Republicans Think Women Are Gullible Idiots

Ever since Republicans and their evangelical/Christofascist party base achieved their dream of overturning Roe. v. Wade  - with the help of Donald Trump's far right appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court - Republican candidates have been battered by their party's anti-abortion stances and have underperformed in elections in 2022 and 2023.  That specter of similar results in 2024 have Republicans grasping for a gambit to lure back woman voters without ceasing their efforts to make abortion illegal nationwide and take the nation back to the 1950's, if not the early 1900's.  One of the strategies is to tell women that while Republicans seek to strip all women of access to abortion, they want to boast that they are leaving women with the right to use contraception.   Never mind that the evangelical/Christofascist base of the party and Justice Clarence Thomas, the high Court's most corrupt member, want to see Griswold v. Connecticut (which gave married couples the legal right to use contraception) reversed.   And meanwhile even GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has endorsed a nationwide six (6) week abortion ban which would strip women of access to abortion before they typically even knew they were pregnant.  The take away is that Republican's view women as simple minded, gullible idiots.  A  a piece at Vanity Fair looks at  this bizarre GOP marketing ploy (another piece at the magazine looks at Nikki Haley's support for a six week abortion ban).  Here are highlights:

Something you’ve probably heard by now is that the Republican Party’s decision to decimate reproductive rights—and celebrate the overturning of Roe v. Wade like it was the greatest thing to ever happen to America—has not gone over great with voters. The 2022 midterm elections, which were supposed to be a red tsunami for the GOP, were anything but: Democrats picked up a seat in the Senate and Republicans just barely took back the House, with voters in critical states citing abortion as the most important issue of the day. A year later, the right to an abortion was enshrined in Ohio’s state constitution; Kentucky voters reelected pro-choice governor Andy Beshear; and Democrats took control of Virginia’s state legislature, preventing the GOP governor from limiting abortion moving forward, which he’d planned to do. The results were unambiguous: The American people want abortion rights.

Now, with the 2024 election less than a year away, what are Republicans running for higher office to do? According to GOP strategist and Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, the answer is simple: make their campaign slogan something like, “Yeah, we took away your reproductive rights, but, hey, we’re letting you keep contraception, and that’s something!”

Politico reports that Conway plans to tell Republican lawmakers that the key to big wins this year is to focus less on the gutting of abortion access, and more on vocally supporting access to birth control, the logic apparently being that people will be grateful for what they can get (and too dumb to notice what they’re not getting). “You’ve got a fair number of Democrats saying that they want an alternative to [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris, or they may sit it out,” Conway told Politico. “He’s especially bleeding young voters, who you would think would be animated and interested to hear about [contraception], and who are in the prime of their years and choosing to conceive or not to conceive.” Using an extremely strange analogy, Independent Women’s Voice CEO Heather Higgins told the outlet, “Republicans are like your uncle, who really loves you and loves the women in his family, but he’s bad about showing it.

Both Conway and Higgins cited polling showing that more than eight in 10 independents and more than eight in 10 pro-life respondents agreed that, “Given the current political debate about abortion, it is more important than ever that women have access to the most modern and effective contraception method of their choice regardless of where they live, how much it costs, and where they receive health care services.” Of course, most Americans support abortion being legal to some degree, but neither Conway nor Higgins are telling GOP politicians to craft their policies and messaging around that. The two also don’t appear to be talking much about the fact that in 2022, just eight House GOP members voted in favor of the Right to Contraception Act, which would suggest that Republican lawmakers don’t actually support access to contraception, despite what they’ll be told to tell voters.

Speaking to The Daily Beast, Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the few people in her party who actually supports access to contraception and abortion, said she was skeptical the plan would work.

“Does this help? Does a focus on contraception make Republicans well with women on the issue of abortion?” Murkowski asked. “I think that remains to be seen,” she said. For her part, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Nebeyatt Betre told the outlet it absolutely won’t work, saying that no amount of “fancy marketing will change this fundamental truth: House Republicans have consistently pushed legislation to crack down on both abortion and contraception access in their assault on women’s reproductive freedoms.”