(My new American Thinker post)
By Thanksgiving we'll have a GOP House majority. By mid-December, we may have a GOP 51-49 Senate majority or another 50-50 situation. Not a bad wave if it turns out that way.
How much of a role did abortion play in this election? The Democrats want you to think that it was the dam that stopped the red wave. It really wasn't, as Catherine Glenn Foster wrote:
If anything was less impressive on election night than the “red wave,” it was the abortion wave. Blue states protected abortion rights as expected, but public officials who have supported or enforced limits on abortion in nearly 20 red states were re-elected.
Americans have learned since June that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t make abortion illegal in the Dobbs decision. Instead, after decades of jurisprudence that effectively taught Americans to embrace abortion, the Court made abortion an issue for voters, for Congress, and for states.
Since June, the states have been actively forming their own policy. California, New York, and Illinois have maintained their policy of abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy, while a dozen other states have moved in various ways to abolish abortion or embrace pain-capable or similar protections.
Yet, since June, there has been a political, financial, and media onslaught to repudiate the Dobbs decision by denouncing officials who enforced state laws and running hard against Republicans who support abortion abolition or simply limits to the killing. A reported $500 million have been spent attacking Republicans who supported pro-life law and policy. Abortion was an election issue in virtually every state’s elections because Democrats made it an issue with their ads.
The first national election after the Court overruled Roe was destined to be raucous, but the issue has fizzled in many states for abortion activists.
Fizzle it did. It was kept alive by a pro-Roe media that felt abortion was the only issue that mattered to voters. It was not. Again, the abortion issue did not stop red waves in Texas, Florida, or Ohio. It may have helped candidates in blue states, although in most of those places Roe has been replaced by a local version of Roe.
We've seen the last hurrah for abortion. By the next election, most states will have their own abortion laws. Voters will be able to keep them, change them, or amend them. The bottom line is that the issue will cease to exist because voters have expressed themselves one way or another.
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