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Sorry Republicans, but those forced-birth ads failed you [1]

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Date: 2023-11-10

This election cycle, Republicans’ obsessive quest to invade and control the bodies of anyone who might become pregnant—by forcing them to endure unplanned, unwanted, and sometimes life-threatening pregnancies—certainly inspired no shortage of creativity.

Admittedly, some of their brightest ideas failed to gain any traction; New Jersey state Sen. Ed “The Trucker” Burr 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, according to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, said women ought to be spayed like dogs. As Marcotte notes, even Durr’s fellow Republicans balked at him saying the ”quiet parts out loud.”

Durr gets to go back to driving trucks and spewing his misogyny over a CB radio, but plenty of other Republicans were part of 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.

RELATED STORY: Republicans have never been this panicked over their abortion debacle—never

First—look at this example of how Democrats used Durr’s words to unseat him!

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

The most visible failure was in Ohio, where a friendly right-wing state Supreme Court majority helped Republicans game the language of a statewide referendum enshrining the right to reproductive choice in the state’s constitution. The court-approved language provided by the forced-birther Secretary of State substituted the phrase “unborn child” for the standard, accepted medical term “fetus.” The apparent hope was that, after wading through the proposition’s already deliberately unwieldy and confusing language, voters would see those words and have some kind of epiphany.

Seeking solace from their political hack judges wasn’t the Republicans’ only tactic. They also enlisted the help of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife Fran, who earnestly stared into the camera, warning Ohioans that “Issue 1 just goes too far” because, as the state’s first lady noted, it would deny parents the opportunity to force their kids to give birth.

Watch:

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

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the GOP got 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 15-week ban on abortion that Democrats would be cowed into submission by ads portraying pro-choice proponents as fanatics, salivating to perform abortions on fully formed babies seconds away from birth.

But that didn’t work either. Virginians brushed off Republicans’ sick fearmongering, and Democrats not only kept their majority in the state senate, they also reclaimed 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 Republicans can’t succeed by calling in chits with conservative judges, can’t succeed by enlisting a pair of grandparents reading off a teleprompter, and can’t even succeed by pushing a dead baby into voters’ faces, what else is there to do?

Well, lying is always an option. That’s what Republican Carolyn Carluccio did when trying to defeat Democrat Dan McCaffrey in the race for 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 from her actual resume, which touted 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.

When stung by an outstanding campaign by Planned Parenthood that managed to effectively define her extremism quite early in the race, Carluccio 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’s the same thing every Donald Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice told the public before they overruled Roe v. Wade.

Carluccio saw the pro-choice writing on the wall, so she enlisted a self-described “proud Democrat” to cut an ad confirming she’d known Carluccio since she was a “second grade law student” (what?), 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 it’s not surprising that she supports her.

It’s also (in legal parlance Lippy 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.

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

And 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 will continue trying to do to anyone who becomes pregnant.

These ads didn’t do the trick, but no doubt they’ll keep trying. And so Democrats will keep winning.

Editor’s Note: This story has been lightly edited for clarity, and its headline has been changed.

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