“Dark money” group founded and funded by Pritzker deploys strategy at Democratic National Convention
Hannah Meisel
Capitol News Illinois
hmeisel@capitolnewsillinois.com
CHICAGO — Gov. JB Pritzker used part of his eight-minute prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention this week to urge his party to shift its messaging on abortion rights and reframe the issue as an economic one.
The billionaire governor said when he meets with business leaders, they always say, “We need more workers to fill all the jobs we have.”
“But the anti-freedom, anti-family policies of the MAGA Republicans are driving workers away,” Pritzker said of Republican-controlled states that have moved to severely restrict access to reproductive health care in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision.
read more: In primetime Democratic National Convention speech, Pritzker emphasizes role of benevolent billionaires | Illinois Democrats consider abortion rights a 'fundamental' issue for 2024
“Here's the thing: Americans don't want to have to drive 100 miles to have their baby because draconian abortion laws have closed their doors,” he continued. “Americans with LGBTQ children don't want to face discrimination at school because their state has sanctioned them. Americans don't want to go to their local grocery store and worry that a stranger is openly carrying an AR-15.”
Abortion as an economic issue
Removing abortion rights from the “social issue” mold, in particular, is what Pritzker's chief of staff, longtime Democratic strategist Anne Caprara, sees as the party's way forward.
“We like to talk about these issues as 'social issues,'” Caprara said, using air quotes to emphasize his point. “In reality, they're very much economic issues.”
Caprara made the remarks during a panel discussion held Wednesday by Think Big America, a “dark money” progressive advocacy group that Pritzker launched last fall with his own money. The group has supported abortion rights measures in several states, and Caprara pointed to the ripple effects of Idaho's near-total abortion ban.
read more: Senator Pritzker founded a national abortion rights group with his own money.
The ban took effect in the summer of 2022 following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade. The law makes performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and loss of a medical license, except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the mother's life.
As of February, Idaho had lost nearly a quarter of its practicing obstetricians and three hospital systems had closed their delivery units, creating a huge medical desert for pregnant women.
“There are a lot of companies out there right now that are trying to figure out where to put their headquarters. They're trying to attract workers in their 20s, 30s, early 40s,” Caprara said, echoing his boss' speech from the previous night. “Companies have to go where people want to live.”
Jeffrey Pollock, president of Global Strategy Group, a New York-based political research and communications firm, pointed to recent examples of companies successfully fighting legislation pushed by Republican-controlled state legislatures.
In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration was forced earlier this year to repeal much of a 2022 law that had drawn heavy criticism from the Walt Disney Co., whose theme parks and resorts bring in billions of dollars in sales taxes annually for the state.
Disney's spat with DeSantis over the Parental Rights in Education Act ultimately turned into a complicated, drawn-out legal battle during which the entertainment giant halted plans to build a $1 billion business campus and relocate up to 2,000 jobs out of California.
The law, which critics have dubbed the “No Gay Bill,” still restricts discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity as part of school curriculum, but after a federal appeals court indicated it was likely to overturn the entire law, the state narrowed its scope to once again allow discussion of LGBT-related topics outside of school hours and to offer similar books in school libraries.
And in 2016, North Carolina businesses played a major role in overturning a law that would have barred transgender people from using public restrooms that matched their gender identity. The so-called “bathroom bill” was repealed a year after PayPal canceled an expansion plan that would have brought 400 jobs to the state and the NCAA and entertainers like Bruce Springsteen canceled scheduled tournaments and shows.
“Very important businesses in North Carolina stood up and said, 'Wait, we can't do this,'” Pollock said. “And this became a business issue, because they saw this as an economic issue and they were a very credible voice.”
But abortion rights advocates stressed that when making the case for reproductive rights as an economic issue, it's also important to focus on the impact abortion bans have on individual households.
“Abortion allows families to make decisions about how many children they want to have, who can continue to work, how many breadwinners there are in the household,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a group that provides financial and strategic support to the abortion rights movement.
“What is the state of the household economy?” she continued, telling reporters after the Think Big America event. “And it really reminds us that abortion is not just abortion. Abortion is an economic issue, abortion is a health care issue, abortion is a freedom issue.”
Abortion as a matter of “freedom”
Hall's use of the word “freedom” to talk about abortion rights reflects a deliberate about-face by advocates since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the first abortion-rights referendum after that ruling, an abortion-rights group calling itself Kansas for Constitutional Freedom leveraged a term that has played a major role in Republican messaging against Democrats and “big government” in recent years.
Just six weeks after the Supreme Court decision, Kansas voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have overturned a state Supreme Court ruling that the Kansas Constitution protects the right to an abortion, paving the way for abortion restrictions.
In the two years since, five other states have placed abortion measures on the ballot, with abortion-rights groups winning each time, and nearly a dozen more are set to do so in the 2024 election cycle.
At the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday evening, highlighting abortion as an issue of “freedom,” Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson told the story of a Georgia woman who had to fly to California last summer to receive abortion care. McGill Johnson said the woman had traveled from her hometown to neighboring South Carolina and Florida, only to encounter bans that had just gone into effect in both states.
“You can't have a free country if women are not free,” she said, noting that women must cover travel expenses in addition to arranging childcare.
The same day, McGill Johnson rejected the notion that abortion access was losing importance as an issue that motivates voters following the initial shock of Roe v. Wade being overturned. Voters “can have two minds at once,” she said at an event on Wednesday, even as Democrats fight Republican attacks centered on the economy and inflation.
Pollock, whose firm recently completed a research project on voter motivations for Pritzker's Think Big America, said that while voters may not rank abortion as a top issue when speaking with pollsters or the media, “that's a false indicator” when it comes to actual voter behavior.
“So even if abortion is fourth or fifth on the importance scale, that doesn't mean it's not one of the most compelling counter-messages to a Republican candidate,” he said.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of print and broadcast outlets across the state. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, with generous contributions from the Illinois Broadcasting Foundation and the Southern Illinois Editors Association.