ALABAMA BLUE

Alabama’s first election since the state’s IVF fiasco yielded a Democratic blowout. It’s one more reminder of just how important reproductive rights will be in 2024.

• Know what’s better than a bunch of polls sizing up the national 2024 horse race in vague and unmeaningful ways? Actual voting results. In this case, they showed, yet again, how concerned real American voters are about reproductive rights. Meet Democrat Marilyn Lands, who won a special election in a Republican Alabama House district last night after putting her own harrowing abortion story at the center of her campaign. Alabama is ground zero for the post-Dobbs reality, ever since the state has an effective abortion ban and even temporarily suspended IVF treatments after a Dobbs-enabled court ruled last month that frozen embryos could be considered live children. In a devastating ad, Lands looked straight into the camera and said: “These men just do not understand, or care, about women’s health. But. I. Do.”

• A couple key points here. First, this special election was a shellacking. Lands ran for this seat and lost in 2022 by seven points. Unofficially, she won last night by 25. Second, this is the deep South, not a suburban district outside Detroit or Milwaukee. A tidal wave of support for reproductive rights in a place like Alabama says as much as it did when voters revolted against anti-choice policies in deep-red Kansas right after Dobbs was decided.

• What does all this suggest for November 2024? Or, more specifically, what happens when a clear electoral advantage on reproductive rights collides with President Joe Biden’s low (but improving) poll numbers? The dynamics of a small-turnout Alabama special are a world away from a national presidential race. Dems will have to do a lot of work to ensure the stakes of 2024 are obvious to women, independents, and everyone else in swing districts and suburbs all across America. It will help that disgraced former President Donald Trump, with a MAGA base eager to ban abortion everywhere for everyone, is still flirting with a 15-week national abortion ban. Even today his surrogates are still going on TV to brag about overturning Roe.

Yesterday, Strict Scrutiny’s Leah Litman told us the Supreme Court is unlikely to drop yet another anti-choice ruling just months before the election by restricting medical abortion with mifepristone. That would only re-antagonize women verifiably mobilized by Dobbs. So while it makes sense to limit your assumptions for extrapolating one local Alabama district to the whole nation, the trend here is even more instructive: In every election, ballot measure, and special where reproductive freedom has centered the race post-Dobbs, it’s won. As Crooked’s Erin Ryan says, when it comes to a vote: “Abortion is undefeated.” Add Alabama to the list.

NEWS NEWS NEWS