Abortion looms large in Florida elections Nov. 8 | Bill Cotterell
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Suppose you worked hard for decades to achieve something and, when you finally accomplished it, the prize you’d dreamed of for so long turned out to be a big, fat millstone around your neck.
And, even worse, suppose you couldn’t admit your new self-inflicted handicap was dragging you down — you had to smile bravely and pretend to be savoring a great moral victory.
That’s pretty much where the Republican Party finds itself, at the state and national levels, with the pivotal midterm elections less than 10 weeks away. The issue hurting the GOP, the topic that’s become sort of a life raft for foundering Democrats, is abortion.
Charlie Crist and Val Demings, the Democratic nominees for governor and U.S. Senate, are using abortion to depict Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio, the Republicans in those offices now, as Neanderthals wanting to keep women pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen. To be completely fair, Rubio and DeSantis haven’t said anything about shoes, but they’re pretty much stuck with a hardline “pro-life” position that seems totally out of fashion politically.
The U.S. Supreme Court ignited the issue with its June 24 repeal of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion. That sent the matter back to the states, many of which had “trigger law” ready to restrict abortion. More lawsuits ensued, but public reaction was swift and severe — and overwhelming against the GOP position.
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Kansas voters soundly rejected an anti-choice constitutional amendment. A New York congressional election that looked good for Republicans went to the Democratic nominee, who made abortion a big deal.
Ballot proposals protecting abortion choice are in the works in five states next November — California, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Vermont — and a Michigan initiative got 750,000 signatures, almost twice what it needed, before being blocked on a technicality by a state elections board. That one’s on appeal.
Meanwhile, Republican nominees for governor and Congress in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina “scrubbed” their campaign web sites, deleting anti-abortion statements that seemed like a good idea not so long ago. Some of that is just timing — they ran hard to the right in their GOP primaries, and now need to move back to the center — but a lot of it is acknowledgment that this became a losing hand the minute the Supreme Court gave the party what it wanted for 50 years.
A recent Gallup poll showed 67% public support for abortion choice up to 12 weeks gestation.
The Republican Party national platform says, “we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” and calls for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion nationwide.
DeSantis signed the law last April forbidding abortion after 15 weeks gestation, without exceptions for rape, incest or human trafficking. He has been tactically vague on the campaign trail, saying he’s opened to seeing what new limits are do-able.
Crist has slammed him as anti-woman and promised to sign an executive order protecting abortion on his first day in office.
Rubio stands by his anti-abortion record, without rape or incest exceptions, while recognizing that’s not the majority opinion.
“I never said this is an easy issue,” he recently told a Miami interviewer. “It puts two fundamental rights in conflict — the right to choose of a woman and the right to life of an unborn human being.”
Demings fired back on Twitter, “Marco Rubio is obsessed with taking away our freedoms. Losing the right to choose means women’s lives are at risk, doctors could be thrown in jail and victims of rape and incest forced to carry the seed of their rapist.”
The poles-apart positions of the candidates won't make Florida's elections a referendum on abortion. Although polls show solid support for choice, voters are more concerned about inflation, education, crime and other issues.
But in Florida and nationally, a lot of Republicans probably wish the Supreme Court had waited until next term to give them the big abortion victory they sought for so long.
Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Abortion looms large in Florida elections Nov. 8 | Bill Cotterell
