Given the issues most people are concerned about, standard political fare likely won’t win the election for the Democrats this year.
Commentary
’Tis election season, and the political narratives are flying everywhere.
Let us examine the 2024 Democrat political narrative surrounding abortion, including efforts to leverage the
2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that has roiled U.S. politics for 50-plus years and counting.
Abortion on Demand as a Political Weapon
On March 14, Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota, “marking what her office said was the first time a president or vice president has toured a facility that performs abortions,” as reported by The
Associated Press. The article correctly points out that this represents an escalation of the “[Democrats’] defense of reproductive rights” political narrative this year.
Buried in that article was a reference to President Joe Biden. The practicing Catholic is cited as using the phrase “right to choose” as opposed to actually using the word “abortion” when discussing the issue on which the U.S. Constitution is silent.
Regardless of the euphemism used, President Biden, Ms. Harris, and other elected Democrats support unlimited abortions, and they apparently mean to ride that narrative all the way to November, because they apparently still believe that the 2024 election will be decided by “pro-choice” suburban women who
helped make the difference in 2020.
The Wrong Horse
There are big problems with that political strategy. First of all, a
March 12 Rasmussen poll revealed that “economic issues and immigration matter more to voters than abortion.” This should come as no surprise to anyone because
single-issue pro-abortion voters are generally going to vote Democrat anyway.
[Note: The abortion numbers from Guttmacher were 930,000 performed in 2020, with 878,000 performed in the first 10 months of 2023, which, when the November and December totals at about 88,000 per month are added, would greatly exceed 2020.]
The Right Horses
Other issues subordinate abortion in Americans’ priorities.As
The Heritage Foundation headlined on March 12, “Biden’s Border Crisis Comes to the Suburbs.” The article stated that “Biden’s immigration-driven crime wave is now arriving in America’s suburbs and small towns with devastating results” while noting that, regardless of the total number, “every single crime committed by an illegal immigrant is totally preventable.”
Illegal immigrant crime victimhood is not an elective action for suburbanites, while abortion certainly is—and the polls reflect that uncomfortable fact for Democrats as open borders continue to be an issue of great concern to most Americans.
President Biden suspended the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement of U.S. immigration laws in January 2021, which initiated the
64 policies recently detailed by U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson that have created the ongoing open border crisis. President Biden could easily reverse all of those policies with the stroke of a pen, yet he
refuses to do so by claiming that Congress needs to pass a border bill before he can act.
Another major political issue that is sidestepped by Democrats is inflation as a direct result of “Bidenomics.” A February article by
Reason described Bidenomics as a political messaging strategy that included the following facets: “pandemic aid, industrial policy, handouts for labor unions and public workers ... [that] could be reduced to a single, overriding response: government spending.”
Trillions of dollars of federal government stimulus spending resulted in a year-over-year inflation rate that peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, which was the highest rate experienced in the United States in more than 40 years. Inflation remains stubbornly high as the Federal Reserve interest rate manipulations have consistently missed the inflation target of 2 percent because government spending continues unabated.
ZeroHedge reported on March 12 that the year-on-year U.S. consumer price index was 3.2 percent, which was more than expected. ZeroHedge further noted that “consumer prices have not fallen in a single month” during Biden’s presidency. And Americans feel that pain at the grocery store and elsewhere throughout the Biden economy.
Concluding Thoughts
Political narrative-shifting to abortion and away from the economy, inflation, and the open border would appear to be a losing strategy, but then abortion has been a
litmus test for Democrat politicians for years. Most Democrat voters are pro-abortion, and the strategy seems to be more about shoring up the fracturing Democrat base than persuading independents and others to vote Democrat this year.
The problem for Democrats is that they apparently misunderstand the changing voter demographics in 2024. Inflation affects Generation Z and blue-collar workers far more than Democrat consultants and pollsters, who are from a different class than those people and don’t directly experience the adverse effects.
One result, a Harvard CAPS–Harris survey determined that 64 percent of the Gen Z respondents (ages 18 to 24)
approved of Donald Trump’s job as president because the contrast between the Trump and Biden presidencies is clear with respect to the economy and inflation.
Furthermore,
The New York Times recently reported the growing shift of Latinos toward President Trump. Of even greater concern to Democrats is the rightward shift of black Americans.
The Washington Post reported on a February Gallup poll that must have shocked many Democrats. According to the poll, black Americans in 2020 were “66 points more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans,” but that spread had decreased to only 47 points in 2023.
Key voter demographics are shaping up to be much different in 2024 than those in 2016 and 2020. The Democrats appear to be losing their traditional base of minority and younger generation voters because they don’t seem to have a political narrative that resonates with them on the open border or inflation. And that is a real problem, because the abortion narrative is a lower priority this year.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
