“For the GOP, the dilemma is: Do you have exceptions so that you can message to voters that, ‘Hey, we’re not that bad and we’re not that far off from the mainstream’?” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. “Or do you just do what the anti-abortion movement wants and hope that voters don’t punish you for it? Because at least that way the anti-abortion movement is happy.”
Or at least, professor of wrong subject. Don’t you need one of not-reproduction?
Being a child these days involves running the gauntlet between hordes of “experts” who want to either crush your skull in the womb, or groom you into becoming a human fleshlight.
Does remind me of the last federal election in Oz. ScMo seemed to have the attitude that he should adopt the policies of his opponents to get their votes too. Whereas he’d won the previous one by adopting policies they adamantly opposed.
Perhaps the Republicans should simply support the policies that their voters desire. Who knows. They might even win.
@ Boganboy
There are two theories: one is that you position yourself between your oppponents and the median voter so that you get the median voter and all those on your side – which should have worked for ScoMo with Oz which has compulsory voting, the other is that you incentivise those on your side by making a big fuss on divisive issues which Trump tried, but didn’t work in 2020 when he faced Joe Biden instead of Hillary.
Perhaps the quality of the candidate might matter as well?
john77.
I’d argue that all political parties are actually coalitions of various groups with some quite different preferences.
In the election he won, ScoMo indiscreetly mentioned to the Collinsville coal miners that he actually wasn’t violently opposed to fossil fuels. The coal miners and others of their ilk are white working class unionised voters who were previously the backbone of the Labor party. Their preferences naturally differ from the woke, upper crust, piss-on-the-plebs greenaticks who are also a vocal part of it.
This tended to split the vote. So ScoMo won some of the crucial electorates. However naturally these rusted-on Labor voters were not attracted by standard Liberal policies plus a good whack of Green wokism. So ScoMo lost election number 2.
The narrative that conservatives “hate women” cannot be false, so there must be some nefarious reason why they’re willing to compromise on a practice they equate with murder in the specific cases of incest and rape.
Because the left is very much used to operating based on media optics, rather than principles.
Not sure about that. I’ve always viewed both 2016 and 2020 Elections in the light that Trump won in 2016 because he wasn’t Hillary and Pedo Joe Biden “Won”* in 2020 because he wasn’t Donald Trump.
We might actually get into the ridiculous situation in 2024 of having Trump win again because he isn’t Pedo Joe Biden. Personally, I’m hoping that Ron DeSantis can wrestle the nomination away from Donald Trump, but that might be asking a bit too much of the GOP.
Regardless, it’s about personalities not policies. Can anyone even remember a single noteworthy policy that either Donald Trump or Pedo Joe Biden pushed in their election campaign?
* – For a given value of “Winning”.
Well, when Steve Bannon was in the White House there was at least a to do list.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/05/03/steve-bannons-to-do-list-annotated/
I haven’t checked how much of that was actually achieved, but I distinctly remember every organ of State pulling all the tricks in the book to frustrate anything that the Trump administration tried to do.
We might actually get into the ridiculous situation in 2024 of having Trump win again because he isn’t Pedo Joe Biden. Personally, I’m hoping that Ron DeSantis can wrestle the nomination away from Donald Trump, but that might be asking a bit too much of the GOP.
I do not see Donald Trump winning the nomination. I think he will self-destruct at some point, and the signs that he will have been there for awhile for all to see.
Do not underestimate Ron DeSantis. He’s being very cagey right now, and it is driving Trump – and others (Nikki Haley, for example) – to make stupid mistakes. Trump has made several over the past couple of weeks, and Haley’s of this week has doomed her chances of getting a nod for VP.
@ John Galt
Yeah, as I tried to hint, Trump won because he wasn’t Hillary and lost to someone who was neither Hillary nor Trump.
Perhaps the Republicans should simply support the policies that their voters desire. Who knows. They might even win.
The thing is, most Americans are not vehemently opposed to all abortion. So a party that runs on a platform of being vehemently anti-abortion makes themselves difficult to elect.
But the red-meat wing of the Republicans would rather lose than compromise on this.
@Chester Draws – Agreed.
The problem is that the Democrats promised it as “Safe, Legal and Rare” but it was that last one they failed to deliver on with hundreds of thousands using it as 2nd stage contraception.
Most normies, of whatever party would probably live with a conservative (Small ‘c’) abortion policy which said “No abortions after viability” (so around 24 weeks.
The fact that the Democrats seem to be pushing for unconstrained abortion even to the point of live birth abortions (admittedly rare) and the Republicans are demanding no abortions under virtually any circumstances (or at least circumstances which are extreme), makes them both very difficult to support.
As for DeSantis, I’m guessing that those who object to his abortion bill weren’t likely to ever vote for him anyway. He might have a point about that, but as 2020 showed clearly, every vote counts.
… and Haley’s of this week has doomed her chances of getting a nod for VP.
I missed it – how did she screw up?
If so, it’s too bad – I like her as a candidate (for senate or VP, say), even though I’m just an onlooker for US politics.
@dennis, given your punditry in the last election, you may want to sit this one out?
You had Trump winning by a landslide
@Anonymous – Modern America is no longer the country for landslides. Too divided. The last one of note was probably Reagan’s win in 1984 to secure his second term as POTUS.
That being said, all the bellwethers pointed to Trump winning, but by far from a landslide. That Biden was eventually appointed to the presidency was probably the biggest US electoral theft since Kennedy.
Who’s really going to trust US elections when they can be subject to such blatant and obvious theft. That it required systematic fraud in only 5 or 6 counties does not undermine the electoral theft itself.