There are many reasons to celebrate the thumping Democrats took in the midterm elections, but near the top of the list is the fact that the phony “war on women” has become a losing ploy for Democrats. With a lot of help from the media, Democrats in 2012 managed to tar every Republican candidate in the country with the moronic rape speculations of Todd Akin and Rush Limbaugh’s insults of birth control activist Sandra Fluke. Obama ran up a 56-44 margin among female voters (though Romney won a majority of married women). In 2013, Democrats managed to get a party hack narrowly over the finish line in the Virginia governor’s race by hammering his socially conservative opponent with similar war-on-women propaganda. The race turned out to be very close, and Terry McAuliffe’s huge margin with single women was credited with the victory.
Flash forward to this year’s election. Democratic senator Mark Udall lost to Republican Cory Gardner in Colorado, even though Gardner was pilloried over birth control and abortion. Gardner smartly countered by taking Louisana governor Bobby Jindal’s suggestion that the GOP come out in favor of over-the-counter birth control. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis also came out in support of an OTC pill. This may well have helped him pull off his upset of incumbent senator Kay Hagan.
As a result of this GOP maneuver, Planned Parenthood made the astonishing decision to oppose over-the-counter birth control. Even though expanding access to birth control is a foundational goal of the organization, they declared it a "political ploy.” The truth is that Planned Parenthood would lose money if birth control were easier to get, because birth control prescriptions are a “lead generator” that gets young women into their clinics—and potentially coming back for the more expensive and disturbing services they offer.
By the end of the campaign, Udall in particular had become a punch line. He was being openly derided as “Mark Uterus,” and the Denver Post shocked everyone by endorsing Gardner and calling Udall’s “obnoxious one-issue campaign . . . an insult to those he seeks to convince.” Udall still didn’t back down, however. One liberal group started running unintentionally comical ads in Colorado claiming Cory Gardner was going to ban condoms. Could this get worse? Yes. The day before the election, Udall was heckled in the middle of a speech by one of Colorado’s biggest Democratic donors. The rich heckler later told a Guardian reporter that “f—ing abortion is all he talks about. He should not talk about it any more whatsoever. There are so many other issues.”
Meanwhile in Texas, Wendy Davis, the media darling who rose to national prominence for unsuccessfully opposing the state’s ban on late-term abortions with a dramatic statehouse filibuster, lost badly. How’s this for a shellacking? The supposed women’s issue candidate lost female voters by 5 points, and her opponent Greg Abbott got almost double her share of the vote among white women, 65-34.
Oh, and Sandra Fluke just happened to be running for the California legislature this year. She lost by a nearly two-to-one margin. She lost to a fellow Democrat, but her national profile as the face of subsidized birth control pills didn’t appear to do her any favors.
Now Democrats are going to have to reassess things. It turns out Republicans aren’t against birth control, they just don’t want to pay for someone else’s. A majority of Americans still oppose late-term abortion, which is illegal in the vast majority of European countries. And when the media don’t cartoonishly and unprofessionally insist one idiotic politician speaks for the entire Republican party, it turns out that these are issues the GOP can campaign on—and win.