How women are reshaping the 2022 Senate map- POLITICO

On Sep 13, 2022

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Republican Senate candidates appear to be getting more and more concerned about losing women voters this fall. POLITICO reporter Natalie Allison recently took a close look at two indications that GOP candidates in Senate races are worried that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision could be turning female voters away from the party. “One after the other, Republican nominees in top Senate battlegrounds have softened, backpedaled and sought to clarify their abortion positions after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade,” Allison wrote. “Another [sign] is that male candidates have begun putting their wives in front of the camera to speak directly to voters in new television ads.”

The change in tactics is a departure from years in which the conventional wisdom in politics was that abortion wasn’t enough of a deciding factor in how people voted. That’s clearly changed, though, as women’s voter registration has surged ahead of men’s in crucial states in recent months and after aWall Street Journal poll was released last week showing that abortion was the single issue most likely to drive respondents to vote in November.

Read the full POLITICO article by Allison to hear more about what strategists in a wide array of states are thinking about how the post-Dobbs landscape could torpedo — or not — Republican chances in the fall. I called the author to talk a little bit more about the takeaways, and what we still don’t know about how all of this might play out in November.

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

Katelyn Fossett: Can you briefly explain how the Senate map looks different now than it did pre-Roe?

Natalie Allison: Well, now, we are in the post-primary phase of the midterms, with the exception of New Hampshire, where Republican voters will choose a nominee on Tuesday. And before the Dobbs decision, we were still pre-primary.

But that’s also a part of this. Before Dobbs, in several cases, Republican candidates were still trying to get out of their primaries. And we were seeing conversations in these states among those candidates about how anti-abortion they were, and they were having to prove their anti-abortion credentials to voters to make it out of that primary. So now they’re in a position where they have to speak to a general election audience, and no longer just the primary voters, who are obviously much more anti-abortion than the general-election crowd. That’s part of why we’re seeing such a change in rhetoric from before the Supreme Court decision to now.

Those Republicans who survived their primaries, largely running on anti-abortion platforms, are now having to appeal to a wider audience of voters, many of whom are concerned about the idea that a right to an abortion is no longer guaranteed in some places. And that includes, in particular, suburban women.

Fossett: So that seems to be the demographic of women that Republican candidates are most concerned about, right?

Allison: The women they’re concerned about in particular are those who shifted toward [Virginia Governor] Glenn Youngkin last year. The suburban mothers. The ones who — depending on the election cycle, and whether we’re talking pre-Trump or post-Trump — the women who could actually switch their vote.

They could support Republican candidates, or, in the case of 2018, they were women who were angry about the rise of Trump and got in line behind Democrats. And then, as we saw after the election of President Joe Biden, and continued school closures and concerns about their children’s education, these same women found their way back to the Republican Party in a place like Virginia. And these are the women who, more so than very young women, could be persuaded to switch their vote. It’s not necessarily the young Gen Z or millennial women, who are going to tend to support the Democratic Party anyway. It’s the moms and women in the suburbs.

Fossett: Is there any concern — or hope — that the actual results of elections will look different? That people are saying in polls that they will support Democrats, perhaps because of abortion, but they will actually support Republicans when Election Day comes?

Allison: Yes. We’ve seen in recent cycles that polling does not tell the full story. It is a very real possibility that women who are saying now that abortion is really important face two more months of inflation and high consumer costs and could decide, at the end of the day, they’re not willing to support the Democratic Party right now, regardless of their feelings about abortion.

There’s also this idea among the consultant class that people who are really partisan will always come back home later in the election cycle. So maybe it seems like there is this window of time where they’re considering moving over or being a swing voter, but they would say history shows many of these people come Election Day are going to go back to where they usually are. I think in the case of the suburban women voters, they’re just a voting bloc that has shown that they sometimes really get moved from party to party in a way that maybe some of the other demographics don’t.

There’s still this question of, will abortion drive voters to turn out based on the idea that they want to protect abortion rights? That remains to be seen. But history has shown us that men running for Senate in Republican states have lost their races because they said something that was really off-putting to the average person. So thinking about Todd Akin in Missouri or Richard Mourdock in Indiana. These are candidates whose comments about abortion, and about not supporting exceptions for rape, appear to have ultimately cost them their elections.

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In our keynote interview, POLITICO national political reporter Elena Schneider will speak with Jennifer Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council. Our Member Exchange panel, featuring Women Rule: The Exchange Business and Impact leaders, will focus on boosting gender and racial health equity in our communities.

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