How Abortion-Rights Backers Changed Their Message--and Started Winning - Molly Ball, WSJ [View all]
Shortly after November’s state-level elections affirmed voters’ support for abortion rights in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, a Democratic pollster named Angela Kuefler got on a webinar to deliver an analysis—and a warning—to her fellow progressives. Yes, it was clear abortion was a winning issue, she said, but it mattered a lot how advocates talked about it.
“Talking about this in the context of values really widens our support,” said Kuefler, an adviser to the Nov. 7 ballot initiative in Ohio that added a right to abortion to the state’s constitution, winning by nearly 14 points in a state President Biden lost by eight. By values, she explained, she was principally talking about the idea of freedom. In polling by Kuefler’s firm, Global Strategy Group, majorities answered “yes” to both “Should we restore the rights we had under Roe v. Wade?” and “Should personal decisions like abortion be up to women rather than the government?” But the latter statement outperformed the former by a whopping 19-point margin, she noted, adding, “It’s the values language that allows us to win by such big margins.”
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The change is evident to close observers of political discourse. Abortion-rights activists rarely use the term “pro-choice” anymore, preferring to talk about people’s “freedom to decide.” In September, the abortion-rights group Naral Pro-Choice America, founded in 1969, changed its name to Reproductive Freedom for All. Grounded in research that predates the Dobbs ruling, these new buzzwords have helped the abortion-rights side resonate across partisan lines. Republicans have noticed the resonance with their liberty-loving voters. “They stole freedom!” one antiabortion Republican consultant recently remarked.
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Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, won a surprisingly wide five-point victory in his red state with help from a viral ad featuring a young woman talking about becoming pregnant at age 12 after being raped by her stepfather. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t suburban women who reacted most strongly to the ad, said Beshear’s campaign manager, Eric Hyers. “The voters that moved the most were older, rural, conservative men who were registered Republicans,” Hyers said. “Those are the voters who have never been forced to think about ‘What if a 12-year-old gets raped by her stepfather? What then?’ It’s not about labels, pro-this, pro-that. It’s about what you think should happen to the little girl in that situation.”
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The attachment to freedom was accompanied by a deep hostility to its opposite—control—and a feeling that such choices were personal and shouldn’t be subject to politics. In a 2019 focus group in Arizona, a Latino man said, “We live in the United States and we can make those decisions because America is for freedom and justice.” .. “I support the freedom to decide” might seem like a straight-up synonym for “I’m pro-choice,” but the research found major differences in the effectiveness of the two sentences.
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