[....] Another area where this came up recently on Slow Boring is abortion.

I noted in a past post that in an unscripted moment, Biden reverted to the old-fashioned Catholic Dem message of saying that he was opposed to abortion as a matter of religious faith but supported freedom of choice as a question of public policy. My claim was that more Democrats should consider using this more moderate framing of the pro-choice position. For my trouble, of course, I got slagged on Twitter because everyone knows abortion rights are a winning issue for Democrats.

And they absolutely are. But when we tested a moderate “personally opposed”/“safe, legal, and rare” message against “abortion is a fundamental human right,” it seems like the moderate message does better [....]

[....]

Wither “the groups”

So what gives? Why don’t Democrats do this?

I know that on climate, the White House claims to believe that one of their political problems is young people not being sufficiently aware of how much Biden has done to address the climate crisis. I don’t understand what information they have received makes them think that. As far as I can tell, everyone in the progressive universe has seen the same data I have saying the most popular parts of the IRA are the health provisions, but people have heard about those less than they’ve heard about climate.

On abortion, conversely, I know that the pro-choice groups have made a concerted effort over the years to purge the party of this kind of wishy-washy language because they felt it in some sense “validated” Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers. The way these TRAP laws work is that instead of saying “oh abortion is illegal now,” you place unreasonable bad-faith regulatory burdens on abortion clinics to try to make them impossible to operate. The argument that someone using wishy-washy rhetoric while re-affirming their commitment to Roe somehow causes TRAP laws to pass never really made sense to me. But at a time when abortion is completely banned across huge swathes of the country, I’m also not sure that’s really the relevant consideration. Abortion rights has been a big lift to Democrats in certain places, but not big enough to suddenly turn Texas into a blue state or to win senate races in Iowa. So if you actually want to protect abortion rights, you need a broader message.

But beyond that, I don’t understand why it would be bad to offer voters multiple conceptual paths to the pro-choice outcome. I don’t have any religious objections to abortion, so I really don’t care, but there are a lot of Democrats (particularly Black and Hispanic ones) who are likely to hear anti-abortion messages at church, and letting them know that they are welcome in the coalition seems clearly good.

It seems to me that what we’re really dealing with here is the mysterious psychic power of the groups [....]

Not convinced she's right about Jews, but the popularity with the younger generation is definitely something to think about

I suspect that a lot of the "find commonality somehow" problem Obama mentions here can be solved by ranked choice voting. It's just that simple! It matters less then which (splintered) politIcal party candidates are 'in', as voters in the end choose candidates from where they stand on a liberal-to-conservative continuum. In most cases, will end up being moderate. But if a district ALREADY has a 'commonality- more left or right and/or tribal group, then that will show too.