Dennis M. Howard
Trump's pro-life victory
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By Dennis M. Howard
November 10, 2016

Nobody was more stumped about Donald Trump's amazing victory on Tuesday than the nation's pundits and pollsters.

Larry J. Sabato, director of Virginia University's Center for Politics, was among the first to confess "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" for being so wrong about his forecasts.

Sabato had predicted a Clinton victory with 322 electoral votes to Trump's 216 on the eve of the election. By 3 o'clock the morning after, Trump had already nailed down 279 electoral votes and appeared headed even higher.

Sabato confessed, "We heard for months that we were underestimating the size of a potential hidden Trump vote. We didn't believe it, and we were wrong. The Crystal Ball is shattered."

So what accounted for Trump's amazing upset victory?

My own analysis reveals that Trump's victory was entirely due to support from the nation's most pro-life states. The 36 states with the lowest number of abortions gave Trump an average of 51.3% of their votes, while the 15 highest abortion states gave Trump just 43.8% of their votes.

This split, of course, simply reflects the unrecognized divide in America between pro-life states and pro-abortion states that runs as deep as the 19th century split between slave and free states. Yet it is just as real, and remains one of the strongest arguments for repealing Roe v. Wade and returning the abortion issue to the states.

How come the pollsters didn't see this before the election?

The answer is that they weren't even looking for it. It was simply not in their politically correct script – which assumes that, of course, abortion is "the law of the land" when, in fact, it is an issue over which America remains deeply divided.

If they had simply included this in structuring their polls, it would have popped out like a sore thumb, and they would have seen it immediately. This was no mysterious "hidden vote." They just weren't looking for it.

Ditto for the Democrats, who became so fixated on the abortion issue during the whole Clinton-Obama era that they left no place in their party for pro-life "deplorables" who make up at least half the electorate. As a result, they were blind to the wide range of opinion on this profoundly human issue.

That's no way to build a majority party.

My own experience confirms this. I left the Democratic Party in 1992 after 40 years as a loyal Democrat when the Clintons booted pro-life Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania from the Democrat convention that year.

That wasn't enough for them. They followed that up by sending goons to keep him from even speaking about it at Cooper Union in New York.

That's when I started Movement for a Better America as my way of changing hearts and minds – one person at a time if necessary.

It has been a long uphill fight. Since then, the pro-life movement has been building its own base while the Clintons finished 8 years in the White House and began a post-presidential pursuit for money and power that earned them a princely $230 million over the last 15 years. This year, Hillary was back for another shot at the golden ring.

Unfortunately for Hillary, her abortion blind spot proved to be her come-uppance.

The fact is that fully half the states qualify as "low abortion states" by contributing no more than 10% of all the nation's abortions. Nineteen states are in the middle, contributing just 40% of America's abortions.

At the other extreme, just six states contribute fully half of the nation's abortions. They include California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida and Texas. The first four are Democrat strongholds. Florida is a swing state, and Texas is reliably Republican. All six have large minority populations, which partly accounts for their high abortion rates.

This skewed distribution, however, is no way to build a national party. No party can afford to write off more than half the states right out of the starting gate, which is what Hillary did with her "deplorables" comment and her extreme stand favoring federal funding of abortion through all 9 months of pregnancy.

The election results showed it. The failure of the pollsters and the pundits to spot it and warn the Democrats was just a case of those "who have eyes but do not see, and ears but do not hear." Jeremiah 5:21

www.movementforabetteramerica.org


© Dennis M. Howard

 

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Dennis M. Howard

(Dennis M. Howard passed away on May 6, 2021. His obituary can be read here.

Dennis M. Howard is founder and president of The Movement for a Better America, a non-profit, pro-life educational organization. Before starting MBA in 1995, he had a long and successful career in journalism and creative marketing. He has been writing since 1950, when he helped launch The Sun Herald of Kansas City, America's last attempt at publishing a Catholic daily... (more)

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