The ad opens with the sound of a fetal heartbeat.
“Most people believe that abortion at the moment of birth is wrong, far beyond any reasonable limit. No Virginia Democrats,” a female narrator says, just before the sound of a baby cooing and crying. “They fought to make late-term abortions the rule, not the exception.”
At the end of the ad, the heart rate flattens out.
The digital ad, released in recent weeks by the Republican Party of Virginia, is part of a six-figure effort to win over voters ahead of the Virginia legislative elections on November 7. The goal is to portray Democrats as abortion extremists and Republicans as champions of reasonable compromise on a notoriously controversial issue. And it’s a new, risky Republican strategy — led by Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin — to rebrand abortion as a winning issue after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade last year left the Republican Party underperforming in the 2022 midterm elections.
If this strategy works in Virginia, it won’t stay there. Virginia’s Republican Party hopes to regain control of the Senate after winning both the House of Delegates and the governor’s mansion in 2021. If they succeed, Republicans across the country are likely to push the 15-week ban into their own 2024 races.
“Both parties, if they win, will argue that, like Virginia, so does the rest of the country. But what you really get, I think, is testing the messaging in Virginia,” said Stephen Farnsworth, director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. “It is clear that Republicans have struggled to talk about abortion since the Supreme Court ruling, and this will be the final test of Republican anti-abortion messaging.”
Before Roe fell, abortion usually motivated Republicans, not Democrats, to go to the polls; While only a minority of Americans are completely against abortion, these voters are among Republicans’ most committed voters. For decades, Republicans were able to appease them by passing abortion restrictions — but they were also largely able to sidestep the political consequences of those restrictions because Roe prevented them from taking effect.
Those guardrails are now gone, and Virginia is the only Southern state that hasn’t abortion has been significantly reduced since Roe’s death. More than 70% of Democrats and half of Republicans in the state say abortion is an important issue to them in this election. according to an October poll from the Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
“It’s a winning issue for Democrats if they know how to communicate it properly,” said Mark Rozell, founder and dean of the Schar School. “So I think Youngkin’s strategy, and that of Virginia Republicans, is to frame the issue in a way that doesn’t seem threatening to sway voters.”
Republicans are trying to reframe the issue by digging into the fault lines within American support for abortion. While most Americans have long supported abortion access—and support it even more in the wake of Roe’s demise— most people say they don’t think the procedure should be legal after the first trimester of pregnancy. (Although the majority of U.S. abortions occur in that first trimester, abortion providers and their supporters say that after Roe, more people are having abortions later in pregnancy because strict restrictions have slowed their access to the procedure.)
At the same time, abortion is a notoriously difficult topic to ask people about. Depending on how pollsters ask a question, respondents can give vastly different, even contradictory answers.
Currently, Virginia law allows abortion during the second trimester of pregnancy, or up to about 27 weeks. In the October poll from the Schar School and the Washington Post, 49% of voters said they would like Virginia’s abortion laws to remain the same, while 24% said they would like those laws to be relaxed. But in that same poll, support for a 15-week ban was evenly divided – contradictory the broad support for maintaining or broadening Virginia’s laws.
“The idea that common sense advocacy for unborn child protection will bring down Republicans is a story made up by liberals, and I don’t put much stock in it,” said Ken Nunnenkamp, executive director of the Republican party of Virginia, in an email. Are Democrats, he said, who refuse to be honest about their views on abortion. “Republicans have a responsibility to expose Democratic abortion extremism.”
The Virginia House Republican Caucus and the Virginia Senate Republican Caucus have purchased a website, nolimitsvirginia.com, to target Democrats on abortion. The website recycles common myths about abortion, such as using the medically incorrect term “late-term abortion” and suggests that Democrats support allowing abortion. abortions must take place “until the moment of birth”.
The website also quotes Democratic state Rep. Kathy Tran, who is now running for re-election and said in 2019 that a bill would allow abortion “up to 40 weeks.” (Tran later told the Washington Post that she ‘made a mistake’.)
Morgan Hopkins, communications director for the Virginia House Democratic caucus, said Democrats do not support further restrictions on abortion.
“Democrats have always been clear that this decision should be between a woman and her doctor,” Hopkins said. “No compromises are possible on this.”
In a different rhetoric tactics, tactics Virginia Republicans are also removing the word “ban” from their vocabulary and replacing it with “limit.” In October, Youngkin’s political action committee, Spirit of Virginia, dropped $1.4 million in an ad buy featuring a spot focused on abortion. “It’s just not true. Their lies about abortion,” a female voice says at the beginning of the ad. “It’s disinformation. Politics at its worst.
“Here’s the truth. There is no ban,” the ad’s narrator continues, as a baby begins to gurgle in the background. “Virginia Republicans support a reasonable 15-week period, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.”
In a sign of how central this message is to Republican Senator Siobhan Dunnavant’s re-election campaign, visitors to her website are greeted with a pop-up ad titled “Not a Ban…”
In the ad, Dunnavant says to the camera: “I am not in favor of an abortion ban. Period.” The ad goes on to explain that Dunnavant, who is running for re-election in a district that includes part of the city of Richmond, Virginia, supports banning abortion after 15 weeks, with some exceptions. (Dunnavant’s team did not respond to multiple interview requests.)
Youngkin did not come up with the idea of a fifteen-week ‘limit’ himself. Instead, it is quickly becoming a Republican flagship. The cases that overturned Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revolved around a fifteen-week abortion ban in Mississippi. Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a powerful anti-abortion group active nationwide, has also urged Republicans to support a 15-week federal ban.
Kaitlin Makuski, political director of Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, applauded Virginia Republicans’ support for what she called a “common-sense and compassionate 15-week limit.”
“Candidates in this country should take note of the way Virginia Republicans are leading the way on pro-life issues by going on the offensive and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” she said in a statement.
Virginia Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to bring up the word “ban” whenever they can.
“A ban is a ban is a ban,” Hopkins said. “What they are talking about is a ban on a right that so many women had access to for years. I’m 24 in Virginia, and now I may have fewer rights than my mother, who was born in 1968. To me that is absolutely insane.”