13 October 24On June 24th, 2022 the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision officially overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which had stood for nearly 50 years. While Dobbs was shocking, it shouldn’t have been surprising.
Social conservatives and their evangelical allies had been hard at work for decades plotting and planning to overturn the decision that they viewed as nothing less than a sacrilegious affront. The overturning of Roe was a culmination of decades of right-wing efforts, but also of Democratic failures.
The stage was set for the overturning of Roe by the efforts of then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. McConnell and his conservative Republican allies had long been stymied in their efforts to overturn Roe legislatively. McConnell understood that congress was a dead end-end in terms of overturning Roe. The only chance to kill Roe was at the place it was born, the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell literally set out to hack the Supreme court.
Through a series of brazen parliamentary maneuvers McConnell managed to block the constitutionally mandated appointment of a Supreme Court Justice by then President Barack Obama and forestall that appointment until Donald Trump was sworn in eleven months later. McConnell then dramatically accelerated the appointment of a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in the waning days of Donald Trump’s control of the Oval Office. The result was arguably the most politically partisan court in US history. More to the point it was a court constructed for the express purpose of overturning Roe v. Wade.
Political poll analysts in the US have coalesced around a theory that there tends to be a ‘hidden Trump vote’ that pollsters miss. In fact there has been a significant discrepancy between the number of votes the polls predicted Trump would get in 2016 and 2020 and the actual vote count on election day in some cases, particularly in battleground state races.
But there’s another powerful voting dynamic that the pollsters have difficulty quantifying, American women in the wake of the Dobbs political earthquake. We are preparing for the first presidential election since fall of Roe. What will American women do in the upcoming election cycle? There are clues to be found in the non-presidential elections, particularly those relating to Abortion rights over the past two and a half years.
Over that stretch Republican candidates and initiatives haven’t fared well. To be fair the republicans did take back control of the House just five months after the Dobbs decision. But what was predicted to be a Red Wave with Republicans gaining enough seats to rival the 1994 Republican/Gingrich Revolution fizzled and turned out to be a surprisingly strong showing for the Democrats in a very unfavorable electoral climate.
Democrats have fared even better since that time in off year elections, winning the vast majority. Of special note are the ballot initiatives relating to women’s reproductive rights. The protection and expansion of reproductive rights has won on every occasion.
So yes there seems to be a voter that has historically tended not to vote that Donald Trump seems to be able to inspire to come out and support him, that traditional polling may not accurately gauge. But there is also a potential seismic political event brewing out there in the discontent of American women and the men in their lives who actually care what they think.
Have American Women gone back to sleep in the two years since the abolition of federal reproductive rights? Or is this the moment they have been waiting for to make a statement that cannot be ignored. Ask the women in your life and see what they say.
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