Nearly a year ago, as Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats were confident that the ruling would spark a backlash from voters. GOP officials heard the predictions — and scoffed.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NPR that he expected voters’ interests to lie elsewhere. A day earlier, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said something similar, telling The Wall Street Journal, “I just don’t think this is going to be the big political issue everybody thinks it is.”
Those assumptions were discredited soon after. Republicans should’ve received a wake-up call in early August, when Kansas voters easily rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would’ve led to abortion restrictions. The GOP received another reminder a few weeks later, when the party assumed it would win a congressional special election in a “red” New York district, right before a Democrat running on an abortion-rights platform scored an upset.
Soon after, Republicans struggled mightily in the 2022 midterm elections, and exit polling suggests the party’s opposition to reproductive rights had a lot to do with the results.
This week, as Politico noted, the GOP suffered yet another major setback as voters sent an unmistakable message that the party still refuses to hear.
The drubbing Republicans took in Wisconsin this week revealed how harmful the issue of abortion still is to the party — and will likely remain through 2024. But following a state Supreme Court race that largely turned into a wholesale rebuke of GOP efforts to restrict abortion rights, Republicans in states across the country are plowing ahead with new restrictions anyway.
This isn’t a situation in which Republicans and their allies are simply unaware of political realities. They can read the same election results and polling data as everyone else. The GOP fully understands that most Americans simply don’t want Republican policymakers imposing…
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