| Joe Biden is now officially Causing Trouble for the Democrats. It's about abortion.
The former vice president made clear on Wednesday that (at least as of now) he still supports the Hyde Amendment, a standard rider included for years on annual spending bills that prohibits using federal money to fund abortion. This isn't going to blow over: Biden may be the only one of the hundreds of Democrats – okay, sorry, the two dozen Democrats – running for president to hold that position. So it's an easy way for his rivals to attack him, and something that both voters and organized groups will likely hold against him. There's no question that within the party, solid pro-choice positioning is where the majorities are and where the intensity is.
Given that, I'm skeptical Biden will hold out for long. Whether the issue will harm him if he flip-flops, assuming he does, is less clear. Biden's long history as an elected official has left him with lots of positions that don't sort well with the party's current priorities. However, he's generally left those stances behind as the party has changed. And in this cycle it didn't seem likely that many people were going to hold his 1970s position on busing or his 1990s position on crime against him. After all, Biden has also taken plenty of liberal positions, and his eight years with President Barack Obama seemed to outweigh a lot for many Democrats.
This may be different. This is a position he holds right now, post-Obama, and it's an issue that a lot of Democrats are mobilized over. But it's not just a question for Biden: The truth is that the Hyde Amendment has always played well for Republicans. Taxpayer-funded abortions for women who can't afford them polls badly, generally running 3-2 against or worse. Ed Kilgore has a history of the amendment, but basically it's a policy on which some pro-choice members of Congress from both parties have voted with abortion opponents. Democrats had more or less given up on the issue, before recently returning to it.
And that's where the problem starts. When Democrats talk about abortion, they'd like to use a framing that plays well for them. It seemed likely that they could do that in 2020, given the very unpopular anti-abortion bills that have been passing in Georgia and other states; the growing conservatism of the Supreme Court; President Donald Trump's decision this week to cut off funding for some fetal-tissue research; and more. All those issues allowed Democrats to hold the middle ground, with large majorities supporting their positions.
Now, though, it appears that they're going to have to expend a lot of effort contesting the Hyde Amendment, an issue on which Republicans have the advantage. Again, I suspect this won't last long. My guess is that Biden will have "evolved" on this one in time for the first debates in June. Still, the consequence is that Democrats will have less time to focus on their more popular agenda items. It's certainly possible that party actors, regardless of their views on abortion, will hold that against the former vice president.
1. Dave Hopkins on Texas and the 2020 elections. Yup: I find it hard to believe that Texas will be part of the minimum winning coalition for Democrats this time around, and I'm still skeptical that it'll flip anytime soon. That said: It's possible that it could go Democratic if there's a strong tide in that direction, and if so it would help produce an Electoral College landslide. It's also worth noting that if I'm wrong and Texas does wind up a marginally Democratic state soon, and holding everything else constant, it would mean a large Democratic advantage in the Electoral College.
2. Tom Pepinsky on populism in Asia.
3. Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz and Joseph Wright at the Monkey Cage on the recent European elections.
4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Karl W. Smith on Elizabeth Warren's trade ideas.
5. David Leonhardt on taxing the rich.
6. And Ryan Goodman compares William Barr and Robert Mueller on the special counsel's report.
Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. |
Post a Comment