A Democratic group, worried that the party shut out millions of anti-abortion voters and donors when front-runner for the presidential nominee Joe Biden abandoned his lifetime support for the Hyde Amendment, is trying to draft an anti-abortion candidate and force the party to address the issue, the Washington Examiner reported on Monday.
“The party has 20-plus candidates with identical, extreme positions on abortion, yet if you look at polling, you’ll find that one-fourth to one-third of Democrats hold fairly mainstream pro-life views,” said Jacob Lupfer, an organizer of the new Pro-Life Democratic Candidate PAC. “Does the party have a message to them other than, ‘Sit down and shut up?’”
Lupfer said the group failed to convince a big name like anti-abortion Sen. Joe Manchin to run, but insisted that with so many Democrats holding these views, there might be a base big enough for a drafted candidate to get into some of the early Democratic debates.
The biggest worry of the group is that if Democrats move further left on abortion, pro-life party members will vote for President Donald Trump and hand him re-election. Lupfer said Democrats could lose key swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin due to this issue.
That point was expressed in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Matt Hawkins, a former policy director for the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who said that Biden’s reversal on the Hyde Amendment to limit federal spending will drive away independents and Republicans “uncomfortable” with Trump.
“There’s a growing bipartisan desire among evangelicals to assert human dignity across every issue, from abortion to immigration to criminal justice,” Hawkins wrote. “Sadly, Mr. Biden has eliminated himself as a plausible safe harbor for those voters.”