Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel went on Fox Business on Monday and gave some advice to Republicans about how to manage their wildly unpopular abortion positions ahead of next year’s elections. Or at least, she tried to do that.
The candidates and their consultants have got to take this head-on. And the RNC has been very vocal on this. I'm a suburban woman. I've been very vocal on this since 2022. I know this is a huge issue. You cannot wait to be attacked and attacked and attacked to the tune of 30, 40 million and let them dig a hole for you that you cannot get out of as a candidate.
So my advice to every candidate, and I have been very vocal on this, is: Get on TV early, talk about this issue, tell the voters where you stand. We need to find consensus on an issue that brings a lot of Americans apart on different and different sides of this issue, especially since Roe v. Wade has been overturned. And we need to talk to them.
So Republicans should talk more about abortion and say … we need to find a “consensus”? Republican lawmakers have chosen their “different” side of the issue, moving to ban abortions across the country. Her advice doesn’t grapple with the fact that Americans are now reading and hearing more and more stories of Republican lawmakers policing Americans’ bodies and punishing women.
A Pew Research Center poll from April 2023 found that nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans want abortion to be legal in most or all cases. Republican politicians’ abortion stance is so unpopular that their consultants have begun advising them to embrace contraception access and at least pretend to care about the lives of women.
The core problem for the Republican Party is that they don’t have anywhere else to go on the issue. They lack any serious policy prescriptions for the issues facing our country, and their single policy victory—clawing back the reproductive rights of more than half the population—is about as popular as that sounds. You can say whatever you like about the matter, but there are only two sides: You either support the right to choose, or you don’t.
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