Abortion - Winning Issue for Democrats

Will wonders never cease? Politico says that" Abortion was winning issue for Dems." An article by Alexander Burns on November 13 makes these points (but if you're an abortion rights advocate, you should really read the whole article - it's at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45069.html ):

"By branding Republican challengers as outside the cultural mainstream on the issue, Democrats managed to hold on to at least a slice of the political center..." Moderate women made the difference in a handful of key states.

This was counter to what the Dems did in 2006 and 2008, when they ran candidates whose positions on abortion were closely attuned to the socially conservative areas where they sought office.


Dems made abortion a central concern in a handful of battleground Senate races — and they won as a result.
In Colorado, Sen. Michael Bennet beat Ken Buck — a tea party-backed conservative with down-the-line anti-abortion views — after defeating him by 17 percentage points among women.

In Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pummeled Republican challenger Sharron Angle for opposing abortion in all cases — and in particular, for telling an interviewer who asked about abortion in the case of a rape that some women were able to turn “what was really a lemon situation into lemonade.” Reid won women voters by 11 percentage points and nearly tied Angle among men, losing by just 2 points.

Highly touted Republican Senate candidates also found themselves on the wrong end of the issue in blue-state Washington and California. Washington Sen. Patty Murray ran ads accusing challenger Dino Rossi with wanting to “turn back the clock” on abortion. In California, Planned Parenthood sent out a mailer comparing Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, charging that both “want to make criminals out of women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them” and branding both GOP women “too extreme for California.”

For some voters, the issue appeared to serve as shorthand for a larger network of social and values-related issues. “Candidates’ positions on choice do serve a signaling function, in terms of the kind of person they are and if they are standing up for women or not,” said Deirdre Schifeling, political director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.