The New York Times points out that virulent abortion foe and far-right conspiracy theorist Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn is lying low, when it comes to abortion rhetoric, in her new Senate bid—and that that's rather unusual for someone who, ahem, has built a reputation on being one of the loudest people in the House. Just how quiet is she being? Pretty darn quiet.
Ms. Blackburn declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.
Blackburn may well ramp up her anti-abortion rhetoric in the campaign's closing weeks, but her team’s apparent desire to dodge the issue is quite the change from how Blackburn started out her campaign.
[T]he only real memorable moment involving abortion in Ms. Blackburn’s campaign was on its very first day. Last year, Twitter blocked paid promotion of a video announcing Ms. Blackburn’s campaign because it included her talking about how she “stopped the sale of baby body parts.”
That ad was a reference to one of the more notorious incidents in Blackburn's career: her eager embrace of far-right conspiracy theories peddled with the help of a far-far-right hoax video targeting Planned Parenthood. Blackburn helped elevate the conspiracy to the House itself, and issued not a stitch of apology for the damage her promoted hoax unleashed on the medical community, the scientific community, and her other targets. She didn't care. At all.
She still doesn't, but stuck in the middle of a competitive Senate battle against Phil Bredesen, her campaign team has apparently decided that being known as one the most frothing of anti-abortion foes is not a net positive, and that's a curious decision. Most far-right conservatives with such a record are more than eager to remind voters of it, in efforts to motivate their own base. The only reason for the current tactical silence would be a calculation that her anti-abortion stance (and hoax-laden history) would do more to turn out opposition against her than support for her.
That seems a reasonable fear. The nomination of the Alito-esque Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has, overnight, changed the political dynamics of abortion; no longer is it mere abstract possibility that Roe v. Wade may be overturned, but an immediate reality that will affect every American voter. Both those that wish to protect Roe and those that wish to see it dismantled are motivated in the extreme to turn out in the November elections. The problem for Blackburn and other Republicans is that those that wish to protect Roe are, in polls, the distinct majority.
Blackburn tying herself to Kavanaugh and to the end of Roe during this particular campaign season would make her a target, not a hero.
And so, for now, she's clamming up. The campaign isn't talking about it in public, nor to the press; she's gone into the far-right bunker on this one. If she wins, it will likely suddenly reappear again in the first five minutes of her acceptance speech. If it looks like she's about to lose, the campaign may reverse course and shout it from the rooftops in the hopes that the far-right base, currently demotivated by the extent to which dear leader Donald Trump continues to suck, rallies to her side after all.
But for now, the House's most notorious peddler of anti-abortion hoaxes, now seeking a Senate spot because apparently this is the best Republicanism can do,these days, doesn't have much to say about all that. For now.