California Republican Carly Fiorina was an anti-abortion candidate Democrats defeated. Abortion was winning issue for Dems

While almost nothing went right for Democratic candidates this fall, one issue turned out to be a winner in some of the closest Senate races in the nation: abortion.

By branding Republican challengers as outside the cultural mainstream on the issue, Democrats managed to hold on to at least a slice of the political center by courting and winning over moderate women in a handful of key states.


The strategy ran counter to the one that enabled the party to broaden the political map in 2006 and 2008, when Democrats thrived by running candidates whose positions on abortion were closely attuned to the socially conservative areas where they sought office.

This year, however, Democrats adopted almost the opposite approach late in the 2010 campaign. As many of the anti-abortion Democrats elected over the last four years were going down in defeat, the party made abortion a central concern in a handful of battleground Senate races — and they ended up in the Democratic column as a result.

In Colorado, Sen. Michael Bennet won reelection by less than 16,000 votes over Republican prosecutor Ken Buck — a tea party-backed conservative with down-the-line anti-abortion views — after defeating him handily among women.

The gender gap was an obvious place for Colorado Democrats to focus their attention, after Buck's divisive primary with former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, and polls showed Buck with persistent weaknesses among female voters.

In one message-testing survey, the Democratic-aligned group Project New West gave voters information about Buck’s views on a number of subjects and 24 percent of respondents said that his stance on abortion — “Buck opposes abortion, even in the case of rape and incest,” the poll said — was the single biggest reason they wouldn’t vote for him.

The Bennet campaign and national Democrats ran aggressive television ads attacking Buck’s views on abortion and slamming him for refusing to prosecute an alleged rape as Weld County district attorney. And Planned Parenthood mounted a mail campaign, targeting women voters with the warning that “Colorado women can’t trust Ken Buck.”

“Ken Buck wants us to think he’s a moderate candidate for U.S. Senate. But the truth is, he hasn’t really changed his extreme positions on women’s health,” one mail piece said. Another called him “radical, wrong, extreme, out of touch, sexist.”

Women broke for Bennet by 17 percentage points, according to exit polling, even as Republicans won female voters by 1 point nationwide. And Buck underperformed in Denver-area suburbs like Jefferson County and Arapahoe County — places where women voters may have been pivotal.

Buck told the Denver Post this week that social issues were a key reason for his defeat, explaining: “It was part of their effort to focus more on their version of Ken Buck rather than the issues that I thought most voters were concerned about. I don't know that there's any way to avoid it; I wasn't going to derail my message to have an election decided on abortion, or any social issue, for that matter.”

A similar campaign unfolded in Nevada, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pummeled Republican challenger Sharron Angle for opposing abortion in all cases — and in particular, for telling an interviewer who asked about abortion in the case of a rape that some women were able to turn “what was really a lemon situation into lemonade.” Reid won women voters by 11 percentage points and nearly tied Angle among men, losing by just 2 points.

Highly touted Republican Senate candidates also found themselves on the wrong end of the issue in blue-state Washington and California. Washington Sen. Patty Murray ran ads accusing challenger Dino Rossi with wanting to “turn back the clock” on abortion.

In California, Planned Parenthood sent out a mailer comparing Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, charging that both “want to make criminals out of women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them” and branding both GOP women “too extreme for California.”

Like most California Democrats, Boxer ended up winning reelection comfortably — unlike the razor-thin victory margins in Colorado and Washington, the Democrat prevailed by nearly 10 points.

Still, abortion rights supporters believe the issue played a role in Fiorina’s defeat: A survey from the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, taken on the eve of the Nov. 2 election, showed that 52 percent of voters who had heard about abortion in the context of the Senate race were less likely to support the Republican.

And for some voters, the issue appeared to serve as shorthand for a larger network of social and values-related issues.

“Candidates’ positions on choice do serve a signaling function, in terms of the kind of person they are and if they are standing up for women or not,” said Deirdre Schifeling, political director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

“We go after a very targeted, specific group of voters: these swing, pro-choice women,” she explained. “This is an issue that really cuts through some of the noise around other issues where candidates may not sound so different from each other.”

The group sent out mailers to a total of 1.4 million households across the country and announced in a memo that its total campaign spending added up to $2.2 million.