It's no secret that the Biden campaign is going to try to ride the abortion issue to victory in November. They believe that women are so upset at being unable to abort their babies that they will all vote for Biden and deliver the election to the president.
The question isn't whether the loss of a right to an abortion for some women doesn't make them angry. The issue is the dishonest attempt by Biden to blame the decisions by individual state legislatures solely on Donald Trump.
Trump's position on abortion has always been "flexible". From being straight-out pro-choice in 1999 to promising in 2016 to fill the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn Roe, Trump has been tough to pin down where exactly he stands on the issue.
This is no different than Joe Biden, whose views on abortion changed as the Democratic Party became more radical. He went from being a pro-life Catholic to his current iteration as a pro-abortion fanatic.
Now the Biden campaign is trying to convince women that it's Donald Trump's fault that some states are restricting abortion. The tactic flows from Biden's campaign disinformation about what the Supreme Court ruled in the Dobbs case.
The court did not "destroy" or "erase" abortion rights as CNN claims. All the court said about abortion was that the "Constitution does not confer a right to abortion" and that the authority to regulate abortion is “returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Not mentioned in any ads that are currently running blaming Trump for Texas or other states' restrictive abortion policies is that it is a perfectly mainstream legal tenet to state that abortion is not a "constitutional right." It never was. Legal scholars on both the right and left believe that. Biden is trying to convince women that they've lost a constitutional right because Trump named three conservative justices to the high court. It's an idiotic argument that pro-choice women believe because they want to believe it.
The Biden campaign is looking to tie Trump to some of the abortion bans and restrictions that polls say most Americans oppose. They are using the plight of ordinary women who are unable to abort their babies due to state law passed in the wake of the Dobbs decision, particularly ads from Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Ky.).
Biden advisers took particular note of an ad Beshear ran in the closing stages of his campaign featuring the testimonial of a woman, Hadley Duvall, who had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was a child, and who would have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term under policies favored by Kentucky Republicans, including Beshear’s opponent.
Eric Hyers, a Democratic strategist who managed the Beshear campaign, said Duvall’s message had echoed across Kentucky, including in constituencies that do not ordinarily lean to the left.
“The voters who moved the most when hearing messages like Hadley’s were the opposite of the voters you might think,” Hyers said. “It was rural voters, male voters, older voters, Republican voters, non-college educated voters.”
Those are exactly the voters Biden wants to attract in places like rural Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The Biden campaign is even more dishonest in an ad that recently ran in the immediate aftermath of Trump's most recent pronouncement on where he stands on abortion rights.
Monday’s ad spotlighting another Texan, Amanda Zurawski, featured her tearfully recalling the loss of her baby, interspersed with a description of the life-threatening conditions she faced after miscarrying and being denied a medically necessary abortion.
“Donald Trump did this,” the end of the ad reads.
The minute-long video — which was released within hours of Trump’s announcement — is part of a broader $30 million advertising push and will air in battleground states. And it offered one of the clearest views to date of how Democrats are plotting to use what could end up being hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising aimed at tying Trump directly to the harshest abortion limits in the country.
Biden isn't subtle. Good political advertising isn't. Of course, the rank dishonesty of the ad speaks for itself.
Abortion will play a role in the presidential election in blue states but won't mean much in red states, and in purple or swing states, the race will turn on other issues like inflation. As it did in 2022, abortion will play a decisive role in some congressional races in swing districts.
In that sense, the Biden $30 million ad campaign gives Democrats a fighting chance to regain control of the House.
