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Democrats Need the Stacey Abrams Playbook for the Roe Fight

Democrats Need the Stacey Abrams Playbook for the Roe Fight

Democrats are holding protests, raising money and turning sound bites into viral clips on social media in response to the Supreme Court’s seemingly imminent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. They have their rallying cry. But whether the energy will last — and turn around a widely expected congressional shellacking six months from now — depends on whether Democrats can go beyond protests and move toward the kind of electoral organizing that has made pro-life groups so successful.

The prospect of the court gutting Roe “could have an effect right away by getting educated Democrats off their shneids,” says Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard. There’s a difference, however, between mobilizing voters and organizing them, and Skocpol and her coauthors argue in a forthcoming research paper that Democrats need to focus more on the latter than the former.

There are specific groups of voters that are harder to reach and will be the ones most affected by abortion bans or more restrictive policies likely to be adopted in many states, Skocpol says: less educated, more rural than suburban, and the occasional or never-before voters. Of the 10 races most likely to determine control of the Senate, more than half are in states with laws that would ban abortion if and when Roe is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization.

The worry with activists on the left, says Skocpol, “is that they’ll get out there and start yelling at Joe Manchin to get rid of the filibuster. He’s not going to do that. Democrats have a chance to get beyond the filibuster if they elect two or three more senators,” she told me.

In her paper, which she wrote with two student researchers, Skocpol compares the approaches of two of the most prominent activists in the Democratic Party over the last 15 years: the Reverend William Barber II in North Carolina and Stacey Abrams in Georgia.

“What evidence increasingly suggests is that when you’re dealing with people who don’t automatically vote, they respond to a neighbor saying something to them or to something they hear over and over again,” Skocpol told me. “And the right in this country has had a big advantage for quite a lot of time in that their networks reach into churches and gun clubs and the kinds of things that have taken the place of unions.”

The big pro-choice organizations, she says, don’t have those kinds of networks.

To successfully organize, reproductive-rights organizations need to adopt the playbook of Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House who narrowly lost the governor’s race there in 2018. She laid the groundwork for Democratic wins in Georgia’s 2020 Senate runoff with an “electorally focused approach to empowering Black and lower-income people,” Skocpol says. She also “prioritized statewide outreach,” including to smaller rural counties where there were a lot of Black non-voters.

By contrast, Skocpol’s paper notes, Barber’s efforts in North Carolina were less successful. In 2014, incumbent Democratic Senator Kay Hagan lost to Republican Thom Tillis.

“Barber’s movement has primarily used marches, protests and public events to attract media attention in order to move public opinion and thereby press politicians and leaders of all stripes to aid the poor and minorities,” the paper says. “Movement effects in elections are likely to be bigger and more enduring if organizational capacities are persistently deployed on the ground. Bursts of media-worthy protests are unlikely to suffice.”

Both Georgia (where Abrams is a candidate for governor and which is likely to have a very close Senate race) and Ohio have enacted laws prohibiting abortion after six weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute. They were blocked by federal courts, but state lawmakers could try to revive them. Arizona and Wisconsin enacted pre-Roe bans that were never repealed. Guttmacher also lists Florida as a state likely to ban abortions. North Carolina has a pre-Roe abortion ban in place, but it’s unclear how quickly it could become law.

About 60% of Americans support the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision. But about half of the public doesn’t know what the law is in their state, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. That represents an opportunity for Democrats, she says — especially in states with competitive Senate races.

Lake also offers a litany of demographic statistics: 28% of projected voters are parents of children under 18. Some 53% will be women — “and 100% of women have at some point been of reproductive age,” she says. Abortion is a health-care issue that affects all women, she says, “and it’s an issue they thought was none of your business and already settled.”

To quote Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion: “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Julianna Goldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who was formerly a Washington-based reporter for CBS News and White House correspondent for Bloomberg News.

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