Hey, Democratic Candidates: Pro-Choice Women Are Your Base

[ehrnst]

Running an anti-choice candidate might pick up a few Republican votes—at the expense of turning off the party’s loyal voters.

Imagine if Democrats, sick and tired of losing white votes in Mississippi, decided to nominate a segregationist for governor. Imagine if they found that LGBTQ rights turn off voters in Tennessee, so they ran one of those anti-same-sex-marriage Christian bakers. Imagine if they found that plenty of Oklahoma voters didn’t believe in climate change, so they ran a denialist. After all, why get hung up on one item in the long list of good things we all support when the important thing is getting back into power? Everyone has to take one for the team sometimes, right?

Don’t worry, Nation readers. These scenarios aren’t about to happen. Only women are expected to let history roll backwards over them. Only women’s rights to contraception and abortion are perpetually debatable, postponable, side-trackable, while those who insist on upholding the party platform—and the Constitution—are dismissed as rigid ideologues with a “litmus test.” Party leaders can’t come right out and say so—in fact, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has issued a statement declaring that abortion rights are non-negotiable. But if you pay attention, you can feel the waters are being tested. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told The Washington Post, “This is not a rubber-stamp party.” Why else would Perez meet with Democrats for Life? And why did so many pay such close attention to Heath Mello, a former state legislator in Nebraska with a long record of anti-abortion votes, who ran for mayor of Omaha with the approval of both Bernie Sanders, and, initially, Perez? Maybe they hadn’t done their due diligence and didn’t know, or maybe it was a test: Can we win in red states if we run anti-abortion candidates?

Now comes Joshua Svaty, who is running in Kansas’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Svaty, who served most recently as the state secretary of agriculture and EPA adviser, has a long anti-choice record from his years in the State Legislature (2003–9). He voted for no less than 11 anti-abortion bills, including one that declares the “unborn child” a person from the moment of conception, and a rather confusingly worded measure, vetoed by then-Governor Kathleen Sebelius, that would have allowed a woman’s husband, parent, or guardian to sue the clinic to prevent her from getting an abortion or receive damages if one had been performed. Never mind what the woman wanted; her pregnancy belongs to her family.
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Kansas presents an opportunity for the Democrats. Governor Sam Brownback, who can’t run again due to term limits, has ruined the state’s finances, cutting education and other services to hand out tax cuts, and right now it looks as if the Republican candidate will be Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state, most famous for his ongoing efforts to take away voting rights from as many people as possible. The conventional wisdom is that you need to be anti-choice to win in Kansas, where the “pro-life” movement has long been extremely militant. But is that true? According to a 2016 poll, 30 percent of Kansans want to ban abortion completely, which is much higher than the national average; 30 percent want it to be legal; and 38 percent said they wouldn’t choose abortion for themselves but that the government shouldn’t prevent women from making their own decision. Over half said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who wanted to defund Planned Parenthood, which Brownback tried to do before being blocked by the courts; 32 percent said they would be more likely to vote for such a candidate. Indeed, in 2016, even as Trump carried the state by 56.2 percent, Kansas Democrats elected 17 new members to the State Legislature, most of them pro-choice."

https://www.thenation.com/article/hey-democratic-candidates-pro-choice-women-are-your-base/

[50 Shades Of Blue]

1. Reproductive rights are nonnegotiable to me.

[ehrnst]

2. Somehow health care specific to women gets treated as something other than health care. (nt)

[appal_jack]

3. Non-negotiable to this man too.

The anti-choice camp is pro-forced labor for women. Any American should oppose that, and stand for choice & privacy.

-app

[dsc]

4. While I tend to agree with the conclusion of the author in terms of the candidates who should be run

this was a very poorly researched piece. The current, Democratic, governor of WV is literally a coal executive who ran a Trump like campaign and certainly a climate denier. Gov Bashear of Kentucky was very anti gay he was nominated and ran twice by Democrats. The Nation should do a better job of editing.

[IronLionZion]

5. I bet people thought militantly pro-choice Kathleen Sebelius couldn't win there either