Last night, I was having some discussions about the future of the GOP (I mentioned these in my post yesterday), and I was asked whether we need to give up on abortion, moot it as an issue, and focus on less sensitive issues (like the economy) in order to win over young people, especially Ron Paul supporters. I said that we did not need to do that. In fact, I believe, it would be counter-productive; backing down on abortion abolition would not only be a grave injustice, but would actually injure us in our ground game and at the polls.
This is not conventional wisdom, and I could tell that there was more than one skeptic at the table when I said what I did. So I figured I’d better spend a little time today pulling together some data.
First, about the Ron Paul folks: Ron Paul was the most ardently pro-life candidate in the 2012 race. Rick Santorum had the reputation as the die-hard social conservative, but that was not quite true when it came to abortion. Paul signed the Personhood Pledge, authored Personhood legislation before it was cool, and put together the most innovative and promising federal abortion legislation in years. That’s why Norma McCorvey (the original “Roe” in Roe v. Wade, now a devoted pro-lifer) supported Ron Paul for President. Clearly, when it comes to Ron Paul supporters, opposing abortion is not a deal-breaker.
And this matches up neatly with my experience in “the movement.” Ron Paul supporters fell into three categories on abortion: those who were devotedly pro-life and did not want to support a “pro-life with exceptions” candidate (e.g. Romney), those who were pro-choice but did not consider it a “make-or-break” issue, and those who simply had no strong opinions on abortion. (DISCLAIMER: I was one of those pro-lifers. For more on why I backed Ron Paul, read my endorsement from last year, “Why I Support Ron Paul for President.”) If Republicans want to win Ron Paul supporters, some can be enticed with stronger positions on abortion. To be fair, though, most of those Paulites already voted for Romney (or Virgil Goode), with only a few exceptions. The rest of Paul’s supporters considered Paul’s abortion position a neutral or a negative, but those supporters are motivated by other issues, so the Republican outreach to them should begin with those issues, not with abortion.
Indeed, Paul helped awaken a division in movement libertarianism as a whole: there are some libertarians, like Gary Johnson, who see abortion as a matter of women’s liberty, and therefore support legal abortion. But there are others in the liberty movement, like Ron Paul himself, who see abortion as a matter of fetal liberty (the first, most fundamental liberty being the right not to be killed unjustly), and therefore support treating fetuses like the people they are under state and federal law. Repositioning Republicans on abortion to appeal to the pro-abortion libertarian caucus would do them few favors with the anti-abortion libertarian caucus, and would alienate traditional social conservatives (i.e. “Santorum conservatives”) to no good end.
So much for abortion and the Ron Paul kiddies. But the question I was asked was not about us Paulbots. It was about young people as a whole, and how they view abortion.
