By MARJORIE DANNENFELSER
In 2012, Democrats ran a well-coordinated campaign to demonize
and distort pro-life candidates as anti-woman misogynists hell-bent on
taking away birth control. The Republican response to this line of
attack consisted mostly of pivoting away to focus on “jobs” and the
“economy.” With rare exceptions, instead of responding, GOP candidates
were unwilling to answer the attacks head-on.
In
order to win elections in the future, Republicans will have to change
tactics and better respond to these scurrilous accusations.
They had a chance to change things in Virginia in
2013. Going into the Virginia governor’s race, pro-life advocates
believed it would be a different ballgame with a strong pro-life leader
in Ken Cuccinelli as the GOP nominee. During his career, Cuccinelli was
known as a candidate unlikely to back down from a fight and unafraid to
counterpunch.
On cue, and pulling from the 2012 playbook,
Democrats pounded Cuccinelli with millions of dollars worth of “war on
women” attack ads. The pounding was so severe that, just a couple of
weeks before Election Day, the Cook Political Report found that
McAuliffe’s campaign had spent more of its ad budget (26 percent)
hitting the Republican on this topic than on any other issue. That is,
McAuliffe and his allies ran more than 5,600 TV spots on abortion alone.
But instead of combating these so-called war on
women charges, Republicans opted again to try to change the subject.
McAuliffe’s echo chamber was complete when the press failed to cut
through the paid media assault and relay accurate information about each
candidate’s actual positions.
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