Karl Rove: “Virginia Republicans held up admirably against a challenging map”



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Karl Rove - Don’t Believe the Hype About Abortion
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Its importance in last week’s elections for state office has been vastly
overstated.




November 15, 2023

There’s a tendency in politics to ascribe success and failure to one thing
when it’s really more complicated. That has been the case with most coverage of
last week’s elections. “Abortion issues burn GOP
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” screamed ABC News. “Democrats see big wins” shouted Roll
Call, which said “access to abortion” was “front and center
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.”

The key example offered for this line of reasoning was Virginia’s state
legislative elections, in which Democrats held the Senate, losing only one
seat, and flipped the House by picking up three. Vox’s Rachel Cohen described
theresults in Virginia and elsewhere
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as “a resounding victory for Democrats and abortion rights supporters.” But is
holding a 21-19 majority in the Senate and a 51-49 majority in the House really
a resounding victory?

I think not. Virginia is a blue state that Mr. Biden carried 54% to 44% in
2020. Last week Republicans won in seven House districts Mr. Biden carried in
2020 by up to 10 points and four Senate districts he won by up to 9 points.
Democrats didn’t flip a single districtDonald Trump
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with the notion that abortion draws large numbers of independents and
Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates.

Two factors probably had a bigger effect than abortion. The commonwealth was
redistricted before the election. Thatbenefited Democrats
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last week, according to Sean Trende, a senior election analyst at
RealClearPolitics. Since Virginia is blue, the redistricting resulted in more
solidly Democratic districts than solidly Republican ones. Mr. Trende was one
of the special masters appointed by the Virginia Supreme Court to draw the
lines.

Offsetting the Democratic redistricting advantage was the popularity of
Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. An Oct. 16 Washington
Post/Schar School pollfound
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that 54% of Virginians approved of the governor’s job performance and 39%
disapproved. Only 43% of the same respondents thought Mr. Biden was doing a
good job, while 55% didn’t. This favorability advantage for Republicans helped
GOP candidates grab districts that normally would have gone Democratic.

Given that their state has trended Democratic for years, Virginia Republicans
held up admirably against a challenging map. The GOP would cheer if it pulled
off similar margin changes in 2024. If Republicans flipped every U.S. House
seat Democrats won by 10 points or less in 2022, the GOP would rack up 50
seats—a 271-seat majority, the biggest GOP seat haul since 1928.

GOP Senate candidates would also be sitting pretty if they do as well in 2024
as Virginia Republican Senate hopefuls did last week. If GOP candidates won
every state Mr. Biden carried by 9 points or less in 2020 and all the Trump
states, there would be new Republican senators from Arizona, Michigan,
Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and
Wisconsin—giving the GOP a 58-seat majority.

Abortion-rights advocates also point to Kentucky, where incumbent Democratic
Gov. Andy Beshear defeated Trump-backed Republican Attorney General Daniel
Cameron, 52.5% to 47.5%. Ms. Cohenwrote
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that Mr. Beshear’s re-election provides “the clearest evidence” that abortion
drew “voters of all persuasions” to support Democrats.

Democrats did run a powerful ad featuring a young woman raped by her
stepfather when she was 12. But if abortion alone decided the governor’s race,
why is it that the rest of the statewide Republican ticket won with 57% to 61%
of the vote and an average margin of 18 points? All those Republicans are
strongly pro-life. Maybe they won because the governor’s race was more about
the incumbent’s record and each candidate’s messages on a range of issues, not
only abortion.

On the flip side, Ohio approved a ballot measure enshrining a right to
abortion in the state constitution by 56.6% to 43.4%. But Republicans royally
screwed up that situation. First, they tried to game the system with an August
referendum raising the threshold for amending the state constitution, which
voters soundly rejected. Then they didn’t offer an alternative to the
unlimited-abortion proposal and were massively outspent.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, pro-abortion groups
have gone seven for seven on state ballot measures. Todescribe last week’s
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sign of Democrats’ continued momentum”—in the words of a Democratic Party
tweet—and principally credit abortion is to oversimplify. Abortion might have
helped Democrats sometimes, but the issue is hardly a silver bullet. As
Virginia showed, as long as Mr. Biden is the face of the party, pro-life
candidates can make gains on Democratic turf if they frame the abortion issue
with care.

Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads
and is author of “The Triumph of William McKinley” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).





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