Comments

1
β€œThe idea that jettisoning this issue wins elections for Democrats is folly contradicted by all available data.” The latest Pew survey on the issue finds that β€œa 57 percent majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”

Cool you can be as pure as you want to, but this is a dumb argument, "every district is pro-choice because national averages"?

Sometimes a district (or at least its voters) is mostly anti-choice. Then you get to elect an anti-choice Republican or an anti-choice Democrat.
2
If anti-choice voters have to choose between an anti-choice Democrat or an anti-choice Republican, they'll choose the Republican every time. We never win by pandering to people who vote Republican, we win by getting that 57% out to vote, all of them, every election. To do that Democrats have to stand for something.
3
Nah, you can't just argue abstract slogans, look at the voters. A fair chunk of Catholics are Democrat-leaning but anti-abortion, for example. In a Catholic district you may do better with a candidate who aligns with that, even if the pro-choice idealists do sit it out.

You can say that losing the national party's purity of essence will drive away purist lefties in other districts. You can make an effort to measure that. Go to it.
4
I can see the DCCC supporting pro-life primary candidates, but once that ship has sailed, do you really want to sit back and let those seats go to Republicans? What if we were two seats away from choosing the Speaker of the House, the committee chairmanships, deciding which bills advance, and those two seats were Daniel Lipinski and Collin Peterson? You'd rather lose everything than see those two guys stay in office? What if we were a dozen seats away and we lost them because the Blue Dog Democrats aren't pure enough for you? How exactly are you going to deliver any health care services to poor and vulnerable people when you're in the fucking minority again?

Don't answer that. If you really are dumb as a sack of hammers, I don't want to know.

Also, this is kind of moot as far as WA-8, right? But cool story.
5
Politics is many things. One of them is a means of sorting out what our priorities ought to be.

The question of whether pro-life Democrats ought to be funded or not comes down to a single question:

Do you consider the country's economic problems to be the number one issue, or do you consider abortion rights to be more important?

Speaking as a gay man, I can tell you that I would heartily support a candidate who was anti-marriage and anti-ENDA and anti-LGBT rights in general if I trusted her to genuinely fight an anti-Wall Street, anti-corporate, pro-workling class agenda.

Yes, I'd rather have a candidate who got the social issues right. But my judgement of this moment in the nation's history is that we need a broad coalition that will take on the monied interests far more. And I would be happy to march arm in arm with, say, traditionalist Catholics to achieve that.

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