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(LifeSiteNews) – For months, polls have signaled that Democrats are in for a rough time in this fall’s midterm congressional elections, but the abortion lobby is betting their checkbooks on pro-“choice” rage at the loss of Roe v. Wade being enough to reverse their fortunes. But how safe is that bet?

Last week, Planned Parenthood announced that it plans to spend a whopping $50 million to help elect pro-abortion politicians, starting with advertising blitzes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states’ residents can expect a lot of fear-mongering about “throw[ing] health care providers and pregnant people in jail, and endanger[ing] the health and lives of pregnant people across the country,” in the words of Planned Parenthood Votes executive director Jenny Lawson.

Trying to maximize turnout of the voters one already has is one of the go-to moves of the current generation of political strategists, who have at least some polling data they can point to. On Tuesday, Pew released survey results finding that 56% of voters say abortion is “very important” to how they’ll vote this fall, with the share of Democrats who say so spiking from 46% to 71% since March, whereas the share of Republicans barely moved from 40% to 41% over that same period.

Kaiser Health News, meanwhile, found in July that 73% of women age 18-49 consider abortion “very important” to their vote, and that 88% of those respondents will be voting to protect the practice.

On the other hand, both Pew and Kaiser also find voters ranking a host of concerns – the economy, inflation, gas prices, health care costs, crime, and gun violence – as more important to them, and those aren’t getting better for Democrats anytime soon. That’s one of the perennial disadvantages of the Left: It’s much harder to cast a vote to signal one’s wokeness when that vote will also perpetuate direct, ongoing harm to one’s daily life. (Pro-lifers, by contrast, can advance their moral values and their fiscal interests with the same vote.)

Further, while we’ve already seen in Kansas that pro-abortion fear-mongering can get results, it has another weakness: eventually reality fails to live up to the hype. It was one thing to make frightening predictions of what abortion bans would lead to when abortion bans were at most a distant possibility, but now people are living in a country where they’re actually taking effect. The more people notice that these laws aren’t resulting in an epidemic of dying mothers, prosecuted women, or investigations for miscarriage, the less seriously they’ll take the hysterics.

Between the issues, rapidly shifting events, voters’ well-being, and the varied performance of individual candidates, elections rarely come down to any single variable. The post-Roe America is one of uncharted political waters, and it remains to be seen exactly how much the fears of misinformed voters will affect an election that by conventional measures should be a GOP blowout. But with same polls that indicate heightened pro-abortion passion also showing voters continuing to prioritize the issues that affect them most directly, there’s no reason for pro-lifers to feel discouraged. As long as we spread the truth as clearly, as visibly, and as often as possible, it won’t matter how much money the abortion lobby pumps into spreading fear.

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Calvin Freiburger is a Wisconsin-based conservative writer and 2011 graduate of Hillsdale College. His commentary and analysis have been featured on NewsReal Blog, Live Action, and various other conservative websites. Before joining LifeSiteNews, he spent two years in Washington, DC, working to build support for the Life at Conception Act with the National Pro-Life Alliance, then worked a year and a half as assistant editor of TheFederalistPapers.org. You can follow him on Twitter @CalFreiburger, and check out his Substack: calvinfreiburger.substack.com.

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