Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt. And continuing to pursue gun control is an unforced error on the part of the Democrats (though they eased off quite a bit on that starting with Obama, to be fair).
IMO the Democrats would have been better off focusing most of their effort on something like single payer health care, along with minimum wage and housing affordability, things like that. Those are issues that are ostensibly part of the party platform but are not high priorities.
The GOP didn't so much make abortion a wedge issue as much as evangelicals captured a big chunk of the party's lame duck platform during the various positional realignments of the 60s-80s. The GOP, by almost sheer luck, managed to stumble in to an apathetic voter block, and came out with one of the strongest, most long lived cores of voters out there.
The real strategic leadership of that block mostly died off in the 2000's though, leaving evangelicals headless and politically adrift. These days most seem to have reverted back to being somewhat apathetic in the positive direction, and aside from abortion, are voting completely based on the products out outrage culture.
> Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt.
Calling abortion a “wedge issue” leads you to thinking about it the wrong way. Sure, democrats say abortion is an unimportant distraction the GOP likes to trot out—but only insofar as everyone unilaterally accepts their position on it. They certainly didn’t treat it that way when Roe was repealed.
There’s no “wedge issues.” The electorate cares about what it cares about. Parties need to triangulation on positions that keep their coalition together, and avoid positions that allow the other party to divide their coalition. It’s just math.
Thinking your political opponents are duped by propaganda just means you lack the ability to think outside your bubble and understand people who have different values and priorities. Certainly abortion views are not the result of GOP propaganda, seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the subject of careful compromises in all but a few liberal democracies. (Views on immigration, same sex marriage, multiculturalism, etc., aren’t the product of “propaganda” either. Most people in my home country of Bangladesh would agree with the GOP on all those issues—especially if the shoe were on the other foot and you were talking about e.g. hearing people speak foreign languages in Dhaka—but they certainly don’t have positive views of the GOP itself.)
This myopia is a great shortcoming of democrats (of the last 20 years—the party used to be savvier in the past), because it leads them to believe that politics is about lecturing and badgering, instead of building coalitions of people who agree more than they disagree.
> seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa
List of countries with same or more restrictive laws for abortion when compared with Texas abortion laws.
Europe - None
Asia - Afghanistan, iraq, syria, Yemen, Burma, Papua new Guinea, Bangladesh
Africa - Somalia, Mali, Malawi, south Sudan, Congo, Niger, Nigeria, Madagascar.
America - Venezuela, Haiti, Suriname, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, tiny Caribbean islands.
Your use of the phrase "seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa" would have been a great example of propaganda, especially considering that no country in Europe is as restrictive as Texas. Especially, leading with "Europe,..." instead of leading with " barely 2 dozen non European countries across the 200+ countries in the world".
But as we all know wedge issues and propaganda don't exist. So, my previous paragraph can actually be deleted because it is a non-sequitur.
IMO the Democrats would have been better off focusing most of their effort on something like single payer health care, along with minimum wage and housing affordability, things like that. Those are issues that are ostensibly part of the party platform but are not high priorities.