Americana

Democrats had a simple message on abortion in Arizona. Then things got complicated.

THE NEWS

PHOENIX – On the day before Halloween, Julie Gunnigle canvassed Elm Street, still wearing the red contact lenses from her vampire costume, worried that voters continue to be  “utterly confused” about whether abortion remained legal in Arizona.

Since the summer, the state’s 158-year old abortion ban had bounced around courtrooms, enforced and unenforced. Last week, the Republican attorney general announced that the ban wouldn’t be in place until the election was over. And Gunnigle, a candidate for Maricopa County Attorney, was fending off attacks on her own support for abortion rights.

“They say anyone who’s got a Planned Parenthood endorsement has agreed to ‘defund the police,’” said Gunnigle, dropping her pink and blue campaign literature at the doors. “They say I’ve been involved in selling fetal body parts. That one was particularly fun.”

Five months after the end of Roe v. Wade, the role of abortion rights in Democratic campaigns has shifted. Republicans have walked back some unpopular statements on abortion bans; Democrats have seen better returns on Medicare messaging than ads about choice. As abortion groups waged a $150 million voter mobilization campaign, conservatives fixated on other stances they’d taken – the 2020 “defund” endorsement, the embrace of gender identity issues  – to brand them as extremists.

“People that are not inside of a total activist bubble don’t assume that men can have babies,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List. “Honestly, how many focus groups do you need to get through to figure out that this isn’t a winning issue?”

In Arizona, abortion rights groups thought they had a simple story to tell. The state’s territorial-era abortion law, unenforceable while Roe was in effect, made it a crime to obtain or provide an abortion. After Roe, Planned Parenthood halted services – sometimes stopping patients in the waiting room and telling them how to travel to other states – until a court allowed them to resume. In races for governor and attorney general, Democrats promised legal abortion if they won, and warned of rough 19th century justice if they didn’t.

“What happened here was just so much confusion and chaos for patients who needed care,” said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, in an interview this weekend. “It wasn’t just those who had appointments on the books to have abortions, but people experiencing complications of pregnancy, people needing life saving medication that has nothing to do with abortion, but it might be used in abortion.”

In July, voters were fixated on abortion, and Democrats moved ahead in their polling, as Planned Parenthood launched a $50 million “Take Control” campaign to turn out persuadable abortion rights voters. Republicans downplayed the issue, with U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters even removing support for a federal “personhood” bill, which would ban most abortions, from his website.

That was the first stage of a fightback. Masters and the rest of the GOP ticket hit Democrats for not specifying any limitations on abortion, and supporting a Women’s Health Protection Act that would scrap limits in place in many states. Polling consistently found most voters in favor of legal abortion with limits – 52 percent of them, in a New York Times/Siena poll conducted last week. So Republicans reintroduced themselves as the party that favored popular abortion restrictions, running against Democrats who didn’t want to endorse any of them.

“They’re the extremists,” said Masters.

Republicans also started talking about the least popular positions Planned Parenthood and its Arizona affiliate had taken, unrelated to abortion. In Arizona, that started with “defunding the police.” The national Planned Parenthood Action Fund endorsed the idea in June 2020, explaining that it meant “investing in community-based solutions, education, and health care,” and teeing up countless GOP attacks anyway.

Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona went further. In July 2020, its board began requiring any candidate who wanted its endorsement to “return any campaign contributions from police unions and other policing organizations.”

There was a caveat — candidates could accept police-tied donations if they re-gifted them to a PPAA-approved group. But when GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake went after Planned Parenthood in a TV ad, it was over the “defund” statement, accusing Hobbs of being backed “by radical groups that want to defund our police.”

Brittany Fonteno, who became PPAA’s president and CEO a year ago, said in an interview that there’d been “confusion” about the group’s police position. As their campaigners knocked doors across the state to talk about the Republican threat to legal abortion, there’d been a “concerted effort” to paint Democrats and allies as anti-cop. But the position itself wasn’t going to change.

“There is a real intersection between bodily autonomy and police brutality,” Fonteno explained. “With the majority of our patients being people of color from communities that historically and currently face higher rates of police violence, it was a step that the board of directors felt they could take to start to address some of that.”

Still, Democrats running to prevent an Arizona abortion ban had distanced themselves from the defund talk, bringing the issue back to what law enforcement would actually do if Republicans took power and enforced bans. Gunnigle has tried to do that in her race. Kris Mayes, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, has hit the same theme in hers – while Abe Hamadeh, the GOP nominee, demanded she renounce Planned Parenthood over the “defund” stance.

“I’m pro-law enforcement and I’m pro-reproductive rights,” said Mayes. “You can be both, and I am both. In fact, if anything, I’ve called for additional resources to go to our state’s law enforcement.”

DAVID’S VIEW

Abortion rights groups shifted left during Donald Trump’s presidency, in step with most of the progressive movement. The phrase “safe, legal, and rare” was ditched to make room for less apologetic language; language about “women” getting abortions was supplanted by language about “people” getting them, to incorporate trans and nonbinary people who are able to give birth. In our 30-minute interview, Fonteno did not use the word “women” once. Planned Parenthood’s abortion advocacy is popular in Arizona, but turn on a TV right now and you’ll see ads from the new Citizens for Sanity PAC about gender identity and ads from GOP candidates about “defunding” – all of it muddying up an issue Democrats want to be clear and simple.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

The Hobbs campaign has centered abortion in its messaging, betting that the the ongoing threat of a ban remains real to voters who might otherwise want to vote Republican to send a message on other issues. Democrats also have real-life examples to point to of voters turning out in large numbers over the summer after Roe was overturned, both in special elections and to block a Kansas amendment that would have enabled abortion bans. The last such race was over two months ago, leaving polls alone to drive the narrative since then.

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NORTH CAROLINA: Lena Geller goes to Tedd Budd’s gun store.

OHIO: Trip Gabriel finds Ohio Republicans not buying the Democratic hype… Ben Mathis-Lilley searches for the soul of J.D. Vance.

PENNSYLVANIA: C.M. Lewis reads Douglas Mastriano’s plan for a “civilian putsch.”

WISCONSIN: Jessica Pishko profiles Eric Toney, the Republican attorney general nominee who’d probe elections.

At the federal level, Democrats are running fewer abortion-themed ads this week than they did three months ago. Republicans never ran them unless they were on the defensive. But the issue is burning up races for elected law enforcement jobs, and it’s very alive in close contests, as Democrats continue to warn voters not focused on abortion rights that they could lose them if Republicans win.

DSCC, “Jennifer.” A statutory rape is the the subject of this spot from the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee. Identified only by her first name, a woman describes the “complicated” choice to terminate a pregnancy, and says that the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate would have ripped that choice away: “Blake Masters has no idea what I went through, and he has no business making that decision.”

Planned Parenthood Votes, “Fight Back.” Wisconsin’s one of several states where a 19th century anti-abortion law remains on the books, and Democrats don’t have the power to remove it. To boost Democrat Mandela Barnes, Planned Parenthood’s political operation reminds voters that Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said that people unhappy with the law could “move.” Why, it asks, not just defeat the senator instead?

Women Speak Out PAC, “Val Demings: Too Extreme on Abortion.” There are several hits here on the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Florida. One is that she always votes with President Joe Biden; one is that she is “focused on abortion” instead of “inflation and prices”; and that she favors abortions so late in pregnancy that the fetus can feel “excruciating pain.”

Tim Walz for Governor Committee, “Tippy.” Another Democratic abortion ad that hands the microphone to a woman, but with a different story: Tippy Admundson, a mother in suburban Minneapolis, who terminated a pregnancy that wasn’t going to be viable. She holds her pregnant belly and serves breakfast for two kids, explaining that she can have kids now “only because I had an abortion.”

Zeldin for New York, “Everything You Need to Know.” In some blue states, Republicans have tried to defuse the abortion issue by explaining that they won’t win enough power to ban it. “I will not change and could not change New York’s abortion law,” Lee Zeldin says here, telling voters that Gov. Kathy Hochul is lying about him.

Legal abortion is more popular than the Democratic Party in every state where the question gets asked. In Arizona, just 32 percent of voters say that they want abortion to be mostly illegal. It’s not defined by the pollster, but most of the political debate in the state has been over a total ban that’s still on the books, and temporarily halted by courts. Who are the one in eight voters who say the issue doesn’t matter? They’re disproportionately male and disproportionately disapprove of the president – i.e., they’re likely to vote Republican.

One question that’ll get answered next Tuesday is whether Democrats created “dummy-manders” – districts accidentally drawn to the other party’s advantage – in the states where they drew new congressional maps. In New Mexico, the party pushed some GOP precincts from the 2nd District into the 1st and 3rd Districts, and pulled reliably blue precincts from there into the 2nd, all to beat Rep. Yvette Herrell. In Nevada, a similar plot has put three Democratic seats at risk. In New Mexico, Democrats had more reliable supporters to move around.

Since our Friday newsletter, Republicans have expanded their targets in House, Senate, and state races, while Democrats have jumped in to defend more incumbents. Some of the loudest alarms are blaring in Pittsburgh, where outside spending and a uniquely weird situation involving two politicians with the same name are raising fears of an upset.

State Rep. Summer Lee won the Democratic primary in the new 12th District to replace retiring Democratic Congressman Mike Doyle. Its lines were drawn to remain solidly Democratic, absorbing some of conservative Westmoreland County but keeping Pittsburgh itself, and Biden carried the new boundaries by nearly 20 points.

But then a strange thing happened: The Republican who won the nomination was also named “Mike Doyle.” Lee’s campaign, with an aggressive field operation she’d built for four years, started finding reliable Democratic voters who assumed the Mike Doyle on the GOP’s ballot line was the Democratic Mike Doyle they’d supported since his first win in 1994.

Sensing an opportunity, the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC offshoot that tried and failed to stop state Rep. Summer Lee from winning the Democratic nomination, put nearly $1 million into new mail and TV ads against her.

UDP previously spent millions in primaries across the country to beat progressives who’d said they’d tie support for Israel to human rights conditions for Palestinians. As in other races, its paid advertising focuses on other issues – direct mail attacking Lee for wanting to “defund” police, and a TV ad highlighting her tweets and remarks about “abolishing” prison and the border.

“The reason the race is close is because Summer Lee is a fringe Democrat who disagrees even with President Biden,” said UDP spokesman Patrick Dorton. New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who chairs the House Democrats’ campaign committee, deferred a question on the spending to a committee spokesman who did not respond before this newsletter went out.

Mike Doyle, the Congressman, re-announced his retirement to help clear things up. Meanwhile, Justice Democrats, a left-wing campaign group that works to nominate progressives in safe Democratic seats leaped into action. On Oct. 27, the group began running ads to remind voters that Lee was the “real Democrat” running against a “fake Mike Doyle. A poll conducted over that period, first reported by Akela Lacy at the Intercept, showed Lee just 4 points ahead of the “fake” Doyle.

Democrats are hoping they’ve put out the fire. Polling by the Democratic Congressional Committee, first shared with Semafor, found Lee with a 54-40 lead, while US Senate nominee John Fetterman was carrying the district by 20 points. New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who chairs the House Democrats’ campaign committee, deferred to a spokesman.

Other good news for Republicans this week:

In Arizona, Libertarian Party nominee for U.S. Senate quit his race and endorsed GOP nominee Blake Masters, saying that the Republican was “generally supportive of the Live and Let Live Global Peace Movement.” Victor had criticized Masters in the only debate between them and Sen. Mark Kelly; in 2018, now-Sen. Kyrsten Sinema got a boost when a Green Party candidate ended her campaign and endorsed her.

In New York, the Democrats’ House Majority PAC went on the air for Rep. Joe Morelle, whose Rochester-based district went for Biden by 19.7 points.

In Washington, Emily’s List added to its seven-figure buy for Sen. Patty Murray, who Republicans identified as a target years ago and who only in the last month has seen her lead over challenger Tiffany Smaller fall to single digits.

• 7 days until the midterm elections
• 35 days until Georgia’s runoffs, if required
• 116 days until Chicago’s mayoral election
• 154 days until Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election
• 735 days until the 2024 presidential election

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