Democrats quietly worry they've gone too far on abortion
Democrats have suggested that everything’s on the table when it comes to rebuilding their brand. But do they mean it? Months into November’s messy autopsy, party officials might not like the ugly truths members are raising behind closed doors — especially when they threaten the far-Left’s sacred cows.
While it’s widely accepted that trans extremism cost the Democrats dearly in 2024, there are rumblings that gender ideology wasn’t the only issue dragging the party down. What if, after three years of fundraising and fearmongering, abortion has become a political liability too? It’s probably hard for DNC strategists to fathom after Dobbs, but the issue that helped them string together so many midterm and state-level wins may finally be turning voters off.
It’s not that Americans don’t share the party’s desire to keep abortion legal; too many do. But keeping it legal and celebrating the killing through all nine months of pregnancy are two very different things. Maybe in Kamala Harris, the nation finally realized that Democrats weren’t just defending abortion — they were reveling in it. What others approached with somber and appropriate seriousness, their standard-bearers gleefully embraced as another rite of womanhood. As millions of mothers grieve what abortion costs them, Harris’s party continues to respond with an outsized enthusiasm for the carnage.
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That disconnect has gotten increasingly uncomfortable, some experts believe. Regular people struggle with the moral weight of this issue, and somewhere along the way, that reality got lost. “After the 2024 election,” Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch told The Washington Stand, “Democrats realized that your average American actually hates hearing about killing an unborn child at nine months.” Even before that, in 2016, when Donald Trump described, in chilling detail, the kind of dismemberment abortion that Hillary Clinton endorsed, it was a turning point in the campaign. “With what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” Trump said. “Now you can say that that’s okay, and Hillary can say that that’s okay, but it’s not okay with me.”
It’s also “not okay” with the majority of Americans, who don’t share the Democratic Party’s delight in ruthlessly executing unborn children. In the most recent Marist survey (2025), 67% of the 1,387 adults surveyed agreed there should be limits on abortion, including 55% of self-described “pro-choicers.” While Harris and company proudly support the practice up to (and even after) the moment of birth — at taxpayers’ expense — the average voter isn’t an abortion zealot. Even after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, most people have a very difficult time justifying the slaughter of innocent children after the first trimester, if at all. To them, the Democrats’ eagerness to push the boundaries of this barbarity is off-putting at best and disturbing at worst.
And partygoers are taking note. When Time magazine went inside “the Democrats’ reboot” in their latest issue, some of the most revealing parts were the interviews that author Charlotte Alter had with party members that hinted at this same problem. In many ways, the Left has misread people’s concern about abortion being outlawed as a full-throated endorsement for the procedure anytime, anyhow, anywhere. This surfaced in some of Alter’s conversations with Democrats in Congress, some of whom refused to go on the record.
“Many Democratic officials believe the party moved too far left on social issues in particular,” she wrote. “‘There are some sports where trans girls shouldn’t be playing against biological girls,’ says one lawmaker, adding that most of his fellow Democrats agree but are ‘afraid of the blowback that comes from a very small community.’” Alter adds, “Even abortion is up for a rethink. Some Democrats want a retreat from the enthusiastic embrace of abortion rights, and a return to talking about abortion as ‘safe, legal, and rare,’ as Bill Clinton put it.”
Quietly, more rank-and-file Dems worry about the party’s over-the-top appetite for a procedure that violently destroys a human life. “‘Refusing to say that even in the third trimester there’s no limits on it, it’s not where the average American is,’ says another Democratic lawmaker. ‘The really embarrassing truth is Donald Trump is closer to the median voting on abortion than Democrats were.’ Yet,” Alter noted, “the fact these lawmakers would only share these thoughts without their names attached shows how much Democrats still fear antagonizing their liberal base.”
That jives with what a lot of politicos said in the aftermath of November’s election. Unfortunately for Democrats, not only did they play the abortion card poorly, but it was also, to most people’s surprise, the only card they played. It was easier, Virginia Republican strategist Zach Roday warned, to wage war “on just one single issue that favors Democrats … in the [2022] midterms” — when the Supreme Court’s ruling was fresh on people’s minds. D.J. Quinlan, who served as a former executive director for the Arizona Democratic Party, also believes “there’s room for a conversation” on “whether talking about abortion at the expense of everything else, particularly the economy, might have been a contributing factor” in November’s shellacking.
Others in the Republican Party stressed that Americans aren’t one-dimensional voters. Maybe, Ford O’Connell suggested, women were insulted by the insinuation that their uterus is the only thing they should care about. “People don’t want to be put in boxes or told what to think,” he insisted. “They want to be heard.”
Those brave enough to challenge the radical views of the Democratic Party openly, like New York Representative Ritchie Torres (D), recognize the losing ground they’re standing on. Most of these lawmakers, Alter explains, “acknowledge that the progressive movement encouraged a kind of purity policies that hampered the party’s ability to win majorities. ‘We swung the pendulum too far to the left,’” the Bronx congressman warns. In his own district, he’s watched with alarm as Trump makes more inroads with “working-class people of color, as he did in cities around the country.”
That will only continue if the party of Biden and Harris refuses to recognize that this reckoning was about a lot more than Donald Trump. It’s about their fundamental failure to course-correct when their values veer into the diabolic. As Time reiterated, “Democrats could dismiss Trump’s first win as a fluke. His second, they know, was the product of catastrophic failure — a nationwide rejection of Democratic policies, Democratic messaging, and the Democrats themselves.” The reality is, Alter noted, “The party got skunked in every battleground state and lost the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. They lost the House and the Senate. Their support sagged with almost every demographic cohort except black women and college-educated voters. Only 35% of Democrats are optimistic about the future of the party…”
When Harris couldn’t convince voters that the economy, illegal immigration, and crime weren’t really problems, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter insisted to TWS, “they pivoted to pro-abortion rhetoric.” And it wasn’t just “Democratic politicians who relied heavily on the party’s pro-abortion platform, but big donors also contributed vast sums of money to pro-abortion ballot initiatives in an attempt to galvanize their base.”
And frankly, he continued, “The fact that Democratic politicians have to speak anonymously to friendly media in order to gently signal to their base: ‘Hey, maybe we need to back off a little of the extreme social policy’ shows that Democratic members know the party has crossed a line with voters. These members simply don’t have the courage to lead their party away from the extreme pro-abortion, pro-trans lobbies.”
But political expedience is just one part of the equation. “Unfortunately,” Szoch said, “it doesn’t seem that Democrats have realized the reason they need to change their position on abortion is because an unborn child is a human being. Instead, Democrats want to change their position to gain votes,” she lamented. “This lack of authenticity is what makes voters disgusted with career politicians. It’s what got President Trump elected. I hope that one day Democrats see unborn children as human beings — not as an avenue to getting more votes,” Szoch implored. “But until they do, I hope the American people are smart enough to continue voting them out of office.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer for The Washington Stand. In her role, she drafts commentary on topics such as life, consumer activism, media and entertainment, sexuality, education, religious freedom, and other issues that affect the institutions of marriage and family. Over the past 20 years at FRC, her op-eds have been featured in publications ranging from the Washington Times to The Christian Post. Suzanne is a graduate of Taylor University in Upland, Ind., with majors in both English Writing and Political Science.
