All The Ladies Say What?

Ryan Cooper over at Washington Monthly makes a number of points on how the GOP could very well come to regret the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS case and its attack on birth control:

But the most striking fact when it comes to women and birth control is this one: 99 percent of sexually active women use it.

Pundits have often pointed out that historically, neither party tends to dominate the political system for very long. The reason for this is that, like how corporations exist to make money, political parties exist to win elections, and if the party keeps taking positions that alienate huge fractions of the electorate, then they’ll change those positions.

But the GOP isn’t doing this. After the 2012 defeat, driven in large part by being absolutely crushed in practically every minority demographic, Republicans halfheartedly tried to choke down an immigration reform bill to at least stop the bleeding. President Obama signaled his support, and the Senate passed a half-decent measure. But now reform looks dead because House Republicans refuse to let the Senate bill come up for a vote. For the GOP, it’s almost the worst of all worlds: a bill supported by all the prominent Democrats goes down due to extremist Republican intransigence. Now Democrats get to blame the GOP for breaking their promise, and quite possibly increase their share of the minority vote. It would have been better to not do anything.

He then ends with this:

Maybe if they lose women by 20 points in 2016, they’ll wise up.

To which I reply "If the GOP loses women by 20 points and wins men by 25, it's a GOP landslide in a midterm year."  They just have to keep it close among white women and win white men overwhlemingly.  The demographics will still allow this to happen, especially in a midterm election, and doubly so when the GOP is doing everything it can to suppress the minority vote in red states.  And even in 2016 if they can keep white women close and get 45% of the vote, there's nobody on the Dem side that's going to get 90%+ of the black vote to make up for that.

The practical upshot is they don't care if they can frame birth control as an Obama giveaway to "those people".  It's a small price to pay, as Megan McArdle says.  Small enough that enough women voters won't miss it when its gone, and besides, they'll just say "Well, *my* company wouldn't do that to *me*."

And when it happens, it'll just be time to blame Obama and "those people" for ruining it for everyone.