Other abortion rights groups arguably should be more organized and more vocal, he said. But as it stands now, RTL "is an advocacy organization and this is literally the only thing they do."

The golden ticket

In Michigan, as in much of the nation, legislative opposition to abortion has generally become synonymous with Republican opposition.

In 2018, 78 of the 80 Republicans who won seats in the 2018 election were endorsed or somehow supported by Right to Life of Michigan, according to an analysis by the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. If history is any guide, they won’t stray.

Candidates who secure a Right to Life endorsement get more than a few words on campaign literature. They get access to the RTL’s powerful list of passionate, single-issue voters likely to turn out to the polls. The group also sends out literature on behalf of favored candidates, most effectively by pushing listings of endorsed candidates to supporters through mailings, emails, social media and its website.

Shields, the Republican strategist, said he witnessed the group’s sway in the state’s most recent U.S. Senate race, in which he worked with Sandy Pensler of Grosse Pointe. Pensler and John James of Farmington Hills faced each other in the GOP primary in a bid to unseat Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow last November.

Both men ran as anti-abortion, but Pensler, 61, acknowledged he had once supported abortion rights and that he would back exceptions in any future abortion ban for cases involving rape or incest.

Right to Life endorsed James.

“We saw the effect right away in the polls,” Shields said. James went on to win the Republican primary, though he later lost to Stabenow.

Anti-abortion activists “are loyal to the issue, and Right to Life has organized that passion,” Shields said. For a candidate, “the use of (RTL’s) lists is a golden ticket to the legislature.”

Once endorsed by Right to Life and sent to Lansing, Republican lawmakers “don’t break ranks on the abortion issue,” he said.

Picking a team

As abortion becomes more partisan in Lansing and Washington, polls shows that Americans are more likely to declare which side they are on.

A larger percentage of Americans now self-identify as “pro-choice” or “pro-life”, and a record high in voters ‒ nearly 3 in 10 ‒ now say they will vote for a candidate for major office only if that candidate’s views on abortion match their own, according to the recent Gallup poll.

Porn, of EPIC-MRA, who began working in Democratic hallways as a college student in the early 1970s, says he sees it in Michigan too. Though abortion has always been an emotional debate, “people are so strident in their position now.”

And that means fewer abortion rights advocates among Republicans and fewer abortion opponents among Democrats, said John Gleason, the Genessee County Clerk.

Gleason served in the Michigan House and Senate until term-limited out of state office in 2014. He belongs to a once-familiar subset of Democrats: “pro-life, Irish, and Catholic.”

Gleason considered running for Congress after leaving the statehouse but eventually ran instead for county clerk.

Especially among elected officials, he said, “there’s no ability to convert to a moderate anymore.”

The state’s voting maps already give Republican candidates an edge over Democrats in reaching Lansing, Gleason noted, even as the impact of the Tea Party activism lingers in Michigan. To win a Republican primary, he said, “you have to be so extreme.”

Demands for party purity on abortion or other issues hurt Michigan voters, in his view. Elections swung by single issues such as abortion or gun control fill the statehouse with single-issue lawmakers ‒ politicians focused on the next election and beholden to special interests instead of policy leaders with the public good in mind.

Gleason said there is no easy fix, “but I also know that you’re not going to fix the roads if 110 state representatives and 38 senators got elected only on the pro-life issue. You have to have a more complex view of policymaking.”

Perhaps, but ideological nuance has not been a hallmark of modern political parties, at least not when it comes to abortion.

In 2016, the National Democratic party reinforced the stand it had made four years earlier that Democrats “strongly and unequivocally support Roe v. Wade.” Dems also called for reversal of the Hyde Amendment, a 40-year-old law that, with few exceptions, prohibits federal funds being used in abortions. For some, it marked an aggressive shift from the middle-ground position that Bill Clinton had once painted as “safe, legal and rare.”

Republicans hardened their stand, too, in Lansing and in Washington.

Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 suggested criminally punishing women who got abortion in addition to abortion providers — a stance that made even some abortion opponents uncomfortable. The president doubled down in his most recent State of the Union address, portraying Democratic legislation in New York as allowing a baby “to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth.”

As the political divide deepens, Right to Life of Michigan and Planned Parenthood have increasingly relied on super PAC money to influence Lansing. Unlike traditional political action committees, super PACs can accept money from corporations, including nonprofit corporations that can raise money from donors who don’t have to be identified under Michigan campaign finance law.