Democrats’ disastrous mistake on abortion

By Jill Filipovic,

The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Ben Ray Luján, said in an interview this week that his party intended to support candidates who can win, regardless of their position on abortion rights.

There will be no abortion “litmus test” in the Democrats’ drive to win back the House, he said. His comments echoed earlier ones from Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer and Bernie Sanders.

That’s not just an insult to the women (and men) who make up the Democrats’ base. It’s a fool’s errand.

Much of the left has learned all the wrong lessons from Hillary Clinton’s defeat. They could focus on increasing turnout among their base — women and African-Americans — but Democrats have instead taken a rhetorical page from both Donald Trump’s sexism and Bernie Sanders’s populism by trying to appeal to disaffected white guys.
This pivot to the right on women’s health is particularly insidious, reflecting an anti-feminist backlash across the political spectrum.

Democrats may say they are trying to field the most competitive team of candidates they can to win a majority in Congress, and in some districts that candidate might be anti-abortion. But this treads a dangerous path: ceding to demands that the entire political system cater to the perceived values of a group that largely stopped voting for Democrats in the 1960s, when the party pushed the Civil Rights Act and equal rights for women.

The public embrace of anti-choice candidates is just one plank of this party overhaul. The new Democratic platform emphasizes building infrastructure, lowering prescription drug costs and creating jobs.

These are all valuable goals, but making them the entire focus of the media blitz at the expense of policies aimed at serving women and people of color seems to be a naked appeal to the white working class, who some political observers have decided voted for Trump out of economic anxiety. This narrative is belied by the social science, which showed bigotry had much more of an influence on Trump supporters than personal finances.

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