Going Pro-Life

Raymond Hernandez for The New York Times takes a look at pro-life Democratic candidates:

Kelli Conlin, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, called the recruitment strategy misguided, saying that surveys conducted by her organization showed that even some Republicans express support for abortion rights when her group described the consequences of outlawing the procedure.

“The movement to recruit anti-choice candidates ignores the larger reality that this is a pro-choice nation,” she said. “It misses the larger point.” (Polls show a divided nation on the issue: A 2008 CNN-Opinion Research poll found that 53 percent of Americans characterized themselves as “pro-choice,” versus 44 as “pro-life;” a 2007 poll by the same organization showed the numbers reversed, 45-50.)

The Times uses Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) as the poster child for this trend, but he actually seems like an outlier example. Pro-choice Democrats regularly win statewide in Pennsylvania — Clinton in 1992 & 1996, Gore in 2000, Rendell in 2002 & 2006, Kerry in 2004 — and, indeed, pro-choice Republicans like Arlen Specter and Tom Ridge have a good record in the state as well. In a place like that, pro-choice voters are naturally going to have a strong preference for a pro-choice candidate. But the fact that Casey’s opponent was Rick Santorum nevertheless left Casey as clearly the more socially and culturally liberal candidate.

The main subject of the article is the rather different case of recruiting pro-life candidates to run in districts or states that are so strongly anti-choice as to make it highly unlikely a pro-choice candidate could win. To me, that seems like a very different calculation. What’s more, it’s clearly a calculation that makes national polling on abortion rights irrelevant.