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National Democrats need to take the abortion fight all the way down on state ballots [1]

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Date: 2022-09-02

State legislatures are where more national grassroots and institutional Democrat money needs to be going, and fast. That includes North Carolina, where Republicans need just two state Senate seats and three state House seats to have a veto-proof majority against Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. The Republicans are already talking potential abortion restrictions in the event they gain a supermajority. Republicans in Wisconsin and Virginia are also on the cusp of having majorities that could ban abortion. “Our challenge will be to convince—or not to convince because it’s true—will be to tell people that any one of these individual legislature races is just like a constitutional amendment in Kansas,” Cooper said.

Democrats can take heart that it’s a message at least some voters and would-be voters are getting. Tom Bonier, chief executive at TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, says that in North Carolina, Democrats have a 5-point edge in new voter registrations since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights. Before that, Republicans were leading by 1 point in new registrations. In other battleground states—including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—Bonier says there’s a surge where “we’re seeing more women register and we’re seeing more Democrats register.”

That’s fantastic, but there needs to be a concerted campaign by Democrats to talk to all those new registrants about the need to vote the entire Democratic ticket. And big, national Democratic donors have to engage in that. “We are seeing more [spending and fundraising] on a legislative level, but there’s still a long way to go. Donors need to understand how critical these races are, especially around voting rights and abortion,” said Morgan Jackson, a North Carolina Democratic strategist who works with Cooper. “National Democratic donors are late to the party on state races because Republicans have been here for over a decade.”

It’s a message new voters highly motivated by abortion access should be receptive to, if Laila Shaikh, a brand-new Gen_Z voter in Ohio, is representative. She’s voting for the first time this election. “That’s something that’s extremely personal, and it definitely did push me to go to the polls as a young woman, because you never know what type of situation you’re going to be in,” Shaikh said.

“Especially pushing me on being like, ‘Hey, I should even register for the smaller elections, you know, not just the one that’s coming up in November,’” she added.

Precisely. And for the entire ballot.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/2/2120433/-National-Democrats-need-to-take-the-abortion-fight-all-the-way-down-on-state-ballots

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