Yahoo article: "Trump pushes young Republicans away; abortion pulls them back."

[Icarus]

Kinda the dictionary definition of “wedge issue”, innit?

IMHO, a significant percentage of GOP leadership, in their heart of hearts, couldn’t care less about abortion - after all, where is the corporate money in it? But they know it is a sure fire red-meat wedge issue to get the GOP voters and small donors worked up.

[iiandyiiii]

The right to choose is fundamental to women’s rights, and thus fundamental to Democratic party principles (the decent principles, anyway – the party is far from perfect). There’s no way to appease the hardcore anti-choicers without turning off some of the most fundamental parts of the party.

Might as well ask them to become more welcoming to racists.

[Chronos]

Quoth Velocity:

Saying this, based solely off of the 2009 Stupak Amendment issue, sounds like someone saying, “The Republican Party is the only pro-LGBT party, because Republicans wanted a tougher stance against ISIS back in the day when ISIS was throwing gays off of tall buildings in Iraq.”

The only difference between the two choices the Senate faced was that one was strongly anti-abortion, and one was more spiteful towards Democrats. Test cases like that, with such a small number of differences between the options, are rare: Being tougher on ISIS, for instance, has a wide array of implications on many different issues, and so there are many reasons why one might take one stance or the other. At the very least, one is forced to conclude that Republicans place a lower priority on stopping abortion than they do on spiting Democrats.

Quoth Kimera757:

He is appointing pro-life judges. That comes with a dollop of “getting what they want”.

He’s getting his list of judges from the Heritage Foundation, whose sole priority is judges who will rule in favor of big companies. From that list, he’s choosing judges based solely on their support for his despotism. Abortion isn’t relevant at all in any of his judicial appointments.

[JKellyMap]

@Fretful_Porpentine

As someone who lives in a deep red state and has contact with a lot of young Republicans, I’d like to make the cynical suggestion that what these people say is not necessarily what they mean. Rather, I think abortion has become a super-popular issue because it is one of the few places where Republicans in the Trump era can still plausibly claim some sort of moral high ground, and thus it becomes kind of a convenient excuse for NOT having to justify one’s beliefs on a whole range of other issues.

In other words, many of these people are not Republicans because of abortion; they are Republicans because they want to be Republicans, and saying “But baaabies!” provides an easy way to explain why you’re a Republican that doesn’t make you sound short-sighted or bigoted.

Excellent post. So true, in my experience.

[Little_Nemo]

@Velocity

That doesn’t make sense.

Pro-life voter: (Wants abortion banned)
Republican Party: (Gets abortion banned)
Pro-life voter: “Great, thanks, now I’m going to consider voting for the Democrats, the only major party in America that might conceivably bring legalized abortion back.”

Sure it does.

It’s the basis of the whole King Cyrus argument going on among Christian voters.

[AHunter3]

Coming from the other side, if there were ever a race in which the Republican candidate was prochoice and the Democratic candidate was not, the Republican gets my vote. Well maybe not if it’s literally Donald Trump. But I will never ever under any circumstances vote for a candidate who is not prochoice, that’s a dealbreaker.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@AHunter3

Coming from the other side, if there were ever a race in which the Republican candidate was prochoice and the Democratic candidate was not, the Republican gets my vote. Well maybe not if it’s literally Donald Trump. But I will never ever under any circumstances vote for a candidate who is not prochoice, that’s a dealbreaker.

To each their own and, certainly, you vote however you feel you should.

Personally, I have tried to be careful to not be a single-issue voter. The country faces many challenges and I just can not see my way to voting for someone I otherwise hate except they happen to be agreeing with me on one issue.

Certainly I prioritize the issues I care about and some are waaaay more important than others but, in the end, I need to assess a candidate on all of the issues important to me.

YMMV

[sub]FTR I am very much pro-choice and it does rank very high on issues important to me.[/sub]

[JRDelirious]

@JKellyMap

@Fretful_Porpentine

As someone who lives in a deep red state and has contact with a lot of young Republicans, I’d like to make the cynical suggestion that what these people say is not necessarily what they mean. Rather, I think abortion has become a super-popular issue because it is one of the few places where Republicans in the Trump era can still plausibly claim some sort of moral high ground, and thus it becomes kind of a convenient excuse for NOT having to justify one’s beliefs on a whole range of other issues.

In other words, many of these people are not Republicans because of abortion; they are Republicans because they want to be Republicans, and saying “But baaabies!” provides an easy way to explain why you’re a Republican that doesn’t make you sound short-sighted or bigoted.

Excellent post. So true, in my experience.

Yep. Seen/heard also among “Gun Rights” voters.