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AUGUST 25, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

The Abortion Election

How the Six Supremes resurrected the Democrats' electoral prospects

To paraphrase the Bard, some political parties are born successful, some
achieve success, and some have success thrust upon them.

Today's Democrats surely fit the latter two descriptions. In recent
weeks, with their enactment of landmark climate and industrial policy,
(modest) drug price reduction legislation, and President Biden's
student debt forgiveness, the world's oldest continuous political
party has certainly achieved some success. ("Oldest" is a pretty fair
description of the party's leaders, too, but that's another story.)
But now, they're also looking forward with something other than abject
terror to November's elections, and that's due to the success thrust
upon them by the Supreme Court's ruling in

**Dobbs**.

There was plenty of evidence before Tuesday's New York elections that
the backlash against the Court's revocation of abortion rights was
both huge and growing. The Kansas referendum on abortion rights stunned
even the most optimistic of abortion's defenders, and a series of
special elections this summer showed that Republicans' expected
margins over Democrats were shrinking due to the

**Dobbs** backlash. Now, in the most prominent of Tuesday's contests,
the Republican margin became the Republican deficit.

The upset victory of Democrat Pat Ryan to fill a vacant House seat in
upstate New York provided proof positive of the pro-choice wave. Before
the Court officially ruled, the polling for Republican Marc Molinaro
showed him leading Ryan by a comfortable 13 percentage points. Once
Samuel Alito descended from Mt. Misogyny with his Commandments (Thou
Shalt Carry a Pregnancy to Term Even if Effectuated by Rape or Incest),
however, Molinaro's margin began to diminish. It diminished more as
Ryan centered his campaign on preserving a woman's right to choose.
"Choice is on the ballot," his lawn signs read. A decorated combat
veteran, Ryan ran ads asserting that he'd fought to preserve freedom,
and that included the freedom to choose. (He also ran a
populist-progressive ad attacking a local power company he'd fought as
Ulster County executive, singling it out as representative of the abuses
of corporate monopolies.)

On Tuesday, Molinaro's 13-point lead had become a two-point deficit.
And in another upstate New York district holding a special,
vacancy-filling election, the Republican prevailed by just 6.6 percent
in a district that Donald Trump had carried in 2020 by an 11-point
margin. Both those districts had been expected to follow the normal
midterm rules, which stipulate that the party out of power is expected
to do better in the midterm than it did in the last presidential cycle,
and that Republican turnout in midterms generally exceeds the
Democrats'. Those rules appear to have been suspended in 2022.

In late June, when the Supreme Court ruled in

**Dobbs**, I wrote

that the only comparable ruling in the nation's history was Roger
Taney's decision in the

**Dred Scott** case. By saying that neither Congress nor the people had
any say over whether a territory could be slave or free, Taney's
decision overruled nearly 40 years of settled law. Both

**Dred Scott**and

**Dobbs**, I wrote, took away fundamental rights from the American
people. Americans, I continued, don't like their fundamental,
long-established rights taken away, much less by the one unelected
branch of government. The backlash against

**Dred Scott**enabled a sectional, start-up party and its presidential
nominee, Abraham Lincoln, to win the next election. The backlash against

**Dobbs** may well have a kindred effect.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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