Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Abortion was a big issue in the 2022 midterm. It will be a big issue in 2024.
Democrat Marilyn Lands on Tuesday decisively won an Alabama state House seat in a long-held Republican district, notching a special-election victory after centering her campaign on promoting access to abortion and in vitro fertilization.
Lands’s win was the latest in a string of Democratic victories around reproductive rights after abortion rights advocates experienced a huge blow nearly two years ago. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — which had established a constitutional right to abortion — in 2022, Democrats have found success in battleground elections and ballot referendums by focusing heavily on protecting abortion rights and running against GOP opposition to them.
SCOOPLET: Speaker Mike Johnson railed against “chemical abortions” in a previously-unreported 2020 interview. He criticized those who mail “a chemical that will induce the abortion, you know, a pill or a syringe … We have to be very vigilant about that.” https://t.co/dk7cgjQHNX pic.twitter.com/fR5DecfDDS
— Daniel Lippman (@dlippman) March 27, 2024
Andrew Solender at Axios:The last precinct is in & Democrat Marilyn Lands has flipped Alabama's #HD10 in a 62-37 landslide! That even beats Doug Jones' 23-point margin in 2017. We've just updated our special elections Big Board with the numbers https://t.co/aR9PkU0n3G pic.twitter.com/Vh4W3AxL7t
— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) March 27, 2024
House Democrats are seizing on an anti-IVF push by a group of right-wing House Republicans to accuse the GOP of trying to "have it both ways," Axios has learned.
Why it matters: Republicans have painstakingly tried to distance from an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that restricted access to fertility services.
The backdrop: Four right-wing House Freedom Caucus members wrote to Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough last week voicing "strong objections" to a policy expanding IVF access to veterans.