As the Supreme Court ponders its ruling in the Mississippi abortion restrictions case, Democratic strategists are hoping to gin up “OUTRAGE!” over abortion rights to turn around their increasingly dire election prospects for 2022. This was to be expected. When the Democrats are out of power, they can claim they have to be returned so that competent adult leadership can be restored. But when they’re in power, they can’t make that argument, for obvious reasons.

So they have to terrify their base with claims that the eeeeevil Republicans are going to take away women’s rights (actually, Democrats have done that, under the guise of “trans rights”), or bring back Jim Crow laws (a Democrat invention), or do away with the sacred Constitutional right of women to kill their unborn children. But there are signs that scaring people into voting for more incompetent Democrat rule is wearing thin.

For one thing, look around: it’s hard to think of anything scarier than the current situation under Democratic rule. Does the hypothetical loss of the right to kill your hypothetical unborn child really outweigh the very real fear that the violent criminals Democrats have turned loose on the streets will kill you? Besides, Americans have too many other things to worry about.

As Rick Moran at PJ Media points out, outrage over abortion laws may not be the motivating factor for voters that some Democrats think it is.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/12/05/a-post-outrage-world-abortion-wont-be-the-winning-issue-democrats-think-it-will-be-n1539027

Politico reported that it played no factor in the recent elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where voters were more concerned about stopping school boards from assaulting their children than allowing abortionists to assault their children. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that voters rank abortion behind taxes and government spending, health care, climate change and the environment, immigration, jobs and the economy as an issue of interest. Exit polls in 2016 found that in picking between the pro-life Trump and the pro-abortion Hillary, only one in five voters named Supreme Court nominations as their most important voting factor, and by a wide margin, those voters were Republicans.

As Moran notes, polls show that only about 10-15% of Americans want abortion banned under all circumstances, 25-30% want it legal in all cases, and the vast majority fall somewhere in the middle. While I wish more people were pro-life, I know enough about politics to know that you can’t run a successful campaign on only that one issue. We’ll soon find out whether Democrats really believe they can retain power solely on a radical pro-abortion stance that’s shared by, at most, 30% of the country. That's actually lower than Joe Biden's approval rating, and that's the thing that has them genuinely terrified.