Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Democratic candidate Pat Ryan poses for a photo with supporters during a campaign rally, August 22, 2022, in Kingston, New York. On Tuesday, Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro in a special election for New York’s 19th Congressional District.
To paraphrase the Bard, some political parties are born successful, some achieve success, and some have success thrust upon them.
Today’s Democrats surely fit the latter two descriptions. In recent weeks, with their enactment of landmark climate and industrial policy, (modest) drug price reduction legislation, and President Biden’s student debt forgiveness, the world’s oldest continuous political party has certainly achieved some success. (“Oldest” is a pretty fair description of the party’s leaders, too, but that’s another story.) But now, they’re also looking forward with something other than abject terror to November’s elections, and that’s due to the success thrust upon them by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs.
There was plenty of evidence before Tuesday’s New York elections that the backlash against the Court’s revocation of abortion rights was both huge and growing. The Kansas referendum on abortion rights stunned even the most optimistic of abortion’s defenders, and a series of special elections this summer showed that Republicans’ expected margins over Democrats were shrinking due to the Dobbs backlash. Now, in the most prominent of Tuesday’s contests, the Republican margin became the Republican deficit.
The upset victory of Democrat Pat Ryan to fill a vacant House seat in upstate New York provided proof positive of the pro-choice wave. Before the Court officially ruled, the polling for Republican Marc Molinaro showed him leading Ryan by a comfortable 13 percentage points. Once Samuel Alito descended from Mt. Misogyny with his Commandments (Thou Shalt Carry a Pregnancy to Term Even if Effectuated by Rape or Incest), however, Molinaro’s margin began to diminish. It diminished more as Ryan centered his campaign on preserving a woman’s right to choose. “Choice is on the ballot,” his lawn signs read. A decorated combat veteran, Ryan ran ads asserting that he’d fought to preserve freedom, and that included the freedom to choose. (He also ran a populist-progressive ad attacking a local power company he’d fought as Ulster County executive, singling it out as representative of the abuses of corporate monopolies.)
On Tuesday, Molinaro’s 13-point lead had become a two-point deficit. And in another upstate New York district holding a special, vacancy-filling election, the Republican prevailed by just 6.6 percent in a district that Donald Trump had carried in 2020 by an 11-point margin. Both those districts had been expected to follow the normal midterm rules, which stipulate that the party out of power is expected to do better in the midterm than it did in the last presidential cycle, and that Republican turnout in midterms generally exceeds the Democrats’. Those rules appear to have been suspended in 2022.
In late June, when the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, I wrote that the only comparable ruling in the nation’s history was Roger Taney’s decision in the Dred Scott case. By saying that neither Congress nor the people had any say over whether a territory could be slave or free, Taney’s decision overruled nearly 40 years of settled law. Both Dred Scott and Dobbs, I wrote, took away fundamental rights from the American people. Americans, I continued, don’t like their fundamental, long-established rights taken away, much less by the one unelected branch of government. The backlash against Dred Scott enabled a sectional, start-up party and its presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, to win the next election. The backlash against Dobbs may well have a kindred effect.
