"Personhood" Claims Credit For Rivera Recall Win; Vows More

7 thoughts on ““Personhood” Claims Credit For Rivera Recall Win; Vows More”

1. 2014 is shaping up.

   Personhood, recalls, Buck, Coffman (who needs a flip-floppy, buck-pedalish nickname).

   WHo can the D's put up in CD3?

   I 'm a believer  – voters aren't dumb enough to just keep sending Tipton. 

    

   Log in to Reply

   1. Not dumb enough? Spent time in Mesa County lately?

      And just who do you think might beat Tipton?

      Log in to Reply

2. That makes as much sense as Giron claiming vote suppression.

   Log in to Reply

   1. No mail in IS voter suppression.

      Log in to Reply

   2. And Giron was correct. My only disagreement with others on this is that it was enough to account for 12 point loss. It wasn't but it was real and it very much did account for the Morse loss.

      Log in to Reply

3. Personhood and abortion were probably a factor in driving conservative, pro-life voters to the polls in Pueblo's recall election, but I think Personhood USA's Keith Mason is wrong in claiming it as a major factor. The NRA got its people out, based on their propaganda that the moderate gun legislation was a "slippery slope" to gun confiscation. Liberal Dems did not get our base to the polls the way we needed to, mostly because of the lack of mail-in-ballots.

    "Personhood" was an issue, albeit a minor one. The first pieces of evidence I have on this are anecdotal:

   Pueblo is a very Catholic town. The three ethnic groups which made up most of the steelworkers in the town's heyday were Italian, Mexican, and Slavic. Guess which religion predominated among those?

   So many of my middle school and high school students wear the little rosary icon bracelets, come to school with ashes on foreheads during Lent. When abortion comes up as a writing or debate topic, I get vitriolic essays about selfish sluts from the girls. Many of my neighbors go to Mass more than once a week.

   Now, Catholics use birth control and access abortions as much as anyone else – but they don't brag or make political points about it. It's a private, hidden thing. So, as I've said ad nauseum on here, I think we Dems were overdoing it with the 6-8 mailers of the sad and angry women, whom Rivera would deny access to birth control and abortion. We could and should have emphasized other issues (water, guns). But apparently, emphasizing "personhood" was what the Dems push poll said to do.

   Personhood voters are also gun-rights voters.

   Conservative and moderate voters definitely came out to vote. The liberal base did not.  The PPP poll the weekend before the recall polled 597 voters, 72% of whom were moderate to very conservative.  62% were older than 46, and about half were Democrats, who had voted for Obama in 2012. 58% were female.

   I would guess that this is the same demographic (with fewer Democrats than Republicans plus Unaffiliated)  that showed up to vote in Pueblo September 10.  The PPP poll did not ask any reproductive rights questions. The most striking poll result was the 53% approval of the NRA, which says to me that these folks were moved by the NRA propaganda ("They're a'comin' to getcher guns!")

   • The Quinnipiac University poll in August, which didn't detail the demographics of its sample, polled on the necessity of the recall, (wasteful and unnecessary), gun laws (support background checks, oppose others), and marijuana legalization (support it).
   • The latest Colorado polling data I could find on the abortion issue was a Denver Post poll, conducted by SurveyUSA, in September 2012. This poll surveyed 750 adults across Colorado, including 615 "likely voters". It found that  65% of Obama voters thought abortion should be legal, while only 25% of Romney voters supported legal abortion. If you remember, Colorado as a whole, (51-46%) and Pueblo in particular, voted for Obama 55-42% , but rural Colorado, in this poll, heavily (56%) supported Romney. 81% of the voters who thought it was more important to protect the rights of gun owners than to protect people from guns also thought that abortion should be illegal. People who thought that "stricter enforcement of existing laws' was the best way to deal with gun violence also thought (by 80%) that abortion should be illegal.

   So my takeaway from reviewing this poll is that it's impossible to untangle or uncouple concern for gun owners from concern for the unborn "person". "Personhood" proponents know that the gun rights loyalists also support "personhood".

   In Pueblo, most of the 53% NRA loyalists who showed up to vote in the recall were likely also strong advocates of personhood and against abortion. Only 27% of those who wanted stricter gun laws on the SurveyUSA poll also wanted to keep abortion legal.

   This seems counterintuitive and ironic to me – children are dying from gun violence all over America. But if they're not actually in the womb, only liberal Democrats seem to care.

   Log in to Reply

   1. . . . a whole lotta' Papists in Pueblo — even/especially among the D's.  Was this the decideing factor? – No!  Was it a factor on some level? – Undoubtedly! 

      Log in to Reply