CBS’s abortion-obsessed political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns joined Tuesday’s CBS Mornings Plus to answer for the liberal media’s despondent reactions to Vice President Kamala Harris’s blowout loss coming despite abortion ballot amendments/initiatives/referendums passing in seven of ten states where the issue went before voters (and four went red for President-Elect Trump).
As she would admit, voters were able to separate out their political views to vote in favor of supporting abortion while not necessarily voting for Democrats, the primary political party behind the ending of unborn lives.
Co-host Adriana Diaz began by briefly calling out liberal pundits: “[R]emember when Democratic pundits thought that the fight over abortion rights could push Vice President Kamala Harris to victory? Well, they’re now thinking again. Because voters who wanted expanded abortion access did not necessarily think they had to vote for Harris.”
Ooof.
After sharing some of the vote totals between Trump and abortion measures, Huey-Burns was brought in by co-host Tony Dokoupil as someone who’s “reported on this issue for many years and followed President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail and has spoken to him about this very topic.”
Huey-Burns started by asking the question herself about how the two didn’t translate. That took awhile as she initially argued “Republicans did recognize that they did have to have better answers to address the fallout” from the end of Roe v. Wade, including Vice President-Elect JD Vance arguing the GOP had “to do a better job talking to women and messaging on this issue and doing more for women who have children.”
But upon being prompted by Diaz to explain how Democrats didn’t also receive the greenlight from voters, she acknowledged previous abortion measures weren’t in presidential election years and thus voters had a different calculus.
Nonetheless, she tried to put a positive spin on the election for the left:
So, if you think about it, with the exception of Georgia, all of the battleground states either had less restrictive measures, measures on the books already protecting access, or a ballot measure, or a Democratic governor who they thought wouldn’t support abortion restrictions, or, you know, perhaps some combination of all of them and when you look at some of these key battleground states, like Arizona and Nevada, for example, Donald Trump won them, but those abortion access measures, preserving access in the state constitution, also passed. So, if you think about it, if you cared about abortion access, but you also were concerned about the economy, the border, other kind of more immediate concerns for your everyday life[.]
She concluded with the reality that, believe it or not, “voters can think about a lot of different things at once heading into an election” and can “exercise their, you know, or show their opinions on a variety of different issues.”
Reacting to all that, Diaz put a cap on the discussion by conceding “it was the economy that really drove people” and that James Carville’s line about an election being on “the economy, stupid” was again proven to be true.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from November 12, click here.
