"Is the Dobbs effect fading?" blared a headline from October 10 at Politico Playbook, the nerve center for the smug centrist take on Beltway politics.
The story helped kick off a month of hand-wringing in the press about how abortion was fading from voters' minds. Over the summer, there had been a massive national backlash to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Over the past few weeks, however, pundits insisted, fears about reproductive rights were replaced with concerns about inflation. (Even though, as the talking heads carefully avoided noting, Republicans are a serious threat to the economy as well.) Mid-October, MSNBC pundit Mike Barnicle summed up the argument by arguing that "while abortion is an issue, it nowhere reaches the level of interest of voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that." "Democrats' Reliance on Abortion for Midterms May Not Be Enough," read a USA Today headline, ignoring that the mythical Democrat who only campaigns on abortion is a strawman. In a classic of the circular-firing-squad genre, the New York Times ran a piece elevating those who "say there has been too much focus on abortion rights and too little attention on worries about crime or the cost of living."
