WASHINGTON — Heath Mello, a Catholic Democratic candidate for mayor in Omaha, Nebraska, seemed like the rising star the Democratic Party needed to show it could win again.

Mello had a record of showing solidarity with unauthorized immigrants, advancing environmental protections and pay equity for women.

National Democrats, desperate for proof the party could broadly appeal to voters in states won by President Donald Trump, descended on this municipal race, which up to that point had largely been defined by the desirability of funding street cars, whether Omaha was a “sanctuary city” and police-response rates to crimes.

But the Democratic “unity tour” quickly unraveled into what may be the first stage of an open war for the Democratic Party’s future as a viable national party.

Mello, already in a tight race against an incumbent Republican mayor, found himself denounced by Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez after NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Ilyse Hogue fired off a tweetstorm demanding Democratic leaders repudiate Mello over his pro-life voting record.

Perez went further and declared that “every Democrat, like every American,” must support legal abortion, with no room for deviation at even the state or local level. The statement was tantamount to a political excommunication of pro-life Democrats, whom polls confirm to account for approximately a quarter of the party’s membership.

“This is perhaps the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard from a DNC chair,” Stephen Schneck, the outgoing policy director of The Catholic University of America’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies, told the Register. “A lot of people in the Democratic Party have a problem with abortion.”

Schneck, a Catholic pro-life Democrat, said Hillary Clinton’s rush in the last election to embrace an abortion position proved to be a “mistake” that did not increase her support among the electorate — if anything, it drove more pro-life voters to cast their votes for the Republican Party and Trump, who ended up winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by thin margins. As a practical matter, Schneck noted, “where are the pro-choice voters going to go?”

“Perez wants to shrink the party even further,” he said. “That’s just political suicide.”

 

Fighting Back

Perez’s line in the sand on abortion, however, has galvanized pro-life Democrats to fight to take back the party after watching its leadership over the course of 25 years disenfranchise their voice at the national convention and turn the platform more extreme on abortion, plank by plank.

“It definitely is a rallying point for our troops,” said Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America. Day said Perez had finally thrust into the open the reality that powerful interests in the party view fealty to abortion politics as more important than Democrats winning elections and advancing an economic agenda.

Since 2008, Democrats have suffered significant losses in both Congress and at the state level: approximately 1,000 seats.

“We’re at the lowest numbers since the 1930s,” Day said.

Perez’s immediate willingness to throw a pro-life Democrat to the wolves in a tight municipal race with a Republican, at a time when Democrats needed to point to some kind of victory, she said, proved “NARAL is leading our party down a very dark hole.”

The long-standing dream of NARAL, Planned Parenthood and similarly aligned abortion lobby groups is the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would demolish all pro-life legal gains achieved after the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision in one fell swoop. But in order to do that, the abortion lobby would need both to purge pro-life Democrats from Congress and count on the GOP to provoke such a deep crisis that the U.S. electorate would reject them in favor of Democratic candidates who are all lockstep with NARAL on abortion.

Day maintained that scenario is a political fantasy not supported by historical data.

“There has always been a pro-life majority in the House,” she said.

Even when voters repudiated the GOP over the ongoing war in Iraq (2006) and the economic recession (2008), and handed control of Congress to Democrats in a massive electoral wave over two election cycles, the House remained a pro-life majority because of the victories of pro-life Democrats. The party balance shifted only because pro-life Democrats beat pro-life Republicans in districts where voters had a choice between candidates with different economic policy visions, instead of starkly different visions of human life and dignity.

Rep. Dan Lipinski, D.-Ill., co-chairman of the bipartisan House Pro-Life Caucus, added that it made “no sense” for the Democratic Party to dig its current hole even deeper by telling a quarter of its members that they have no place in the party. Lipinski — one of only a handful of pro-life Democrats remaining in Congress — told the Register he frequently meets with former Democrats who said they gave up on the party because pro-life voices “don’t have a seat at the table.”

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, who leads a large faction of progressive Democrats, particularly youth, who have rallied around his economic populist message, acknowledged the political reality that Democrats cannot win majorities by excluding pro-life candidates. Sanders, who is reported to be the country’s most popular active politician,  refused NARAL’s demands to back down from his endorsement of Mello, telling CBS’ Face the Nation that “the model of the Democratic Party is failing,” and Democrats need pro-life candidates to win in conservative states if they are going to be “a 50-state party.”

 

Catholic Call to Arms

Perez’s statements provoked a strong reaction from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which denounced the idea that “to be a Democrat — indeed, to be an American — requires supporting that extreme agenda.”

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who heads the USCCB’s pro-life committee, called upon “pro-life and pro-’choice’ Democrats, alike” to demand their leadership “recant this intolerant position.”

“True solidarity with pregnant women and their children transcends all party lines. Abortion doesn’t empower women. Indeed, women deserve better than abortion,” he said.

Matthew Tyson, a Catholic, pro-life Democrat activist from Alabama, told the Register that the grip of radical abortion activists on the national party apparatus was turning off pro-life voters who otherwise would be voting Democrat over issues such as paid family leave, immigration reform, welcoming refugees and care for creation.

Tyson explained that pro-life Democrats need to fight a grassroots campaign to take back power in the party from the ground up and forge common alliances with Democrats who do not want to see the party’s economic prescriptions doomed by extreme abortion politics. Tyson said he has been bringing the message to collegiate Democratic groups and found a receptive audience.

“Now is the time to fight harder more than anything else,” he said.

Tyson said pro-life Democrats have a vital contribution to ending the phenomenon of abortion in the U.S. by bringing to the table policy prescriptions that address the factors pushing women into abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute’s industry data, three-quarters of abortion clients are low income, and 49% make less than the federal poverty level; the top three factors behind a decision for abortion included “concern for or responsibility to other individuals; the inability to afford raising a child; and the belief that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents.” Pro-life Democrats, Tyson explained, can make the case to people who identify as “pro-choice” that abortion is society’s systematic failure to provide actual choices to women that would then render abortion “unthinkable.”

Even in the unlikely event the legal edifice of Roe v. Wade collapsed overnight, Tyson pointed out that only a handful of states, such as Alabama, would actually ban abortion at any stage. First-trimester abortion, which accounts for 89% of all abortion, would still remain legal in the rest of the U.S. The pro-life movement requires complementary policy strategies, which pro-life Democrats can bring to the table, that can save lives in states where abortion will remain legal, such as California, New York and Illinois, which together account for a third of all U.S. abortions, and the Pacific Northwest and Northeast states.
 

Funding Problem

Democrats trying to rebuild a pro-life presence in the party, however, are constrained by a lack of resources at key junctures: They have to get control of the party machinery, win key primary battles and then win the general election, likely against pro-life Republicans who will have party support.

Schneck explained that it will be a “long campaign” for pro-life Democrats to regain control of a party that more than 50 years ago reflected their values. But their leverage to shape the conversation in the Democratic Party, he added, requires them “to win some seats.”

The DNC’s attack on Mello over his pro-life record, he said, demonstrates how “the party’s apparatus militates against this success.”

Leading pro-life groups, other than Democrats for Life, have not yet invested in pro-life Democratic races anywhere near the extent they have invested in GOP races.

According to OpenSecrets.org, for example, the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List has directly donated to only three Democratic federal candidates since 2002. It also spent just $43,718 (or 1%) on pro-life Democrats out of $8 million raised over 1994-2016; pro-life Republicans received 25% of that sum, nearly $2.21 million.

Lipinski told the Register that the pro-life movement needs to invest in pro-life elected representatives on both sides of the aisle to keep its agenda moving forward.

“With any issue that becomes a one-party issue, that party pays less and less attention to that issue,” he said.

“Pro-life Democrats running for office need to have support.”