Abortion was never supposed to be an issue
A few years after joining DU I read Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
A real eye opener. Highly recommended.
Abortion (and guns) were perfect one issue voter manipulation tool.
Pro-Life ✅ Pro-Gun ..later PC'ed to Pro-2nd Amendment RIGHTS ✅. You got 'em.
Large swaths of voters just need a little lip service and they are good to go. These two topics being so obviously ironically counter to each other made no difference.
The problem came when the Republicans had candidates who actually wanted to DO something about it. There is a parallel to the new blood in the Nazi types and Charlottesville. And boy did they get creative - from using zoning and building codes to proximity to hospitals and doctor privileges.
THEN they got nuts. What we are seeing is the right losing complete control over what was never meant to be. The party of "perception is reality" has lost its own messaging.
***A great summary here via Wikipedia ***
What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) is a book by American journalist and historian Thomas Frank, which explores the rise of populist anti-elitist conservatism in the United States, centering on the experience of Kansas, Frank's native state.
Frank says that the conservative coalition is the dominant coalition in American politics. There are two sides to this coalition, according to the author: Economic conservatives want business tax cuts and deregulation, while social conservatives focus on culture. Frank says that since the coalition formed in the late 1960s, the coalition has been "fantastically rewarding" for the economic conservatives. The policies of the Republicans in power have been exclusively economic, but the coalition has caused the social conservatives to be worse off economically, due to these pro-corporate policies. Meanwhile, the social issues that the "Cons" faction pushes never go anywhere after the election. According to Frank, "abortion is never outlawed, school prayer never returns, the culture industry is never forced to clean up its act." He attributes this partly to conservatives "waging cultural battles where victory is impossible," such as a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He also argues that the very capitalist system the economic conservatives strive to strengthen and deregulate promotes and commercially markets the perceived assault on traditional values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F
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