Democrats plan to use GOP's old tricks to roll in 2024: CNN
Democrats are planning to use a strategy engineered by former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove to drive up turnout in next year's elections.
Rove boosted Republican turnout in 2004 by pushing ballot initiatives to ban same-sex marriage in swing states to help re-elect George W. Bush, and Democrats are hoping to copy the strategy by capitalizing on the backlash to last year's Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, reported CNN.
“We should put the right to choose on every ballot across the country in 2024," said Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, "not just with the candidates we choose, but with referendum efforts to enshrine reproductive rights in states where right-wing politicians are stripping those rights away."
An abortion rights ballot proposition in Michigan fueled a blue wave last year, and Democratic operatives see 2024 as the perfect moment to flip Rove's playbook and excite swing voters with an wedge issue that remains highly contentious.
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“In 2024, voters will be deciding whether to elect people who want a national abortion ban,” said Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin. “Republicans nationally will feel the fury that Wisconsin feels now.”
Some conservatives are already sounding the alarm, especially after Tuesday's blowout win by Democratic-backed Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz, who will now rule on the state's 1849 ban on abortion that was revived after last year's ruling.
“Pro-lifers: WE WON. Abortion is not a ‘constitutional right’ anymore!” tweeted conservative commentator Ann Coulter. “Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left,” she added.
Some party leaders hope to make economic issues the top Democratic message, but abortion rights advocates and top operatives plan to tie Republicans up and down the ballot to broadly unpopular abortion restrictions, and President Joe Biden's advisers plan to let Vice President Kamala Harris take the lead on the issue as she did in 2022's midterms.
“People around our country are concerned, afraid, confused, desperate, in many ways feeling alone,” Harris said recently in Iowa.