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Sorry Republicans, but these forced birther ads failed you miserably [1]

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Date: 2023-11-10

In Republicans’ obsessive quest this election cycle to invade and control the bodies of women and others who might become pregnant -- by forcing them to endure unplanned, unwanted, and sometimes life-threatening pregnancies just so Republicans can wave sanctimonious fingers at them — there was certainly no shortage of creativity.

Admittedly, some of their brightest ideas failed to gain any traction; New Jersey state senator Ed Durr (“Ed the trucker”) is now sadly out of a job come January, after telling women they should just “keep their legs closed” and adding his “like” to a post that said women ought to be spayed like dogs. As Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon observed, even Durr’s fellow Republicans balked at Durr saying the ”quiet parts out loud.”

Democrats, of course, pounced on the hapless Durr:

x Got a political advert in the mail today about extreme state senator for NJ about womens reproduction rights..." A woman does have a choice.Keep her legs closed!" NJ state senator Ed Durr .. I know who I'm NOT voting for!😡 pic.twitter.com/JYNI81FaEd — Dawn Calabrese (@dawnkencal) September 18, 2023

Durr may go back to driving trucks now, presumably spewing his misogyny over a CB radio, but other Republicans mounted a slick, well-funded effort to convince voters that Democrats were “just too extreme,” on abortion. They tried multiple tacks to amplify this theme, none of which worked.

The most visible failure was in Ohio, where a friendly right-wing state Supreme Court majority helped Republicans to game the language of a statewide referendum enshrining the right to reproductive choice in the state’s constitution. The Court approved language proposed by the forced-birth lobby that substituted the phrase “unborn child” for the standard, accepted medical term, which is “fetus.” The thought (apparently) was that after wading through the proposition’s already deliberately unwieldy and confusing language, voters would have some kind of epiphany or a “come to Jesus” moment.

And seeking solace from their political hack judges wasn’t the Republicans’ only tactic. They’d also enlisted the help of Ohio governor Mike DeWine and his wife Fran DeWine, who earnestly stared into the camera to assure Ohioans that “Issue One just goes too far” because, as Ms. DeWine intones, it would deny parents the opportunity to force their daughters to give birth.

The video is below:

Voters, however, were apparently unimpressed with this cloying display of concern, and the referendum passed by a wide margin.

In Virginia, however, the GOP resolved to get their hands dirty, since the political ambitions of their private equity wunderkind Glenn Youngkin were on the line. They were so sure that they’d reached an acceptable “compromise” in their proposed ban on reproductive choice “only” after 15 weeks that Democrats would be cowed into submission by ads like the one below, which basically portrayed pro-choice proponents as fanatics just salivating to perform abortions until the very last second before birth.

This is the ad that Republicans ran in Virginia (right up to the very last second when they didn’t). It depicts what is apparently represented as a dead baby, presumably at full term, extending its stiff fingers upward in an abject gesture of despair.

But that didn’t work either. Virginians brushed off Republicans’ sick fearmongering, keeping their majority in the state senate and retaking the house of delegates, effectively neutering Youngkin’s forced-birth legislative schemes for the rest of his term. So much for the “up to the moment of birth” approach. But hey, at least Youngkin wasn’t “spayed like a dog.”

So if you can’t succeed by calling in your chits with conservative judges, and you can’t succeed by enlisting a pair of grandparents reading off a teleprompter, and you can’t even succeed by pushing a dead baby into voters’ faces, what else is there to do?

Well, maybe you just lie. And that’s what Republican Carolyn Carluccio did in trying to defeat Democrat Dan McCaffrey in the race to fill a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But it didn’t go so well. Carluccio was caught scrubbing pro forced-birth language from not just her website, but her actual resume, which touted the fact that she was a “Defender of 2nd Amendment Rights and All Life Under the Law.” She’d also disclosed in February that she’d been endorsed by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, one of the Commonwealth’s leading forced-birth organizations.

And then, stung by an outstanding campaign by Planned Parenthood that managed to effectively define her extremism quite early in the race, she tried to hide her agenda in subsequent ads.

As reported by Taylor Allen, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

While on the campaign trail, Republican Carolyn Carluccio tried to avoid talking about abortion, saying her personal opinion didn’t matter and that she’d “uphold the law.”

Oh gosh, where have voters heard that one before? Oh yes! It was the same thing every Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice told the public right before they overruled Roe v. Wade.

Carluccio saw the writing on the wall, so she enlisted a Democratic law professor to cut an ad that confirms she knew Carluccio since she was a “second grade law student” (?) and that we could trust her not to have a political agenda. As it turns out, the woman, Elizabeth Lippy, was given an internship by Carluccio and considers her a mentor, so yes, it’s not surprising that she supports her. It’s also (in legal parlance she would likely appreciate) irrelevant. What is relevant is that her “mentor” scrubbed her resume so as not to give away the game that she was pro forced birth, as her endorsements attested.

But no, Democrats were supposed to trust her, according to the ad:

In the end, voters declined to trust Carluccio on the word of her faithful former intern. She lost to McCaffrey by over six points.

So, it’s back to the drawing board for Republicans, as they try to comprehend what magical ad or language will actually prevent voters from understanding what they’ve done -- and what they continue trying to do — to anyone in this country who becomes pregnant. These ads didn’t do the trick, but no doubt they’ll keep trying. And Democrats will keep winning.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/10/2204922/-Sorry-Republicans-but-these-forced-birther-ads-failed-you-miserably?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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