New York GOP candidate Alison Esposito might want to think twice before she takes any reporters with her while she knocks on doors:
In a recent report by NBC News, MAGA extremist Alison Esposito tries to claim abortion is “not even a factor” in the race for New York’s Eighteenth Congressional District – yet the first door she knocks on with the reporter proves she’s completely out of touch with Hudson Valley voters. [...]
Once again, Upper East Side Alison doesn’t understand Hudson Valley voters’ priorities and is trying and failing to hide her dangerous anti-choice record.
DCCC Spokesperson Ellie Dougherty: “All it took was Upper East Side Alison to knock on one door to figure out she has no idea what voters care about in New York’s 18th Congressional District.”
As Chris Hayes and his guests Michelle Goldberg and Jess McIntosh discussed in the segment above, Republicans have been hoping to make this election about the economy and immigration and ignoring "abortion rights at their own peril."
HAYES: There is this battle over issue salience that is kind of a proxy battle for the campaign, and I do think partly in the coverage, abortion has ebbed a little bit, and I think that happened in 2022 where everyone in the run-up is like, this is an inflation election and people really didn't see it coming.
GOLDBERG: Well, right, and I think there was a poll recently that showed us abortion had edged out immigration in at least one poll, where the economy was the most important issue, and abortion was a second.
You know, look, I don't want to pin our hopes on having the same sort of polling error that you had. It wasn't even a polling error, an error assumption of conventional wisdom in 2022—when everyone expected a red wave, and the intensity of Democratic voters, particularly Democratic women, voting their outrage over Dobbs, took a lot of people by surprise.
That could happen again. We certainly don't want to count on it. At the same time, I just think there is something about the structure of our discourse, that things that women care about do not get the same amount of attention, right?
HAYES: I totally agree.
GOLDBERG: Why are these young men so alienated? And that is an important issue. But just the kind of white-hot rage of so many women, it just doesn't get the proportional attention that it deserves.
MCINTOSH: I mean, you have been covering reproductive freedom for as long as I have been working for candidates who are in favor of it. At this point, we are very, very used to conventional wisdom underplaying the salience of this issue.
HAYES: Correct.
MCINTOSH: We have literally never had a cycle where that didn't happen. I don't know how many times voters are going to have to stand up and say, no, no, we really care about our own bodily autonomy, which is a crazy thing to have to say, before people understand that it is actually quite a motivating issue for people.
And the idea that we have to choose between abortion or the economy as the issue motivating us, really shows how the people who are making these polls have never actually considered the issue for themselves. The decision when and whether to have a child is the most important economic decision most Americans are ever going to make, and if you are somebody who has thought about it, you have thought about the financial implications for what that child would mean to you and your family. There is no daylight between reproductive freedom and a good economy. None.
We'll find out soon if the pollsters got it wrong again.
