Commentary
The timing—two weekends before the midterm elections—was just about perfect for the release of “Call Jane,” the movie about an underground network that helped pregnant women get illegal abortions during the years before Roe v. Wade.
What better reminder for female voters supposedly in a state of panic now that the Republican-dominated Supreme Court has overturned Roe?
The plotline was perfect, too: a white suburban woman (Elizabeth Banks) who can’t get a legal abortion in 1968 even though her pregnancy seems to be life-threatening. Just like today’s white suburban women, believed to be generally pro-choice on abortion and, up until now, a key demographic component of the Democratic Party. “Call Jane,” costarring A-lister Sigourney Weaver as an abortion activist, got rave reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere, also just in time for the elections.
Except that the film turned out to be a resounding box-office flop. Opening at 1,068 theaters nationwide over the weekend of Oct. 28, “Call Jane” took in a grand total of $244,469 (according to
Box Office Mojo), with average daily revenues declining ever since. You do the math: As of last Friday, it was making about
$33 per day per theater. That’s about three viewers a day.
The “Call Jane” hype, followed by the “Call Jane” debacle, is yet another example of what could be called the Democrats’ “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” Election Year 2022 strategy: making abortion their very top issue. In the month of October alone, according to a
CNN analysis, Democratic campaigns and groups spent $214 million on ads mentioning abortion—nearly half of all their ad spending on all issues. And why shouldn’t they? Their media and polling allies were telling them that it was a winner.
Throughout the summer, the media treated the Supreme Court’s June 24 holding, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that there was no such thing as a federal constitutional right to an abortion like a gift on a silver platter to the Democrats. The “last, best hope”—in the words of Atlantic writer
Russell Berman—for a Democratic Party that has made unrestricted access to abortion at all stages of pregnancy a policy cornerstone.
The
Dobbs decision, returning abortion regulation to the states, had upset decades of jurisprudence since the Supreme Court in
Roe first found a federal constitutional right to abortion in 1973. A
Pew Research poll released on July 6 indicated that 57 percent of Americans disapproved of the
Dobbs decision. Tens of millions of dollars poured into the coffers of Democratic candidates up and down the ballots. In August, voters in Kansas overwhelmingly rejected a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have restricted abortion access, and a few weeks later, Democratic candidate Pat Ryan, running with abortion as nearly his only issue, won a special election for a New York House seat in a turnout surge in his swing district. The
American Prospect called Ryan’s victory the “Dobbs election” and viewed it as a harbinger for November: “This has put Republican candidates
on the defensive, scrubbing their websites and backpedaling on public statements.”
Well, maybe. In the months since August, something seems to have happened—and that something is the rampant inflation with no end in sight undoubtedly set off by a Democratic-administration spending spree of money the federal government doesn’t have, coupled with out-of-control crime and homelessness that have made many U.S. cities unlivable, and parents’ discovery that their children’s learning had been seriously set back by two years of public-school closings in a wave of COVID hysteria fanned by the Democratic Party-backed teachers’ unions whose members preferred working from home.
Remember those white suburban women who were supposed to be so triggered by
Dobbs that abortion rights would be the only thing they cared about? Well, a
Wall Street Journal poll released last week revealed that this key demographic, 20 percent of the electorate, favors Republican candidates for congressional office by 15 percentage points. In August, those same women had favored Democrats by 12 percentage points. That’s a shift of 27 points, with 74 percent of respondents telling the pollsters that the economy was going in the wrong direction. Even more ominously, a new
CNN poll released on Nov. 2 indicates that 51 percent of likely voters said the economy was the most important issue that would decide their vote in the midterm elections. Only 15 percent said abortion was the most important issue.
Nonetheless, the Democrats and their allies, like a vehicle on autopilot, can’t seem to stop telegraphing a message of abortion-rights dread that might have resonated three months ago but now looks grotesquely irrelevant to voters’ real concerns. There should have been warning signals: A Women’s March for “reproductive rights” in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 8 drew mere “thousands” of activists, according to
Washingtonian magazine (it didn’t help that a Washingtonian photo essay seemed focused on the marchers’ tattoos and graffiti-defaced American flags). On Nov. 3, taxpayer-funded NPR aired an audio track of an abortion in progress: the woman moaning in distress while the suction machine roared. The same day on Twitter,
Hillary Clinton was desperately trying to rekindle last summer’s outrage with a video warning of a “MAGA Republican plan” for a “nationwide abortion ban.” Clinton tweeted: “Please share this video with anyone on the fence about voting for Democrats.”
Perhaps this last-minute panic-button pushing will rouse an abortion-centric Democratic base to the voting booths to offset the indifference of their fellow voters who have more pressing priorities. Then again, the Democrats may have made a very expensive bet and lost. We will soon find out.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
