Republicans and Democrats have a lot of chickens coming home to roost next year | Opinion

Year in and year out, chickens come home to roost at election time. The least a party can do — and sometimes the most — is try to avoid being surprised.

Republicans on the watch for next year’s killer cluckers can already see one named Dobbs. Its daddy was Richard Nixon, and Republicans tended the egg for 50 years before it hatched.

When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion was a minor issue compared to Vietnam, Watergate, inflation or the energy crisis. The first presidential contest after Roe saw little difference between the candidates, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, on abortion rights. Well into the 1980s, polls found little difference in the aggregate views of Democratic and Republican voters.

Yet abortion always had the potential to motivate specific constituencies. Nixon’s strategists tested its potential in the year leading up to Roe by painting his election opponent, George McGovern, as an abortion enthusiast. Their target audience was Democratic Catholics.

Republicans stepped up their rhetoric during the Reagan era in an effort to woo evangelicals alarmed by a liberalizing culture. Democrats responded by emphasizing their support for that culture, in particular the women’s rights movement. Over time the partisan differences spread from politicians and activist groups to the general public.

You know the rest. Pro-lifers got their long-sought legal victory in 2022, and the party that carried their banner got punished for it. Midterm voters rejected antiabortion hardliners (along with some stop-the-steal fanatics) and turned a widely predicted “red wave” into a ripple. Even the GOP’s big red rooster, whose appointees axed Roe, noted the setbacks and warned the purists to pump their brakes. The fear is that abortion extremism will continue to bite Republican candidates, including in next year’s race for the White House.

Democrats have their own worries about 2024. If they renominate an aging Joe Biden but fail to convince voters that he can finish a second term, they’ll be remembered for ignoring a chicken (or is it a 500-pound gorilla?) that was staring them in the face. In the wake of immigration policies that yielded a border crisis and a spending spree that spawned inflation, the last thing the party needs is more chickens. Nevertheless it got one on Oct. 7.

Hamas shocked the world when it perpetrated the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Some Americans got a second shock when thousands of their fellow citizens stood up for the terrorists. Calls for a “ceasefire” came from the usual suspects in Congress before the bodies were cold (in earlier times, a ceasefire after one side has done all the shooting was known as “surrender”). Demonstrations sprang up on campuses and city streets around the country, leaving no doubt where the left placed blame.

Anyone asking who, if not burned and mutilated toddlers, could ever qualify as innocent victims where Israelis are concerned should understand how the left assigns victimhood. Progressive ideology divides the world between oppressors and oppressed – and awards the latter designation to the weaker side in any conflict. Israel can never be the real victim.

In March, Gallup found Democrats’ sympathy for the Palestinians exceeding their sympathy for Israel for the first time in 22 years of polling. It’s a generational shift – and thanks to the war, the tremors are reaching all the way to the White House. President Biden’s support for Israel is hurting him with a lot of Democrats, but it particularly rankles young progressives. They gave him a nickname: Genocide Joe.

As Biden watches his approval numbers sink among Millennials, Gen Z, Arab Americans and Muslims, he must wonder if a prolonged war will keep crucial Democratic voters on the couch next November. Could a distant terrorist organization deny him a second term? The idea seems only marginally stranger than a conservative Supreme Court handing him one.

Michael Smith is a freelance opinion writer in Georgetown, KY.