“Trying to scare women”: Fox News struggles to cope after brutal election night for GOP

Abortion rights on Tuesday helped fuel a series of Democratic election victories in key states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

Democrats placed abortion rights at the center of their campaigns and spent tens of millions highlighting Republican support for abortion bans in the off-year election and picked up major wins in those elections.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who criticized his Trump-endorsed Republican opponent Daniel Cameron’s anti-abortion views, won re-election. Democrats won control of both chambers of the Virginia state legislature after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and GOP candidates pushed for new abortion limits. Democrat Dan McCaffery won a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, preserving the Democrats’ 5-2 majority, in a race that also focused heavily on abortion rights.

Voters in Ohio also overwhelmingly approved a Democratic-backed ballot measure establishing a right to abortion in the State Constitution.

Meanwhile, anti-abortion Democrat Brandon Presley underperformed in Mississippi’s gubernatorial election, losing to incumbent Republican Tate Reeves.

Conservatives on Fox News struggled to cope with the abortion-related losses.

“If we’re really gonna honest about this – and I consider myself pro-life, but I understand that’s not where the country is – I would say first trimester, 15 weeks seems to be where the country is,” host Sean Hannity said Tuesday night while discussing the Ohio results. “And these issues will be decided by the states.”

Hannity pointed to earlier abortion-related losses in other states, calling it an “indication that the women in America, suburban moms, want it probably legal and rare and probably earlier than at the point of viability.”

Fellow Fox News host and former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany lamented the “losing streak in the pro-life movement.”

“Every ballot initiative has been lost post-Dobbs for the pro-life movement,” she said. “As a party, Sean, we must, we must not just be a pro-baby party. That’s a great thing. We must be a pro-mother party. We need a national strategy… to help vulnerable women because the results of next year’s election could be determined by that.”

McEnany urged the House of Representatives to pass legislation for “men to pay women child support from the moment of conception, legislation to make the child tax credit apply to the unborn, legislation for women to have access to the supplemental food and nutrition program up to two years after childbirth.”

“These are things that could be done today that will make a difference!” she added. “But until we own this issue as a party, we will lose again, and again, and again.”

Fox contributor Charlie Hurt, who also appeared on the segment, said the Supreme Court ruling had put the GOP in an “awkward” position.

“This is what happens when you go for 50 years [after] an unelected group of Supreme Court justices take this vitally important issue out of voters’ hands and rule by fiat in Washington,” he said, despite decades of GOP efforts to have Roe v. Wade overturned.

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“Thankfully we get it returned to the states and returned to voters—it’s a difficult issue, and we’re working through it,” he said. “It’s going to be difficult and it’s going to be awkward. Everybody has got to try to find their voice on it.”

Hannity then accused Democrats of “trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.”

Over on Newsmax, former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., lamented that the Democratic base is “more ginned up to go out and vote generally than Republicans” and bemoaned voters’ ability to directly vote on issues that affect them like the Ohio initiative.

“We’ve seen this now for the last several years, and so a base election, they — Democrats — outspend, and you put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote. It was a secret sauce for disaster in Ohio,” he said. “I don’t know what they were thinking, but that’s why I thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot because pure democracies are not the way to run a country.”