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Jun 27, 2022, 9:41pmUpdated 29m ago

By: John Craven

Connecticut Democrats are hoping anger over the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will translate into votes, but will the issue make a difference at the ballot box?

On Monday, Gov. Ned Lamont launched a campaign adpromising to keep abortion legal and accessible. He also took a swing at his Republican opponent, Bob Stefanowski.

"I think it's top of mind, said Lamont. People want to know where you stand. Are you going to call for restrictions on Roe v. Wade or not?"

Stefanowski says abortion is a non-issue in Connecticut because it's codified in state law although he does support adding a parental consent requirement for kids under 16.

"Democrats are going to want to do a lot of fear mongering on this issue in Connecticut. It's part of the law, it's not going to change, said Stefanowski. They don't want to talk about inflation, they don't want to talk about gas prices."

So are abortion rights really at risk in Connecticut?

In the General Assembly, many Republicans are pro-choice. In fact, Stefanowski's running mate, Rep. Laura Devlin, recently voted to expand abortion access. But the state Senate president has a warning.

"The Republican party itself is becoming more and more conservative, said state Sen. Martin Looney (D-New Haven). So I don't know whether all those more moderate Republicans are likely to continue in office."

This year's Republican primary for U.S. Senate could be a litmus test. Themis Klarides, who received the party endorsement, is vocally pro-choice. But her two opponents, Leora Levy and Peter Lumaj, oppose abortion.

But with the November elections four months away, will abortion still motivate voters? Some political analysts think inflation will remain the dominant focus.

"You know, there's only so much voters can do, said Dr. Jonathan Wharton with Southern Connecticut State University. Because this is really a Supreme Court decision that was handed down, so it's not like the voters can decide on the judges."

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Connecticut Democrats campaign on Roe decision, but will it sway voters? - News 12 New Jersey

(The Hill) Justice Clarence Thomas concurrent opinion calling on the Supreme Court to reconsider landmark cases protecting access to contraceptives and LGBTQ rights is striking fear among Democrats, with many worried about how far the conservative court will go after it took the extraordinary step of reversing Roe v. Wade.

In his concurring opinion to Fridays ruling, Thomas wrote that in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Courts substantive due process precedents, arguing that the Constitutions Due Process Clause did not secure a right to abortion or any other substantive rights.

Fridays majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito said Roe should be reversed because the right to an abortion is not protected by the Due Process Clause in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Thomas made it crystal clear exactly what rights he was considering by naming cases explicitly, listing Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that allowed married couples to access contraceptives; Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that barred states from outlawing consensual gay sex, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that made same-sex marriage a constitutional right.

Alito, writing for the courts majority, wrote that in overturning Roe v. Wade, the court was not advocating for changing those other rulings.

But critics of the court on the left have noted that few thought Roe v. Wade itself was in jeopardy five years ago and suggest it is unclear how a future conservative court will move forward.

Democrats have highlighted the Thomas concurrent opinion, arguing it makes clear his own plans.

If you read what is very clear one of the Justices had his own statement: its about contraception, in vitro fertilization, family planning, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a Friday press availability where she denounced the ruling. That is all what will spring from their decision that they made today.

The courts liberal justices offered a similar warning.

No one should be confident that this majority is done with its work, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in a joint dissent.

The rightRoeandCaseyrecognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation, they added.

The swift changes to American life from Fridays decision have been stunning to many.

As of Friday, nine states had banned abortion, according to theGuttmacher Institute.

On Sunday, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, said she would move to ban abortion pills delivered online. Other states are expected to make similar moves.

Thomas, who was nominated by President George H. W. Bush more than 30 years ago and isconsideredby some to be the most conservative justice on the bench, in his concurrent said the court must correct the error of the three landmark cases he mentioned.

Because any substantive due process decision is demonstrably erroneous, we have a duty to correct the error established in those precedents, he wrote.

Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chairman of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, said the current moment is a dangerous time for individuals who hold human rights and civil liberties in high regard.

They are taking away rights that people in this country enjoyed. And I think anyone who cares about any marginalized community, like the LGBTQ community, has to be alarmed at both the Supreme Courts willingness to complete[ly] disrupt, disregard precedent, and secondly, to remove basic fundamental rights that citizens of this country have enjoyed for decades, he said. So this is a very dangerous time for people who care about human rights and civil liberties.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), in an interview withMSNBCoutside the Supreme Court on Saturday, said the ruling overturning Roe is part of extremist Republicans long-term agenda.

This is part of a long-term agenda of the far-right extremist Republicans to begin to erode our democratic rights starting with, of course, our right to reproductive freedom and our personal liberties, Lee, a vice chair of the LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, said.

Theyre not gonna stop there, whats next? Same-sex marriage. Whats next? Voting rights, could be, banning interracial marriages. Who knows where theyre going, she added.

Democrats have hoped that outrage with the decision on Roe v. Wade and fear of rights the court might go after next could energize their voters ahead of this falls midterm elections.

Republicans, who have been feeling confident about winning back the House majority and quite possibly the Senate, believe the focus of voters will remain on inflation and high gas prices.

But there have been statements from the right indicating a wariness of how the courts direction might reverberate.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday said Alito had set the right tone, implicitly pushing back at the message from. Thomas.

He said nothing in this decision puts those cases at risk, Graham said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, referring to the cases mentioned by Thomas.

The reason he decided that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided is because it deals with the potential for life, the senator said.

These other privacy issues like contraception do not deal with the potential for life, the senator said. He made a distinction between same-sex marriage and contraception, which I think will win the day over time.

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Thomas opinion strikes fear in Democrats over how far court will go - WANE

It is unconscionable that your administration, amid the heartbreaking supply crisis, chose to destroy perfectly good baby formula, read the letter.

It was signed by many of the states most prominent Democrats, including state Sen. Jen Jordan, the partys nominee for attorney general, and state Rep. Bee Nguyen, the nominee for secretary of state.

Georgia adopted the policy in 2019 in response to guidance from the federal Department of Agriculture that advised against donating returned products, even if they were unopened and unexpired, for safety reasons.

State health officials say theyre now working to boost the formula supply and provide community food programs with extra stock. Georgia has also secured federal waivers to give needy families more options to buy the formula.

The letter from the Democrats, who each support Kemp challenger Stacey Abrams, demands more aggressive initiatives to stem the shortage.

As legislators, but also as mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and caregivers, we are calling on you to speak directly to the people of Georgia about this crisis, it read, and take immediate action to resolve it.

Kemps campaign said Democrats shouldnt blame others for the disastrous failures of the Biden administration and used the letter to blast his November opponent.

Abrams took credit for Bidens win and far-left agenda and shes not going to be able to run from it this November, said Kemp spokesman Tate Mitchell.

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Georgia Democrats blast Kemp over 'heartbreaking' baby formula shortage - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

As a scholar studying working-class and rural whites, I have written about this subtle but consequential divide. I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teachers aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the settled side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion.

We lived in an all-white corner of the Arkansas Ozarks, so my parents werent fretting about the Black folks Ronald Reagan would later denigrate with the welfare queen stereotype. They were talking about their lazy neighbors. They called these folks white trash, the worst slur they knew.

Though Vance described this divide in Hillbilly Elegy, readers unfamiliar with the white working class may not have picked up on it. Vances beloved grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, represented hard work. Papaw had a steady job at the Armco steel millone good enough to draw him and hundreds like him out of the Appalachian Kentucky hills to Middletown, Ohio. Indeed, it was such a good job that Mamaw could stay home and take care of the kids. Though they were crass and unconventional by polite, mainstream standards, Papaw and Mamaws work ethic positioned them in the settled working class.

Vance (bottom) grew up in the shadow of the steel mills in Middletown, Ohio (top), where he became very familiar with two distinct groups of working-class whites. Academics refer to these groups as the settled working class and the hard living.|Al Behrman/AP Photo and Drew Angerer/Getty Images

From that perch, Vances grandparents harshly judged neighbors who didnt work. They even judged their daughter, Vances mother, Bev. Though shed trained for a good job, as a nurse, Bevs drug use and frequent churn of male partners led to the instability associated with the hard living. Indeed, at one point Vance uses that very term to refer to his mother: Moms behavior grew increasingly erratic, Vance writes. She was more roommate than parent, and of the three of us Mom, [my sister], and me Mom was the roommate most prone to hard living as she partied and stayed out til the wee hours of the morning.

Given the childhood trauma associated with his mothers behavior, its perhaps not surprising that Vance came to emulate his grandparents judgmental stance toward the hard living. This is illustrated by his condemnation of shirking co-workers at a warehouse job and those who used food stamps (SNAP) to pay for the groceries he bagged as a teenager. (It seems that Vance also inherited his familys pugilistic tendencies, which have come in handy with his conversion to Trumpism; words like scumbag and idiot, which readers of Hillbilly Elegy can easily imagine coming out of Mamaws mouth, have become staples of Vances campaign vocabulary).

Ultimately, of course, Vance traveled far from his modest roots to graduate from Yale Law School and become a venture capitalist. For this success, he credited the hard work and boot-strapping mentality he learned from his grandparents. What Vance didnt credit not explicitly, anyway were the structural forces that benefitted him and his grandparents. For Vance, these included an undergraduate degree from an excellent public university (Ohio State) and opportunities in the military. For his grandparents, these included that good union job at Armco Steeleven as Papaw complained about the union. (A significant faction of workers believe that hard-working people like themselves dont need unions, that unions simply protect slackers from hard work. My own fathers pet peeve was unionized loading dock employees whose generous breaks delayed getting his truck loaded or unloaded and thus back on the road earning money. The naming of right-to-work laws plays to this mindset.)

Like Vance, settled white workers tend to see themselves living a version of the American dream grounded primarily if not entirely in their own agency. They believe they can survive, even thrive, if they just work hard enough. And some of them are doing just that. Because they lean into the grit of the individual, they tend to downplay structural obstacles to their quest to make a living, e.g., poor schools and even crummy job markets, just as they downplay structural benefits. They also discount white privilege because giving skin color credit for what they have achieved devalues the significance of their work. This mindset is also the reason that when Obama said in 2012, if youve got a business, you didnt build that, the remark landed so badly among the settled working class. Theyre not accustomed to sharing credit for what they have perhaps especially when they dont have much.

Vance and my parents are mere anecdotes, yes, but scholars have documented the phenomenon they represent. Kathryn Edin of Princeton University, Jennifer Sherman of Washington State University and Monica Prasad of Northwestern University have studied folks like them in both urban and rural locales. What settled and hard living express as cultural phenomena, Edin and colleagues express quantitatively as the second-lowest income quintile dissociating from the bottom quintile the very place from whence many had climbed. Edin described that disassociation as a virulent social distancing suddenly, youre a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person.

Journalists have also brought us illustrations of the settled working class. Alec MacGillis did so in a 2015 New York Times essay, introducing us to Pamela Dougherty of Marshalltown, Iowa, a staunch opponent of safety net programs. As a teenaged mother who divorced young, Pamelas own journey had been rocky, and she had benefitted from taxpayer-funded tuition breaks at community college to become a nurse. But at the dialysis center where Pamela worked and where Medicare covered everyones treatment regardless of age, she noticed that very few patients had regular jobs. Pamela resented this. She thought the patients should have hoops to jump through to get the treatment, just as shed had to keep up her grades when she was getting assistance with college. She thought they should have some skin in the game.

Atul Gawande brought us a similar tale in a 2017 New Yorker article about whether health care should be a right. He introduced us to Monna, a librarian earning $16.50 an hour in Athens, Ohio. After taxes and health insurance premiums were deducted, Monna was taking home less than $1,000 a month, and her health insurance annual deductible was a whopping $3,000. It was her retired husbands pension, military benefits, and Medicare all benefits considered earned, not handouts that kept them afloat. In spite of this struggle, Monna didnt support health care as a right because it was another way of undermining responsibility. Noting that she could quit her job and get Medicaid for free like some of her neighbors were doing, Monna explained that she was old school and not really good at accepting anything I dont work for.

Exit polls from 2016 also reflect this division, with the lowest-income voters supporting Clintonand therefore safety-net programs associated with Democratsby the greatest margin, 53 percent to 41 percent over Trump. It was folks earning $50,000 to $99,000, those who depending on region and family size might be considered settled working class, who preferred Trump by the greatest margin of all income brackets 50 percent to 46 percent.

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There Is a Major Rift Dividing the White Working Class And Democrats Are Clueless - POLITICO

FAIRVIEW PARK -- In 1989, the national Democratic Party was coming off three straight blowout presidential election losses. In response, the Progressive Policy Institute published a detailed paper that identified the Partys central problem its leaders practiced the politics of evasion.

In doing so, they refused to acknowledge any problems with the partys appeal while relying on mythical cures like mobilizing imaginary non-voters or advocating for even more liberal positions.

Today, Ohio Democrats face a situation that is even more dire than the one faced by national Democrats in 1989.

Since 2014, only one person listed on the statewide ballot as a Democrat has won. In the other 13 statewide races, the Republican candidate won, and often by significant margins. Down-ballot, Democrats have fared no better as Republican supermajorities dominate the General Assembly.

This decade of cascading losses must force Ohio Democrats to face the stark reality: That most Ohioans have come to see the party as unresponsive to their economic needs, hostile to their cultural mores, and indifferent to the rise of crime in their communities.

But too many Democratic leaders refuse to acknowledge that reality.

Instead, they rely on trite slogans of avoidance like Ohio is not a red state, it is a gerrymandered state, Democrats win if more people vote, and Democrats will win if they act like Democrats. In short, too many Ohio Democrats today are practicing the same politics of evasion that national Democrats practiced in 1989.

Rick Raley is political director of the Cuyahoga County Young Democrats, treasurer of the Fairview Park Democratic Club, and a member of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party Central Committee.

Data shows that Ohio Democrats consistently lose statewide elections because they have lost the support of middle-class Ohioans and lost ground with moderate voters.

Since 2016, statewide Democrats have only averaged 44% support from voters with yearly incomes between $50,000 and $100,000. And, losing statewide candidates in that timeframe have only averaged 54% support from moderate voters, which is far short of the 60% threshold that Ohio Democrats need to win to be competitive.

Ohio Democrats cannot stick their heads in the sand when confronted with this data. Increased turnout will not save the party. After all, the 2020 election featured the highest turnout in decades, and President Biden still lost by eight points.

Creating a more liberal electorate is a fantasy, too. Since 2000, the Ohio electorate has been remarkably consistent with only about 20% of voters identifying as liberal. The only thing that Ohio Democrats can do to achieve a governing majority is to increase their support among moderate and middle-class voters.

By relying on cliched myths and failing to appeal to the voters who decide elections, Ohio Democrats have ceded the state to extremist Republican ideas like massive giveaways to the powerful, a gun in every classroom, and a bureaucrat in every doctors office.

Now is the time for Ohio Democrats to correct course by reaching out to moderate and middle-class Ohioans who recoil from those ideas. They must communicate that the Partys policies are laser-focused on rewarding those who work hard and play by the rules. They must meet voters where they are while remaining dedicated to non-discrimination.

And, they must commit to fighting both the crime in our streets and the underlying causes of that crime.

Today, Ohio Democrats face a choice: Do they want to sit in an echo chamber as the state descends further into right-wing extremism or do they want to do what it takes to win a governing majority? The choice must be easy because too much is at stake for Ohio Democrats to remain sidelined.

When national Democrats cast aside the politics of evasion in 1992, the Party won its first presidential election in 16 years and President Clinton was the first Democratic president re-elected in 50 years. Doing the same thing here in Ohio in 2022 will produce the durable governing majority that Ohio Democrats need to make the state a place of equal opportunity for all, not special privilege for a few.

Rick Raley is political director of the Cuyahoga County Young Democrats, treasurer of the Fairview Park Democratic Club, and a member of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party Central Committee.

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Ohio Democrats need to abandon the politics of evasion if they expect to win elections : Rick Raley - cleveland.com