Both TNR’s Noam Scheiber and Political Animal’s Kevin Drum called attention today to a New York Times report that Carol Tobias of the National Right to Life Foundation had firmly rejected Hillary Clinton’s invitation to find “common ground” in an effort to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Noam suggested Tobias’ position reflected an unwillingness to admit that the Right to Life movement is only interested in celibacy-based approaches to reducing unwanted pregnancies, while Kevin’s take is that it reflected the Right’s determination to keep the culture wars alive instead of actually getting something done. They’re both probably at least half-right, but there’s something a little more basic going on here. While Clinton talked about sex education and abstinence training, the main thrust of her proposal was to encourage birth control, including “emergency” contraception, i.e., the morning-after pill. The Right-to-Life Movement dare not go there, for two reasons: (1) many anti-abortionists oppose “artificial” (anything other than the ol’ rhythm method) contraception; and (2) even those anti-abortionists who support birth control–or who view it as vastly less horrifying than abortion–often embrace a very narrow definition of “contraception.”This second point is familiar to habitues of abortion politics, but perhaps not to everybody else. Part of the full-human-life-begins-at-conception point of view is typically that “conception” occurs at the moment when an ovum is fertilized. Anything that deliberately interferes with live birth after that instant is an “abortion.” Thus, most really hard-core right-to-lifers believe that birth control methods (including not only morning-after pills but IUDs) that in part or in full rely on preventing implantation of the fertilized ovum in the uterine wall are not “contraceptives,” but “abortifacients” that are morally indistinguishable from a late-term abortion or, for that matter, infanticide. Never mind that this kind of “abortion” occurs naturally in a very high percentage of proto-pregnancies; ideology is ideology.Now: of the 40-45 percent of Americans who routinely identify themselves as “pro-life,” how many do you think share this rather eccentric view of the line between “contraception” and “abortion?” Not that many, I imagine. And that’s why Clinton’s proposal, if it is repeated often by other pro-choice Americans, really could drive a big wedge between pro-life pragmatists and ideologues. Indeed, it’s a classic example of how to completely revolutionize the politics of a cultural issue without abandoning progressive principles: it simultaneously refutes the conservative-fed perception that Democrats enthusiastically celebrate every single abortion, regardless of the circumstances, and exposes the extremism of those on the other side who pretend to just worry about a small category of repulsive-sounding procedures. And for that reason, Hillary Clinton has just given us all a textbook case of what it really means to “seize the center”: it does not mean “moving to the right,” it means moving to higher and stronger ground.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 11: If Biden “Steps Aside” and Harris Steps Up, There Should Be No Falloff in Support
At New York I discussed and tried to resolve one source of anxiety about a potential alternative ticket:
One very central dynamic in the recent saga of Democratic anxiety over Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump, given the weaknesses he displayed in his first 2024 debate, has been the role of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris. My colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained the problem nearly two years ago as the “Kamala Harris conundrum”:
“Top party donors have privately worried to close Obama allies that they’re skeptical of Harris’s prospects as a presidential candidate, citing the implosion of her 2020 campaign and her struggles as VP. Jockeying from other potential competitors, like frenemy Gavin Newsom, suggests that few would defer to her if Biden retired. Yet Harris’s strength among the party’s most influential voters nonetheless puts her in clear pole position.”
The perception that Harris is too unpopular to pick up the party banner if Biden dropped it, but too well-positioned to be pushed aside without huge collateral damage, was a major part of the mindset of political observers when evaluating Democratic options after the debate. But now fresher evidence of Harris’s public standing shows she’s just as viable as many of the candidates floated in fantasy scenarios about an “open convention,” “mini-primary,” or smoke-filled room that would sweep away both parts of the Biden-Harris ticket.
For a good while now, Harris’s job-approval numbers have been converging with Biden’s after trailing them initially. These indicate dismal popularity among voters generally, but not in a way that makes her an unacceptable replacement candidate should she be pressed into service in an emergency. As of now, her job-approval ratio in the FiveThirtyEight averages is 37.1 percent approve to 51.2 percent disapprove. Biden’s is 37.4 percent approve to 56.8 percent disapprove. In the favorability ratios tracked by RealClearPolitics, Harris is at 38.3 favorable to 54.6 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 39.4 percent favorable to 56.9 percent unfavorable. There’s just not a great deal of difference other than slightly lower disapproval/unfavorable numbers for the veep.
On the crucial measurement of viability as a general-election candidate against Trump, there wasn’t much credible polling prior to the post-debate crisis. An Emerson survey in February 2024 showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 percent (43 percent to 46 percent), which was a better showing than Gavin Newsom (down ten points, 36 percent to 46 percent) or Gretchen Whitmer (down 12 points, 33 percent to 45 percent).
After the debate, though, there was a sudden cascade of polling matching Democratic alternatives against Trump, and while Harris’s strength varied, she consistently did as well as or better than the fantasy alternatives. The first cookie on the plate was a one-day June 28 survey from Data for Progress, which showed virtually indistinguishable polling against Trump by Biden, Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer. All of them trailed Trump by 2 to 3 percent among likely voters.
Then two national polls released on July 2 showed Harris doing better than other feasible Biden alternatives. Reuters/Ipsos (which showed Biden and Trump tied) had Harris within a point of Trump, while Newsom trailed by three points, Andy Beshear by four, Whitmer by five, and Pritzker by six points. Similarly, CNN showed Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer trailing him by five points.
Emerson came back with a new poll on July 9 that wasn’t as sunny as some for Democrats generally (every tested name trailed Trump, with Biden down by three points). But again, Harris (down by six points) did better than Newsom (down eight points); Buttigieg and Whitmer (down ten points); and Shapiro (down 12 points).
There’s been some talk that Harris might help Democrats with base constituencies that are sour about Biden. There’s not much publicly available evidence testing that hypothesis, though the crosstabs in the latest CNN poll do show Harris doing modestly better than Biden among people of color, voters under the age of 35, and women.
The bottom line is that one element of the “Kamala Harris conundrum” needs to be reconsidered. There should be no real drop-off in support if Biden (against current expectations) steps aside in favor of his vice-president (the only really feasible “replacement” scenario at this point). She probably has a higher ceiling of support than Biden as well, but in any event, she would have a fresh opportunity to make a strong first or second impression on many Americans who otherwise know little about her.