Abortion principles, abortion politics

The 90s were probably the last time you could pull Enlightened Centrism cards like “safe, legal, rare” or “‘culture of life’ but what we really need is more gibs for the babymamas” on abortion and be treated like some kind of political genius. The only reason this worked was because the electoral coalitions were substantially more weighted towards suburban white women, possibly the most whimsical of demographics, who vote solely based on vibes and the ick, and no one was being honest about what they really wanted.

Like many things, in a democracy the political issue is so warped that it manages to be orthogonal to the moral issue at the relevant margin. Se vis pacem, para bellum. Si infantes vis, magna comitia vince. I will not try to convince someone that abortion is an atrocity; assume that as a given. Imagine that only wheatfield waifus are getting knocked up in this halcyon future, if that makes it easier to swallow. The question is how you get there, ideally as quickly as possible, without sabotaging the entire endeavor.

The best models we have of electoral outcomes varying with respect to campaign messaging use the idea of political salience - what are the three or so things a voter actually cares about, and which candidate do they trust more on them? Once you get beyond demography (which is a hell of a caveat) you’re left with semi-floating signifiers like Crime or The War or The Economy. These notably do not correspond to any actual portfolio of policies, which means if you poll on policies, you will find the results incoherent enough that you should doubt the underlying political sanity of the American voter. Outcomes heavily rely on caveats, exceptions, wording, and assumptions. This is why they elect you, supposedly, to worry about the boring stuff that frightens and confuses them. Policies, in other words, are not what you want to focus on if you are going to win an election. This doesn’t mean you don’t have policies, but the function of those planks is to reward people who really, really care about policies, not the median voter.

You saw this in the Ohio referendum, which was incoherent enough to appeal to the purportedly conservative Ohio voter. What exactly does “the right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” entail? You’ll find out when it works through the courts in ten years (spoiler: infanticide). But yay rights! But uh oh, we know “reproductive decisions” are code for “abortion” and we don’t like that. But it’s okay, we can still protect children when they look like children, post “viability”. But what if I, like, really need one? It’s okay, sweetie, if it’s for your “health”. Something for everyone!

The way to deal with referenda like this is usually technical objections (which in the Ohio case failed), or dueling-banjo referenda that conflict in complicated ways that can be resolved in arenas in which you have control. With candidates the solution is actually far less complicated.

Talk about something else.

When a campaign succeeds in driving saliency of an issue on which the other party basically has more credibility with the median voter than you do, you shut up about it after making whatever symbolic concessions to your own abstract position are required, and you yell as loudly as possible about something you do have credibility on. If you are a pro-life candidate in an state that is about to write “yay abortion sometimes maybe” into its constitution by a 13% margin, you are no longer “the pro-life candidate”, you are the “stop schizophrenic hobos from knifing your daughter” candidate, or whatever you can highlight best on in a local context.

Trump is shaping up to pull exactly this kind of triangulation. “Everyone calls me the most pro-life president, we got rid of Roe versus Wade, a terrible decision, probably one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever made - but some of these states, they’ve just gone too far. I’m happy it’s with the states, but Florida I think has just gone too far. Let me tell you, Florida is a great state, but MEATBALL RON isn’t doing them any favors. Flying people from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, what did that do? They’re going to be gone so fast, out of the country. Deported!” You don’t spend all of your limited time with the public explaining your moderation while you audibly sweat that your evangelical get-out-the-vote bank might take you too seriously, as happend in Virginia - offense is by far the best defense.

What do you do when you’re elected? The art of the possible. Policy, again, is separate enough from politics that you do have room to maneuver. And the people you are appealing to with policy are ideally at least led by those smart enough to understand the distinction. If abortion in your state is approximately as easy to procure as a handgun license in New York City because, for instance, you aggressively pursued a licensing / compliance framework, or tracked the personnel overlap with “protestors” who like insurrecting your legislature and threw the book at them in the same way the feds give five year sentences for jaywalking with a “being Republican” enhancement, well, they can’t say you’re not on the right track.