Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max The Democratic Party’s capacity to avoid a November bloodbath could come down to how energized voters are by an expected Supreme Court ruling ending abortion rights. Such a ruling would place the country in uncharted political territory. And, as such, it’s impossible to predict its electoral impact. But there are recent precedents for Democrats waging national campaigns around abortion rights and related threats to women’s health — and the results don’t necessarily suggest it’s the elixir the party hopes. After the 2012 election, conventional wisdom held that Republicans were damaged by their candidate’s stances on reproductive issues. A young spokeswoman for the BARACK OBAMA campaign named JEN PSAKI even described it as ipso facto reasoning for MITT ROMNEY’s loss. “The more we’re talking about women’s issues, women’s health care, the differences between the candidates, the better it is for us,” she explained. But two political scientists, JOHN SIDES, now of Vanderbilt University, and LYNN VAVRECK, of UCLA, measured attitudes of women voters to Obama and Romney as traced over the course of media coverage of contraception and abortion issues in 11,000 publications and media outlets. They found the argument unpersuasive. “It wasn’t clear that abortion as an issue had a real effect on persuadable voters in terms of which direction they shifted in the course of the campaign,” Sides told West Wing Playbook. “It didn’t push women in his direction. None of that really happened.” Still, the perception stuck, and two years later, Democrats leaned in even harder. The “War on Women” mantra — built around the idea that Republican candidates would limit access to both abortion and birth control — did not prevent a huge GOP wave in 2014. That, in turn, produced a separate bit of conventional wisdom: Democrats had overestimated how much a campaign cudgel reproductive rights could be. The reality, in retrospect, was probably somewhere in between, with murky explanations accompanying it. Among them: reproductive rights issues aren’t necessarily politically determinative and can resonate in different ways. To a voter, maintaining a right to an abortion may hold different weight than supporting legislation requiring insurance companies to cover birth control. Still, Democratic operatives say it would be folly to look back at 2014 and conclude that reproductive rights don’t work electorally. One operative on Sen. MARK UDALL’s (D-Colo.) Senate reelection campaign said their relentless focus on birth control — an emphasis that earned him the moniker “Mark Uterus” — was actually “wildly successful” at keeping Udall in the race. “Obama was at 37 percent in Colorado. It was a slog,” the person said. “All the modelling told us is that [CNN’s] Chris Cilliza and the pundits were getting annoyed that we were spending all this time on abortion but any decision to focus on something else would be to focus on something less salient to voters just because you find the press coverage annoying.” Biden is in a similar polling pit as Obama in 2014. But whereas the loss of access to abortion was hypothetical threat back then, it could very well be the reality in 2022. Vavreck, for one, says that she expects far different results than the muddied cause and effect that she and Sides documented ten years ago. “There has been a fundamental shift in the dimension we are fighting over,” she explained, noting that Democrats’ perception of the importance of abortion was heightened even before news leaked of the Supreme Court draft opinion. But she also sounded a note of caution. If Democrats were to benefit politically from the overturning of Roe, it would be with respect to their voters being galvanized, not in moderate Republicans suddenly leaving their party. “I think it is not so straightforward to believe that there are all these Republicans who have this issue and say, ‘How can we steal them?’” she explained. “One of the things our data shows is if you're cross positioned with the ideology of your party, that issue is actually not that important to you.” Put another way, if you’re a pro-choice Republican, then you probably don’t conceive of the loss of abortion rights as a top voting issue. “If it was,” Vavreck summarized, “you wouldn’t be a Republican.” TEXT US — ARE YOU BARBARA LEAF, Biden’s nominee to serve as the State Department’s assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs? We want to hear from you. Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.
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