Democrats are betting that anger over the reversal of Roe v. Wade will take down Republicans in the 2022 midterms. This is a plausible, if desperate, hope.
The theory is that the “winning” side of such a long struggle will now be pacified, while the “losing” side is energized and outraged. And abortion rights—with some limits—remain broadly popular on a national scale.
The political calculus over the right’s biggest victory in a half-century is so scrambled that even former President Donald Trump is reportedly worried about this.
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But Republicans have a secret weapon: Democrats’ penchant for progressive overreach. We are already seeing signs at multiple levels—among activists, elite celebrities, and politicians. It raises the question: Could there be a backlash against the backlash?
Let’s start with the most serious: activist overreach. Since May’s leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs case, pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in dozens of locations have been vandalized or firebombed (in the wake of the Dobbs decision, centers in Virginia and Colorado have been added to the list).
A group called “Jane’s Revenge” has claimed credit for some of the destruction, writing on their website on June 15, “We have demonstrated in the past month how easy and fun it is to attack… Rest assured that we will, and those measures may not come in the form of something so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti.” As the progressive data analyst David Shor suggested (in a 2020 tweet that got him cancelled shortly after the police murder of George Floyd), while nonviolent protests can be helpful, violence is bad for Democrats’ electorally.
Like the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the attacks on crisis pregnancy centers have not garnered the mainstream attention they deserve (or would garner if the roles were reversed). They are, however, getting plenty of play on Fox News, where voters in the Republican base are likely to be paying attention. Fox has already hyped fears of massive spasms of violence over the weekend that didn’t come to pass, but who’s to say the “Summer of Rage” will remain “mostly peaceful” during the entire hot season?
Less dangerous, but still problematic, are examples of progressive overreach among out-of-touch liberal elites and celebrities (like clockwork, they never fail to take the bait).
The list of celebrities weighing in since Roe was overturned includes names like feminist Gloria Steinem, who is offering her New York guest room to out-of-state abortion seekers, and Barbara Streisand, who says the Supreme Court is “the American Taliban.” Not to be outdone, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said he is renouncing his citizenship, adding “F— America.” And John Legend referred to Capitol police as “Storm troopers on their way to tell women to shut up and accept government mandated childbirth. Sickening.”
Regardless of how you feel about this issue or these celebrities, their virtue signaling (a) garners buzz for attention-starved has-beens, and (b) is universally applauded by most mainstream media. As such, they have every incentive to keep churning them out—and to ramp up the rhetoric.
The problem for Democrats is that they rarely catch on to this race to the bottom, until it’s too late.
They start out with an issue where public opinion seems to be on their side and keep talking until they undermine it. They have no way of realizing this, though, because radical rhetoric is rewarded inside the progressive media filter. And so you go from position like “safe, legal, and rare” to something akin to abortion on demand. Whatever the abortion version of “defund the police” turns out to be, Democrats will embrace it and once again grasp defeat from the jaws of victory.
The last and, arguably, least disquieting part of this story concerns progressive politicians’ rhetoric. For example, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, Rep. Maxine Waters declared, “The hell with the Supreme Court. We will defy them.” Meanwhile, politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are talking about impeaching Supreme Court Justices and packing the court. If you were hoping for a return to normalcy and restoring institutions, you should probably keep looking. What is more, if you’re a normie Republican who doesn’t quite fit in with the Jan. 6 crowd, do you really want to throw in with a radical Democratic Party?
A reasonable political observer might conclude that if Democrats can’t win the midterms on the heels of two mass shootings and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, they might want to pack it up (no pun intended). Even Sen. Mitch McConnell recently admitted that Republicans have a real problem in the suburbs. And as Axios notes, “Democrats see [overturning Roe] as a mobilizing issue for suburban women in swing House districts across the country.”
On the other hand, there are reasons to believe all the talk about Republicans being “the dog that caught the car” is overblown. The unpopular Texas Heartbeat Act similarly fueled electoral warnings and ample outrage on Twitter and cable news back in 2021, but it doesn’t appear to be an issue anymore with regards to the GOP’s midterm fortunes. Heck, the issue even receded from the spotlight in Texas.
We still have four months until Election Day. During that time, new, big stories and scandals will undoubtedly emerge. People may realize that Dobbs does not affect them (especially people living in progressive states) nearly as much as inflation, high gas prices, and an overbearing sense of national malaise.
Democrats were expecting to take a beating this November, but now that Roe is gone forever, they see a glimmer of hope that they could avoid the typical fate of the incumbent president’s party—which is to lose bigly in the midterms.
But I’m counting on progressives to overreach, alienate the middle, and blow their shot—again.
