How Taylor Swift Inspired Dads to Support Harris – Mother Jones

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Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project released an ad focusing on abortion rights, featuring a chilling line from the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his policies would end my freedom, my rights, my life. ,” she says. “You chose hatred over me.”

The advertisementdepicting a woman dying of pain as she suffers complications during childbirth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to kick-start a demographic group they have dubbed ‘Dobbs Dads’ – a group of men open to voting rights to protect or restore the position of their daughters. access to abortion – which could be Trump’s undoing.

There is evidence of such a shift in a recent Marist poll which showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 20 points among college-educated white men – a 5 points improvement above Biden’s 2020 margin with the same demographic group.

“We call them Dobbs Dads,” tweeted Joe Trippi, a veteran Democrat strategist who works with the Lincoln Project. “And they break at Harris. One (of) our most important target groups.”

The name Dobbs Dads, of course, comes from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in which the justices, led by three Trump appointees, effectively ended the federal right to access abortion. Following that decision 13 states have banned abortion outright, mothers have died due to lack of access to abortion, maternal mortality in Texas doubled, infant mortality increased nationally, and The Idaho Legislature disbanded commissions designed to investigate the causes of maternal deaths, clouding public understanding of how that state’s abortion ban affects mothers. Nearly two-thirds of the American public believe abortion should be legal, including 61% of men Pew Research shows that the rapidly changing legal regime has made the right to abortion one of the top issues of the elections.

According to Stuart Stevens, another adviser to the Lincoln Project, pregnancy-related medical trauma has led more men to be open to voting against Trump, who has refused to rule out signing a federal abortion ban, and for Harris, who would to the restoration of abortion rights. Those men include, as Stevens recently shared MSNBC, “voters who are more conservative than not, many of whom would check a box to say they oppose abortion. But they are shocked by the specter of these tragedies.”

“These are men who really take pride in being their daughter’s advocates,” Trippi explains. “They’re suddenly looking at what that means in terms of the Dobbs decision as they think about their daughter’s future and the world she would live in. in.”

The Lincoln Project says its Dobbs Dads strategy is based on research conducted by a sister organization, the Lincoln Democracy Institute. An LDI from April 2023 questionnaire of more than 17,000 voters helped their team select two voting groups they saw as ripe for persuasion: Dobbs Dads, and another they called Red Dawn Republicans — older GOP voters who prioritize traditional international alliances, especially in opposition to Russia .

Alex Shashlo, who helps run the Lincoln Project’s digital campaigns, said their “hyper-targeted approach to talking to fathers about abortion” led them to choose female narrators for “Daisy” — the nightmarish ad set in a delivery room — and another similar place: ‘This year.” The strategy was inspired in part by a viral video clip featuring Taylor Swift with her father about taking a political stand ahead of the 2018 election. “If Taylor Swift told all her followers, ‘Hey, talk to your dad,’ that would be pretty powerful,” Trippi said. LDI’s research confirmed that the concept of daughters having conversations with their fathers about abortion could be effective in reaching men.

In a close election, the targeted campaign could make the difference. The Lincoln Project says it has identified approximately 680,000 Dobbs Dads in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In a recent podcast, Trippi also mused on the demographic’s potential to “surprise people in these Senate races like in Florida, in Texas, maybe Montana.”

“There’s an opportunity here,” he said.