion industry and its allies have filled our culture with lies about what the child in the womb is, what abortion does, and what happens to women without it.
That is why my administration is committed to curing misinformation with the truth: I call on the State Legislature to send me legislation requiring women to be given accurate fetal development information before abortion, including the opportunity to see their child on an ultrasound and hear his or her heartbeat; and requiring every public science education to include basic human embryology. The Virginia Attorney General’s Office will also closely monitor the abortion industry to expose and bring to justice how it actually treats pregnant women, and the Virginia Department of Health is also standing by to ensure the highest standards of pregnancy, maternity, and child care, and to disseminate to all patients the information they need.
And yes, as I said, I will sign any bill to protect preborn babies that reaches my desk. But what reaches my desk is ultimately up to you in the form of what you tell the legislators you send to Richmond. In functioning representative government, whatever changes are in store for Virginia abortion laws cannot happen unless and until the people are ready for them. We do not believe in a few powerful officeholders transforming society overnight. That’s what Democrats believe, and the loss of the power to do just that is the real reason they are so incensed at the Supreme Court that returned abortion policy to your hands.
Some of us still disagree on abortion, although I hope and believe we at least agree that Democrats’ refusal to accept any limits or protections of any kind is horrifying and has no place in Virginia law. I hope to change your mind, but the only way any of us will make any progress is if we’re open with each other about what we have in common and what we don’t. In the meantime, I’m grateful for the support you have given me so far, and promise to keep working hard delivering all the things you hired me to do.