Originally posted on Facebook
In all the punditry’s hand-wringing about the Democratic chances in the 2022 election, I rarely see any reference to the impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. After today, I think that outcome is likely. And I also think the impact on our elections–especially state legislative elections–will be profound.
All of us who do advocacy on state legislative elections know how hard it is to get people–and lately newspapers, too–to pay attention to them. We know how they don’t connect the party identification of incumbent legislators to control over the legislature and control over the legislature to policy decisions. And so Republicans incumbents in SEPA and elsewhere in the state, and their equivalents elsewhere, skate by as voters turned off by the increasingly Trumpified Republicans Party push the button for familiar names of incumbents.
If Roe is gone, voting for any Republican legislator in PA, no matter how they say they will vote on abortion–will be empowering the Republicans in the General Assembly to restrict the right to abortion. If Roe is overturned, existing law in PA will make abortion illegal in our state. That means that we will have to enact laws that allow for and protect abortion and a General Assembly controlled by Republicans WILL NOT ALLOW THOSE LAWS TO COME UP FOR A VOTE. So when the few Republicans who are pro-choice say they will break with their party, we will be able to claim, truly, that so long as they support Republican control over the PA House and Senate, they will be empowering the most extreme ideas of Mike Turzai, Russ Diamond and Daryl Metcalfe.
The so-called Republicans moderates will not be able to hide.
There are very few issues that can change a vote in a state legislative race. This is the one that can do so.