After another disappointing night for Pa. Republicans, the GOP struggles to find an answer to abortion

Carolyn Carluccio never had a good answer for the deluge of abortion attacks.

The Republican candidate for state Supreme Court tried to avoid the issue on the campaign trail — saying that her personal opinion didn’t matter and that she’d “uphold the law.” But it wasn’t enough.

Carluccio’s six-point loss to Democrat Dan McCaffery in swing state Pennsylvania is a warning sign for Republicans, who have struggled to rebut attacks against them on abortion rights in races where the issue takes center stage.

Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky also showcased on Tuesday how abortion rights continue to motivate Democrats and draw out swing voters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion last year. In Pennsylvania, Democrats proved that the same playbook used against more extreme candidates — like state Sen. Doug Mastriano in the 2022 governor’s race — can also work on less recognizable candidates like Carluccio, a judge from Montgomery County who never shared her personal beliefs on abortion throughout the campaign.

And even though the balance of the court was not at stake — Democrats already held a 4-2 advantage — liberals’ campaign messaging successfully conveyed urgency on the abortion issue.

“Elections are about defining yourself, defining your opponent and defining the stakes of the election,” said Democratic strategist J.J. Balaban, whose firm worked on pro-McCaffery ads in the race. They were juxtaposed with attacks on Carluccio as antiabortion, which “had the double benefit of motivating Democrats to vote in a low-turnout election and also persuading swing voters not to back Carluccio,” Balaban said.

In the wake of Tuesday’s losses, Republicans did not deny the issue is an ongoing weakness for them. They blamed outside interest groups for McCaffery’s success, and acknowledged the messaging drew in more money. Nearly $20 million was spent on the race and Democrats outspent Republicans by a little less than 2:1.

“Until our side gets the same fire that you and I have to elect principled candidates, we will continue to be massively outspent by deep-pocketed special interests,” Matt Brouillette, who heads the conservative Commonwealth Leaders Fund PAC that spent millions trying to elect Carluccio to the bench, said in a memo to supporters Wednesday.

Polling consistently shows that Americans think abortion should be legal in some or most cases and a record high number of voters now say the procedure should be legal in all cases, a position more in line with the Democratic Party. Republicans have struggled to carve out nuanced positions on the issue.

But GOP leaders see opportunity in 2024, when far more voters will turn out than the roughly 34% who voted in Pennsylvania’s off-year election. And in a presidential election that could be a rematch of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, plenty of other issues and baggage will take center stage.

“We all have to remember that 2024 won’t be 2023,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll. “This electorate was favorable to Democrats, who were more educated voters. … And we know that Trump voters come out for Trump, and not necessarily other candidates.”

Republican strategist Charlie Gerow said Republicans have “failed” on abortion messaging but they’re not failing on economic issues, “and national elections are almost always about the economy.”

McCaffery didn’t just eke out a win. In a swing state where races are often decided by thin margins, he won by a larger margin than Biden and Sen. John Fetterman.

Despite lacking widespread name recognition, he coasted to a six-point victory, running up margins in areas that are going to be key to Democrats next year.

He outperformed the 2021 Democratic state Supreme Court candidate by adding more than 260,000 votes to his vote totals — more than half of which came from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and its collar counties, Yost noted. McCaffery ran up the score in unlikely places, too; in Lancaster County, McCaffery won 44% of the vote, while just two years ago the Democratic Supreme Court candidate won only 38%.

That kind of boost, however small in raw votes in a low-turnout election, helped Democrats sweep all the remaining statewide judicial races and local elections in the state’s suburban areas.

McCaffery also tapped into his working-class background and touted endorsements from the Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police and labor unions to expand his appeal. In one TV ad, he rode a motorcycle with an American flag, as a voiceover claimed Democratic rights are under attack.

“We messaged the race pretty simply: We basically talked about the [U.S.] Supreme Court and juxtaposed it with our state Supreme Court,” McCaffery said. “And voters, they really wanted somebody who would protect the rule of law and their constitutional rights.”

Pro-McCaffery groups spent millions on a united message that Carluccio was backed by extreme antiabortion groups. They slammed her for deleting language on her website about protecting “all life under the law,” and framed the race as one that could determine abortion access in the state.

That’s partly true, though Carluccio tried to rebuff the attacks as baseless.

“The Democrats made this about abortion,” Carluccio said Tuesday night, in the hours before the race was called for McCaffery. “And actually abortion has nothing to do with this. I don’t expect it to come before me [as a justice], but they’re using it as a litmus test to see what the people think.”

There is an abortion case before the state Supreme Court, which will decide whether Pennsylvania’s state constitution includes reproductive access as one of its fundamental rights. The court will also soon decide whether the state has to cover abortions for Medicaid patients.

Traditionally, some justices have recused themselves on cases accepted by the court before their election. McCaffery said Wednesday that he’d “cross that bridge when I come to it.”

Carluccio’s loss follows a recent string of wins by Republican judicial candidates in the state. A longtime judge in Montgomery County, one of the most populous in the state, Carluccio was, in many ways, an ideal candidate for her party.

“We ran a clean race,” she said Tuesday night. “We were strong. We kept our head high. And I was consistent the entire time that I’m gonna uphold the law.”

But the counterattacks — tying McCaffery to the Porngate email scandal that surfaced in 2015 involving his brother — proved ineffective.

“The Republican ads were memorable and mean but they did little to motivate Republican voters,” Balaban said.

Chris Nicholas, a Republican political consultant, said Republicans would have been wiser to address abortion directly.

“You can’t allow yourself to be painted as an extremist, or … as having supporters who are extremists and your only response is kind of a technical one,” he said. “We need to go back at the Democrats and say, ‘You have just as many or more supporters on your side who want to make abortion legal at all times.’”

One study in owning a more direct position on abortion failed in Virginia where Republicans, backed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, ran campaigns promising to enact a 15-week ban on abortions if the party took control of the legislature. The theory was that a less extreme limit on abortion might find support. Instead, it drew intense opposition.

Democrats wound up holding the Senate and flipping the House in an embarrassing loss.

“A lot of Republicans suspected or thought that the message that Glenn Youngkin was gonna use in Virginia would work, and it clearly didn’t,” Yost said.