The liberal side of the Texas abortion showdown has the two most powerful Democrats in Washington squarely in its corner: Barack Obama and Harry Reid — not to mention a Dixie Chick.
On the right: Rick Perry’s holding down the fort without much obvious help from national Republicans.
The RNC hasn’t latched onto the fight. Few national Republicans have weighed in. And a key party official in Texas acknowledged there’s no behind-the-scenes help coming, though he says he doesn’t need it.
Republicans will talk about the abortion bill when they’re asked about it, but they aren’t swooping into the fight with the same enthusiasm as liberals.
(PHOTOS: Wendy Davis’s filibuster)
The mismatch makes sense: Even abortion bills that poll well, like the one in Texas does, open the door to the kinds of comments that have hurt national Republicans repeatedly — from Rep. Trent Franks’s comments last month on the “very low” number of rape-related pregnancies to Todd Akin blowing his shot at a Senate seat over his “legitimate rape” remarks in 2012.
But that political calculus doesn’t do much for anti-abortion activists who are glad to see their issue front and center.
“You either fight and ask your leaders to fight on an issue that cuts your way or you just fold up and go home, which is what the national party wants to do,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List. “It really is fear. It really is simply, ‘We’re not going to go there.’”
(PHOTOS: Stars weigh in on Texas abortion fight)
“Now, you’ve got an issue that’s in your platform, that cuts your way with big margins. To be silent is a mistake,” Dannenfelser said.
In contrast, Democrats couldn’t be happier with the way the issue is energizing their supporters.
Jeremy Bird, the former national field director for President Obama’s reelection campaign who now runs Battleground Texas, a group that’s trying to make Democrats more competitive in the state, says the abortion showdown inspired about 500 volunteers to knock on doors registering voters this weekend.
“Most people don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I want to register voters in the 100-degree heat,” Bird told POLITICO.
The political reality is that abortion is a dangerous debate to have on the national stage, even for a short period of time — as Franks found out when his comments on the “very low” number of rape-related pregnancies blew his chance to lead the debate on the House-passed ban on abortion after 20 weeks.
And that was a one-day debate in the House. The Texas Legislature is about to spend the better part of 30 days on it. That’s a lot of time for someone to trip on their shoelaces.
Perry’s decision to call a special session to pass the bill — which would ban abortions after 20 weeks and impose strict new rules on abortion clinics — carries the risk of political missteps for every day the Legislature spends on it. Perry has already made some people on his own side cringe with his remarks last week suggesting Davis was lucky she wasn’t aborted.
(QUIZ: Do you know Wendy Davis?)
It’s not that Republicans are afraid the public won’t support the Texas bill. They know the polling is solidly on their side: Most Americans favor some restrictions on abortions, and a Gallup poll earlier this year found that their support for legal abortions drops dramatically after the first trimester.
There’s also the National Journal poll that found 48 percent of Americans would support a ban on abortions after 20 weeks. And the Texas bill, specifically, gets high levels of support, at least among the state’s voters: a Texas Tribune poll found that 62 percent of the state’s voters would support eliminating abortions after 20 weeks.
Those polls don’t measure public support for all of the implications of the Texas bill — particularly the new health standards that, according to its critics, could force all but five of the state’s abortion clinics to close.
But taken together, the polls give Republicans a reasonable amount of confidence that the Texas abortion debate won’t alienate huge blocs of voters.
“I don’t know how you get in trouble politically for taking a position that a majority of Americans favors,” Texas Republican Party Chairman Steve Munisteri told POLITICO.
GOP pollster Whit Ayres said he’d be “happy to have a debate on an 80 percent issue when the 80 percent is on your side” — referring to the eight out of 10 people in the Gallup poll who said abortions should be illegal in the third trimester.
But there’s a difference between having the public on your side on an issue and having them think it’s important. Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport noted that abortion is never one of the top priorities Americans list when the polling organization conducts its regular surveys of national priorities. In the May survey, he said, the top priorities for Americans were jobs, the economy and a more efficient government.
“Every which way we’ve looked at priorities, … nowhere does abortion appear up in the top,” Newport said. “It runs the risk of the public saying, ‘You’re out of sync with what you should be spending your time on.”
There’s also a difference between claiming victory in the polling and actively rallying to help pass the Texas abortion bill. Republican National Committee officials didn’t respond to requests for comment on the bill and how it could affect the national party. Neither did members of the Growth and Opportunity Project, the group that produced the report for the RNC on how to avoid repeating the party’s losses in the 2012 election.
GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway says the party will be on solid ground with the debate as long as it sticks to the issues. But in a not-so-subtle message to Perry, she warned Republicans not to get distracted and make the debate about personalities — like Davis.
“It would be a mistake to divert attention from the central message here — that 64 percent of Americans support a ban on abortions after the 20th week when told that nonpartisan medical experts say the fetus can feel pain at that point — and onto messengers like Wendy Davis,” Conway said. “The right should stick to its knitting: issues over individuals, policies over politics, principles over personalities. The public supports their position on this, a measure that has passed in a number of states without repercussion.”
If the Texas abortion bill passes, as it’s expected to, it won’t be the only strict package of state restrictions. Ohio Gov. John Kasich just signed another measure into law that requires abortion clinics to have agreements to send patients to hospitals in an emergency, and abortion rights groups are worried that a lot of clinics will have to close because they can’t meet the standards, according to The Washington Post.
And even though Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell had to back away from a bill that would have required women to get an invasive kind of ultrasound before having an abortion, he still signed a weaker version into law — and the state has also adopted building codes for abortion clinics that some facilities say could force them to shut down.
Bird says Perry’s personal remarks about Davis were just one of the issues that fired up the Battleground Texas volunteers. He said they were motivated by what they consider the heavy-handed tactics of Republicans who are trying to pass the abortion bill again, as well as their failure to pass other measures that are important to women, like equal-pay legislation.
“It’s not just the issue, it’s the way they went about it — the bullying, the breaking of the rules, the calling of the special session because they couldn’t get it done in the regular session,” Bird said. “And then you see them belittling the people who were there … and Rick Perry talking about Wendy Davis’s past. I think people are really frustrated by that.”
Munisteri, however, said Republicans have plenty of enthusiastic volunteers of their own — and that the main accomplishment of groups like Battleground Texas has been to convince the RNC to put more money into Texas so he can hire 21 more full-time staffers.
“The Democrats did something I was not able to do in my three years as the state party chairman — convince the national party to pay attention to Texas,” he said.
So far, that doesn’t include sending national representatives to Texas for the abortion debate, though. But Munisteri says that’s fine; he doesn’t need them — because the bill is going to pass and the debate isn’t going to change anyone’s minds.
“It’s no surprise they can turn out a few thousand people for a rally,” Munisteri said of the Democrats and the abortion rights groups. “Is that going to change anything? No.”
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