MIAMI — Republicans have long claimed the mantle of the party of freedom.
Val Demings is trying to flip that dynamic on its head — and using the loss of abortion rights to do so.
In the three months since the Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs ruling revoked the right to an abortion, the Democrats’ nominee for Senate in Florida has argued that Republicans — led by her opponent GOP Sen. Marco Rubio — are attempting to limit or altogether eliminate the freedom once afforded to women, replacing personal decisions with ones mandated by state or federal government.
In statements, campaign-trail speeches, and widely broadcast ads, the congresswoman has repeatedly leaned into the message, hoping it can win over not just core Democrats but also the valuable swing voters her campaign needs to attract in droves ahead of November’s election.
“I will never stop fighting to codify Roe v. Wade,” Demings said in a statement, “and protect the fundamental freedom of women and girls to choose our own destiny.”
Her approach is part of a broader strategy from Democratic candidates across the country, many of whom have woven appeals to freedom into their broader rhetoric about abortion rights and the political price they think Republicans should pay for opposing them.
It’s a rare opportunity, party strategists say, to stake a claim on a politically potent issue that has been a GOP strong point for years.
“That kind of government overreach is becoming a mantra for the Republican Party in a way they used to cry out against,” said Ronja Abel, spokeswoman for EMILY’s List, a Democratic group that supports abortion rights and has endorsed Demings. “Democrats have been able to reclaim that mantle of anti-government overreach.”
Republicans fiercely contest that liming abortion rights amounts to an overall loss of freedom, instead of granting the unborn a chance at life.
They have made personal freedom a big part of their own campaigns, arguing that pandemic-era restrictions on everyday matters like business openings and school closings unnecessarily limited Americans’ rights and caused great harm to society along the way.
Such a push from the GOP isn’t new: The party has argued for generations that its more laissez-faire economic policy amounts to giving more freedom to individual citizens to dictate their economic fate. Republicans, including GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, have more recently even criticized Democrats for wanting to control what car people drive and what language they use.
Demings has also faced pointed questions about what restrictions she supports on the procedure. The congresswoman has said that she backs abortion rights until the fetus becomes viable outside the womb as determined by the patient’s doctor, and has voted for the Women’s Health Care Protection Act, which seeks to guarantees the federal right to an abortion until 24 weeks.
Conservative critics, including Rubio, have charged that the bill’s restrictions on abortions past 24 weeks is too permissive, however, and effectively allows for the procedure up until just prior to delivery.
“Val Demings is a pro-abortion extremist,” Elizabeth Gregory, spokeswoman for Rubio’s campaign, said in a statement. “In the House, she’s voted for abortion up until the moment of birth, but Demings repeatedly refuses to say that out loud now because she knows how radical that sounds to the people of Florida. Marco Rubio is proud to be unequivocally pro-life and has consistently reaffirmed his belief in the dignity of the unborn.”
Last week, Rubio co-sponsored legislation that would ban abortions after 15 weeks nationally, with exceptions for rape, incest and if the life of the mother was in danger. Florida law already bans most abortions after 15 weeks, but the federal legislation put the issue back in the spotlight of a U.S. Senate race where the incumbent Republican appears to hold a small but significant lead over Demings.
Polls suggest Rubio’s lead was larger before June’s landmark ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade.
National Democrats credit the court’s ruling — and subsequent moves from GOP officials in many states to tighten abortion regulations — for turning around their political fortunes in an election that once seemed poised for sweeping Republican gains.
At the start of July, according to an aggregate of polls collected by the political statistics website FiveThirtyEight, the GOP held a two-point edge on the generic ballot for Congress. Now, Democrats hold a 1.5 percentage point lead, the polling aggregate shows.
Republicans still hold a voter registration edge in the state, one that has continued to grow over the last few months, according to Florida Department of Elections voter files through September analyzed by the Herald.
Democrats actually lost registered voters this month, nearly 8,100 of them, though voters not registered with a party surged by more than 28,000.
Since the ruling, however, women and young people in the state — two groups that skew left relative to the average voter — have registered to vote at a faster rate than they did before the Dobbs decision, according to Democratic strategist Tom Bonier, mirroring a nationwide trend in the data that he has analyzed.
Bonier, who is tracking the data, found that young people made up 4.2 percentage points more of all registered voters after the decision than they did before, while women made up 2.5 percentage points more.
Demings, of course, doesn’t talk exclusively about abortion rights as an issue of personal freedom. She has focused some of her criticism on Rubio’s personal opposition to abortion exceptions for rape and incest.
At other times, she’s discussed abortion rights as a public safety issue, saying cops should be focused on catching criminals instead of cracking down on women who receive abortions.
But emphasizing personal freedom is nonetheless a key component of the Democratic nominee’s overall argument, in part because of its political resonance.
One national Democratic Party official working with Senate campaigns found that after extensive voter research on the topic, describing it as taking away a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions ranked as one of the most effective messages with voters.
It’s a message Demings and her allies have emphasized.
“If Senator Rubio and others like him are able to pass things like (an abortion ban) starting at conception, we are looking at things like criminalization of emergency contraception, we are looking at extreme invasions of privacy to try to determine if someone might be pregnant before they receive any medication,” said Jennifer Cowart, a leader with the Duval County Democratic Party, in a press call with reporters last month. “I’m deeply worried about what this loss of privacy, this continued intrusion and invasion means for people just trying to get their routine health care.”
(Staff writer Ana Claudia Chacin contributed to this report.)
