Single-issue abortion voting licenses support for otherwise anathema policies

Evidence

The logical, unfortunate, even tragic corollary to this partisan dualism is single-issue voting. Rather than evaluate overall policies and platforms, too many citizens (on both sides of the issue) decided to cast their votes solely on the basis of abortion. A candidate or a party could have ruinous economic proposals or execrable policies on race or poverty or the environment, but as long as they lined up on the “right” side of the abortion issue, they would be assured of support. In the case of the 2016 election, a candidate might be ethically compromised, a racist, and show no signs of a moral compass, but once he delivered the appropriate rhetoric about abortion, he secured the allegiance of the Religious Right, even if that rhetoric contradicted his earlier positions. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 174

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running argument laid out in earlier chapters that the abortion issue was engineered to rally evangelicals to the Republican Party, per Weyrich’s own account; this passage describes the resulting voter behavior. — connects to: Electoral competition for expellee votes fossilized symbolic irredentism that no longer meant return — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 741; Antiabortion activism among secularized Catholics functions as a commitment device to preserve faith
• SEED: Sturdy material for an essay on how issue capture undermines democratic accountability — that a single litmus test lets voters hand over all other policy domains unintentionally.

Broader Connections

• Antiabortion activism among secularized Catholics functions as a commitment device to preserve faith #expands (0.78)
• Electoral competition for expellee votes fossilized symbolic irredentism that no longer meant return #corroborates (0.75) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 741