(LifeSiteNews) — The Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF) and Planned Parenthood Votes (PPV) announced on Monday that they intend to spend $40 million this year on reelecting President Joe Biden and increase pro-abortion representation in Congress. But despite Democrats’ emphasis on 2024 as a pivotal battle for “reproductive freedom,” the abortion giant’s spending is actually smaller than in its previous two election cycles.
PPAF’s and PPV’s so-called “We Decide” program will “make strategic investments to defend the White House and the Senate, take back the House, state legislatures, governor offices, and state supreme courts — as well as pass critical abortion rights [sic] ballot measures across the country and launch voter registration efforts,” according to the political arms of the nation’s largest abortion chain.
Nationally, Planned Parenthood intends to focus on Arizona, Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; while state organizations prepare “robust” campaigns in California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio.
“For politicians like Donald Trump who oppose abortion, ending Roe v Wade was just a warm-up lap,” declared PPV executive director Jenny Lawson. “The 2024 election is our time to decide,” she added, signaling the abortion lobby’s intentions to paint the Republican challenger as secretly devoted to banning abortion nationally despite his public insistence to the contrary.
Notably, while the Biden campaign and other Democrats have made clear they view driving pro-abortion turnout as key to their success, Forbes points out that Planned Parenthood’s $40 million investment is actually less than the $45 million it spent to oust Trump in 2020 and the $50 million it spent in the 2022 midterms, the first slate of elections to follow Roe’s overturn. The abortion giant’s annual reports released in 2023 and 2024 showed the money it took in continuing to rise, ruling out financial constraints.
Ianthe Metzger, senior director for Planned Parenthood advocacy communications, explained the discrepancy by claiming that this year other left-wing organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are sharing the burden with their own pro-abortion campaign activity, as opposed to 2022 when “it was really just Planned Parenthood screaming about abortion.”
However, despite its public bravado, it may be that Planned Parenthood also privately realizes what pro-lifers have been arguing for years: that pro-abortion agitation does not drive as many votes as many in both parties insist.
While the abortion lobby has defeated pro-lifers in numerous ballot initiatives since Roe’s fall, available evidence suggests that abortion has not been a massive or insurmountable factor in elections. No state that enacted a near-total abortion ban prior to November 2022 flipped the governor or legislature responsible, and to the extent that any consistent bias could be gleaned, it was in favor of incumbency, regardless of party or abortion position; 94% of existing officeholders kept their seats.
Last Friday, LifeSite’s Jonathon Van Maren interviewed Dr. Michael New, a senior associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and an assistant professor of practice at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America, for a closer look at what polling data really says about how abortion influences voters.
“According to Gallup, nearly all of the recent gains in ‘pro-choice’ sentiment have occurred among self-identified Democrats,” New said. “Abortion attitudes among Independents and Republicans are virtually unchanged. The fact that self-identified Democrats are becoming more supportive of legal abortions is unlikely to have much impact on elections — considering that self-identified Democrats are already consistently voting for Democratic candidates.”
He advised pro-lifers to “not worry all that much about short term fluctuations in public opinion. There is some evidence that public attitudes toward abortion tend to fluctuate in response to current events. There is some evidence that pro-lifers lost some ground in the court of public opinion in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1989 Webster decision, because many observers felt that a reversal of Roe v. Wade was imminent. That said, the 1990s debate over partial-birth abortion led to substantial gains in pro-life sentiment.”