a Sirens blare. Footsteps echo down a gravel road. The county sheriff peers into the car and tells the teenage girl she’s pregnant. He arrests her father for driving her to a state where she can get an abortion. “And now, my lady, you’re being arrested for evading motherhood,” the sheriff says.
The ad, from the pro-democracy group The Lincoln Project, presents a bleak vision of the future for millions of American women if Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris in the presidential election and criminalizes abortion nationwide.
But its target audience also includes another important group of voters: conservative men.
“Dobbs Dads,” named after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that ended constitutional abortion rights in 2022, are suburban Gen X and millennial fathers who resent the prospect of “big government” making choices about the reproductive health needs of their wives and daughters.
The group is recognized by the Lincoln Project’s sister organization, the Lincoln Institute of Democracy, as being of critical importance, along with “Red Dawn conservatives” (inspired by the 1984 film “Red Dawn”), who emphasize a strong national defense and traditional alliances.
It’s the latest attempt to find a snappy phrase to succinctly describe the type of voter who will make decisions that will affect the whole of America and the world. Because, in the absence of a national popular vote, the outcome of the presidential election will likely be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in seven battleground states.
In its first iteration, “soccer moms” supported Democrat Bill Clinton against Republican Bob Dole in 1996. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, then-Senator Joe Biden opined, “Soccer moms are now security moms,” as Republican George W. Bush was seeking reelection.
Subsequent elections have given rise to such monikers as “Starbucks moms,” “waitress moms” and “Walmart moms,” commonly applied to economically struggling white suburban women, as well as “NASCAR dads,” mostly white, middle-aged working- or lower-middle-class men, and “mama bears,” a reference to the conservative mothers and grandmothers who have been organizing for parental rights in recent years.
Their fathers are overwhelmingly female… Their conservatism is based on the idea that “we don’t want to be told what to do by the government.”
Trygve Olsson
America now faces another close election, with the latest battleground state polls by Emerson College Poll and The Hill showing Harris with slight leads over Trump in Michigan, Georgia and Nevada, the two candidates neck and neck in Pennsylvania, and Trump with narrow leads in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona.
It’s no secret that the Dobbs decision, which overturned half a century of legal precedent that upheld abortion rights under Roe v. Wade, is already galvanizing progressive women voters in the 2022 midterm elections. But the Lincoln Institute of Democracy believes conservative men could also play a crucial role.
“Dobbs fathers are often millennials, they’re more likely to be college-educated, white men, and they’re overwhelmingly fathers of girls,” said Trygve Olson, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Institute of Democracy. “Some of them are pro-life conservatives, and their conservatism is based on the idea that we don’t want the government to tell us what to do.”
Olson characterizes the mindset of such voters this way: “I hope my daughter never faces that choice, but if she does, I don’t want a theocrat or a government official to make that decision for her. I want her to come to me. I am trying to raise her with integrity. I see my role as a guardian. I don’t want the government making that decision for me, just like I don’t want the government to dictate what I can grow on my land or what shotgun I can own.”
A “State Line” ad warning of a nationwide abortion ban based on the right-wing think tank’s radical policy plan, Project 2025, received 500,000 views on YouTube in two days. Olson, who grew up in the battleground state of Wisconsin, continued, “Being a father of girls changes your perspective because you can relate to a lot of the things they go through.
“Like I would say to my 15-year-old daughter, I can relate and empathize with some of the challenges that you have, but I don’t know what it’s like to be a 15-year-old girl because I’ve never been 15. But I know that I can apply what I know to you. And that seems to be what’s happening with this electorate. Joe Biden lost their support. A lot of them are still undecided. If you look at the data, you’ll see that Kamala Harris has regained a lot of support. There’s still work to be done.”
With abortion now a winnable issue for Democrats in the 2022 and 2023 elections, Trump, sensing the political danger, has sought to assure voters that he will not call for a nationwide ban and will distance himself from Project 2025. “I understand that Trump is trying to distance himself from Dobbs,” Olson said. “He recognizes that it’s up to the voters to decide these important states.”
But Democrats jumped on the issue and the theme of “freedom” at their recent convention in Chicago, where one speaker, Amanda Zulawski, recounted how she went into premature labor at 18 weeks but was sent home by a hospital in Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, after it determined she did not qualify for an abortion under an exception for life-threatening emergencies.
Zulawski’s husband, Josh, stood alongside her on stage and told the rally, “I’m here tonight because the fight for reproductive rights is not just a fight for women. It’s a fight for our families and, as Kamala Harris says, it’s a fight for our future.”
Speaking on a panel at the Brookings Institution think tank earlier this week, former White House staffer Elaine Kamark said, “Someone asked me a few weeks ago if I could sum up Kamala Harris’ message in one sentence, and I said, no, I can’t, but I can sum it up in one word, and that word is ‘freedom.'”
The abortion decision was about much more than an abortion: it was about fundamental freedoms.
Elaine Kamarck
“What’s behind that? Dobbs. What’s behind that is an unprecedented Supreme Court decision to strip away rights that have been held by Americans for half a century, and the people who care most about those rights are 55 percent of voters.”
Kamarck added, “The abortion decision was about much more than abortion. It was about fundamental freedoms. Should the government be able to come into your bedroom, your home or your doctor’s office and make decisions for you? That’s frightening, especially for a country that’s built on freedom, for voters. So we’ve got a situation where Democrats are taking away from Republicans an issue that was once favorable to them.”
The convention also focused on presenting Harris as an effective commander in chief, in contrast to President Trump’s isolationism, anarchic style and past insults against former Vietnam War prisoner John McCain and other veterans. Olson believes “Red Dawn conservatives” could also sway the election.
Olson said: “They tend to be both men and women. They’re Generation X, or late baby boomers. They’re conservative, they came of age during Reagan and Thatcher. About half of them voted for Trump. The other half didn’t vote for Biden, they just watched from the sidelines. But there are things that motivate them.”
“Trump is saying that (Russian leader Vladimir) Putin is a genius for invading Ukraine, and they’re very troubled by that. They’re troubled that the Republican Party is no longer the party that understood that there is an evil empire, and foreign policy is somewhat important to them.”
Some of the Lincoln Project’s most successful ads in the 2022 midterm elections targeted “Red Dawn conservatives” in battleground states and focused on Trump siding with Putin on Ukraine. “From an election standpoint, it’s probably more about disqualifying Trump than getting them to vote for Harris,” he said.
“A lot of them will never vote Democrat and maybe vote Republican down the line. But the issue is Donald Trump, because that’s another reason they’re uncomfortable with Donald Trump.”
The Republican primary showed a small but significant minority rejecting Trump and his “America First” foreign policy. She dropped out of the primary in early March, but her rival, Nikki Haley, continued to garner 20% of the support, arguing for a more traditional hawkish stance.
Harris and Trump have spent the past week touring battleground states like Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, but the key races stretch from the Midwest to the Sunbelt and cut across a range of age, gender and race demographics, making it a challenge to segment voters and get the right message to the right audience.
“I think the battleground is suburban women, and the key is busting the myths about what suburban women look like,” pollster John Anzalone said at a panel hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention.
“One, it’s very diverse. In 1990, 85 percent of suburban women were white. Now it’s like 61 percent, so there’s diversity. It’s older, and in some ways I think it’s good for Kamala when it comes to issue-based things. There’s a mix of people with kids, people without kids, etc. But the reason it matters in the world is because (Hillary) Clinton got 46 percent support and Biden got 56 percent support.”
Anzalone noted that suburban men are slowly drifting away from the Democratic Party. “So where are you going to make up for that? Suburban women can make up for that, not just because of abortion, but because of who Donald Trump is.”