Plunging in the polls and facing a Republican-wave election defeat in November due to their mismanagement of the economy, border security, inflation, crime, energy, gasoline prices, foreign policy, supply chains, even baby formula and just about everything else, Democrats are in desperation mode nationally. In Colorado, they resorted to a strategy of deceit in their attempt to manipulate voters in the recent primary elections.
That strategy is attributed to Claire McCaskill, a former Democrat senator from Missouri who devised it for a successful 2012 campaign. In her own words, the ploy was to create “dog whistle” ads directed at “uber-conservative” Republican voters urging them not to vote for Todd Akin, an extremist in the Republican primary field who had no chance of winning the general election. She explained this as “reverse psychology” designed to get Akin the GOP nomination. It worked for McCaskill in Missouri but it just backfired on Democrats in Colorado.
The difference is a new Colorado law that allows unaffiliated voters to participate in party primaries. As I speculated in an April column, moderate unaffiliated voters might cross over and swing a Republican primary nomination to a right-center candidate better able to defeat a Democrat in the general election than a far-right Republican. Apparently, that just happened when 200,000 unaffiliateds — constituting more than a third of the total vote — helped cener-right Republican candidates for statewide office win the party’s nomination. Those unaffiliateds would likely vote for them in the general election, too.
In Colorado’s U.S. Senate primary, where incumbent Sen. Michael Bennett is vulnerable, ads openly funded by the Democratic Party branded Republican candidate Ron Hanks as “too conservative for Colorado.” (That’s the reverse psychology “dog whistle” to drive “uber-conservatives” to Hanks in the primary.) While Hanks has won election in his conservative rural legislative district, he’s too far right to win a statewide election in Democrat-leaning Colorado. The Democrats’ strategy was underhanded, but not illegal.
However, there was also a flood of surreptitious dark-money mailings pretending to be from Republican or conservative sources posing as “informational guides” that stopped just short of flat-out saying “Vote for Hanks” but clearly implied that. These were part of the shady Democrat strategy to circumvent campaign laws.
Democrats who can’t win on their failed public policy performance are understandably distancing themselves from Joe Biden, their empty-suit president. Now, after the conservative SCOTUS majority has overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats are hoping to make the election all about abortion. Most Americans who defend Roe do so simply because they’re pro-abortion with little regard for or understanding of constitutional law. The 1973 ruling on Roe by the Court’s, then, liberal majority to legalize abortion nationwide was a tendentious act to achieve a political outcome, devoid of constitutional reasoning. This has long been criticized by objective scholars. Rational observers understand that overturning Roe doesn’t nationally ban abortion, it just devolves that decision to each state in our republic and the people thereof, as our Constitution intended.
Democrats and media liberals habitually spin public polls on abortion. How questions are phrased can manipulate the answers, and how the results are reported can misrepresent public opinion. For example, on June 22, David Morgan a liberal correspondent for Reuters, cited a Reuters/Ispos poll and asserted, “About 71% of Americans say decisions about terminating a pregnancy should be left to a woman and her doctor, rather than regulated by the government.” But 71% don’t favor unrestricted abortion.
Consider the results from a May Quinnipiac Poll offering four choices: “Do you think abortion should be legal in all cases (28%), legal in most cases (32%), illegal in most cases (27%), or illegal in all cases (8%)? Abortion supporters can combine the first two answers to declare: ”60% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.” Abortion opponents can combine the last three answers to say: “67% of Americans say abortion should be illegal or restricted in all or some cases.”
Use of the words “or,” “most,” “all,” “some,” and “restricted,” are tailored to produce the desired spin. Americans at either extreme are the outliers. Most Americans are in the middle. Bill Clinton crafted the politically ingenious position on abortion when he said it should be “legal, safe and rare.”
Although most Latinos still vote Democrat, their support is drifting somewhat toward Republicans on public policy, including border security. They don’t like crime, high gas prices or inflation either. Moreover, Latinos are heavily Catholic and many oppose abortion. Democrats banking on their support may be disappointed. And most non-Latino pro-abortion activists already vote for Democrats anyway.
Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.
