The GOP Push to Bring Abortion Bans to Virginia

Despite the usual Republican disinformation campaign about Democrats being "soft on crime" and "wasteful spenders" - any spending that aids social programs and the less fortune and even highway funding is wasteful to Republicans - the reality is that the number one issue on the ballot next month when Virginia's entire General Assembly is up for election is abortion.   Republican's claim such is not the case but GOP efforts last legislative session make it clear that tighter bans on abortion will be quickly enacted if Republicans gain full control of the Virginia General Assembly.  To date Glenn Youngkin - a slick and disingenuous individual - has pushed for a ban at 15 weeks, but don't be surprised if something more draconian were to be passed under full GOP control.  On his first day in office Youngkin signaled he intended to further the agenda of the "Christian" extremists at The Family Foundation, Virginia's most powerful hate group with antecedents in "Massive Resistance" and white supremacy, when he banned "divisive topics in schools, namely accurate history and any mention of LGBT individuals. In short, full GOP control would be a nightmare for women, blacks, other racial minorities and gays.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the stakes:

A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.

An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.

After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.

With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.

But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”

The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.

The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.

These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C.

Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory.

Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”

Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. . . . only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.

“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”

The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.

Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.