NARAL and its allies must have been heartily disappointed when Personhood didn’t make the ballot in Colorado for the 2012 election. Perhaps that’s why the organization, which has largely become the “reproductive rights” arm of the Democratic Party, has announced its plans to “to win over pro-choice female voters who voted for Obama in 2008 but are not planning to vote for him, do not plan to turn out, or are only weakly supporting him in 2012”, according to the Daily Caller.
The article explains the rationale for the grand scheme: “According to NARAL’s model, based on extrapolations from GQRR’s extensive survey and consumer data, there are over 5.1 million women pro-choice ‘Obama defectors’ nationwide, 1.2 in battleground states, and 338,020 in 25 key battleground counties.”
NARAL policy director, Beth Shipp, in trying to defend the rationale for her organization’s existence, said that a lot of the pro-choice shift away from Obama has nothing to do with abortion but rather the economy, which “still sucks” she noted.
(And, if we could all pause to make fun of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research’s Drew Lieberman who is calling these women “defectors”? Are we in an East Germany? Should these women receive political asylum from the KGB? Ok, back to regularly scheduled blogging.)
Lucky us, Colorado just happens to be one of those battleground states with (likely) several of those counties. The other states NARAL plans to target include Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. According to the article, the organization plans to spend $2.5 to $3 million to reach these “defectors” via cable, online, and social media advertising, as well as volunteer efforts like “peer-to-peer” personal phone calls.
It would appear that, despite the best efforts of those on the left, to claim the election is over (and Obama has won), several of the states that Obama won in 2008 remain in play. Perhaps, the Democrats should remember how their Patron Saint of the Oval Office, Bill Clinton, won – “it’s the economy, stupid”. Or maybe they already do – and that’s the problem.