ICYMI: GOP Senate Recruits Back The Same Extreme Abortion Positions That Cost The Party In 2022 [HuffPost]

New reporting from HuffPost highlights that Senate Republicans’ top 2024 recruits have “extreme” “anti-abortion” positions that “polls have repeatedly shown” are “deeply unpopular” among independents and swing voters in key battleground states across the map. 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

HuffPost: GOP Senate Recruits Back The Same Extreme Abortion Positions That Cost The Party In 2022
By Liz Skalka and Igor Bobic
June 21, 2023

Key points:

• Senate Republicans’ number one recruiting target in Montana, a state that will help decide control of the upper chamber next year, has compared abortion to “murdering our unborn children.” The party’s preferred candidates in Nevada and Pennsylvania, swing states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, have said abortion should be banned without any exceptions for rape or incest.

• [Republicans are] already at risk of repeating one of the major errors of their disappointing 2022 cycle: running candidates with anti-abortion positions unacceptable to swing voters in a post-Dobbs decision world.

• The backlash to the highly contentious Supreme Court decision repealing abortion rights shattered Republican hopes of retaking the Senate in the midterms, and Democrats are aiming to keep voters fired up about the issue in order to defend their narrow 51-49 majority. Democratic senators will take to the floor of the chamber this week exactly one year after the fall of Roe v. Wade to push for abortion rights.

• Polls have repeatedly shown Republicans losing ground among independents on the abortion issue. The trend has even been confirmed by Republican firms that have conducted research into Senate races this year, according to one memo that inadvertently fell into Democratic hands at a GOP retreat last month.
  
  
• Abortion rights are sufficiently popular to boost Democratic candidates even in red states. A Public Religion Research Institute survey released earlier this year found a majority of people in all seven Trump-won states that the GOP could target — Arizona, Montana, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — think abortion should be legal in most or all cases. 

• In Nevada, another GOP-targeted state where Trump narrowly lost twice, a whopping 80% of the population said abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

• In Montana, national Republicans are reportedly close to drafting wealthy businessman Tim Sheehy to take on incumbent Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. Sheehy would first have to face a competitive primary against Rep. Matt Rosendale. Both potential GOP candidates are staunch abortion opponents. Rosendale has cosponsored legislation banning abortion and birth control, while Sheehy expressed dismay over the Supreme Court ruling maintaining government approval of the abortion pill, comparing abortion to murder.

• “It’s really frustrating how, you know, we have one party in this country that seems to be bent on murdering our unborn children and taking that, taking that tack, you know, in a very militant way,” Sheehy said in an April interview on conservative talk radio show Montana Talks.

• In Pennsylvania, hedge fund executive Dave McCormick … [who] has been touted as a moderate, business-friendly Republican — the kind of recruit favored by the NRSC. His views on abortion may repel the same suburban voters…: McCormick has said that life begins at conception and that he does not support exceptions in abortion laws for rape or incest.

• Sam Brown, an Army veteran who lost the 2022 GOP Senate primary in Nevada to Attorney General Adam Laxalt, for example, said in a questionnaire he would only support Supreme Court nominees “who would understand the importance of protecting life.” Brown is considered a potential 2024 Senate candidate in Nevada.

• In Ohio, meanwhile, entrepreneur Bernie Moreno is positioning himself as the Trumpiest candidate in a GOP primary to take on Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Moreno has said he’s “100% pro-life with no exceptions.” Matt Dolan, a state senator and declared 2024 candidate who has spoken out against Trump, has supported anti-abortion measures in the legislature, as had possible Senate candidate and Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

• In Arizona, everyone is waiting to see whether prominent election denier and former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake will jump into the race for Senate. The former news anchor praised Arizona’s total ban on abortion and has called abortion “the ultimate sin.”

• Key to Democratic messaging on the issue will be the threat of a national abortion ban, which is deeply unpopular in public opinion surveys. McConnell left the door open to such a ban last year, something featured in scores of Democratic ads on the issue. 

• “Republican Senate candidates want to make abortion a crime without exception and rip away women’s right to make their own health care decisions, and in 2024 voters will hold them accountable by rejecting them and their toxic agenda,” said Nora Keefe, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

• “Republicans or any of my potential challengers, I can tell you, the first thing they would do is enact a nationwide abortion ban,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) told HuffPost. “They’ve all said it. I’m going to do everything I can to protect women and their families to make their own health care choices.”
  

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