Datechguy's Blog

One factor in the Deval Patrick victory of 2010 where he received less that 50% of the vote was social conservatives.

No they didn’t vote for Patrick, but given the choice between a candidate who declared himself pro-life and one who didn’t. These voters abandoned Charlie Baker and made up part of the nearly 8% of the Vote that Tim Cahill secured in the last election.

I’ve talked to many who voted for Cahill specifically for this reason.

The number of believing Roman Catholics who would bring themselves to vote for Baker because of his stance was considerable, I know, I was one of them.

Now comes Mitt Romney who unlike a Herman Cain does not have a strong history of opposing abortion. (He accurately called planned parenthood “planned genocide“) choosing to not sign the SBA pledge:

Five Republican presidential candidates have signed a pledge to advance the anti-abortion movement if elected to the White House, but the current front runner for the 2012 GOP nomination — Mitt Romney — isn’t one of them.

Allahpundit comments:

Doubling down on RomneyCare, confirming that he believes in climate change, now this. Say this for him: At least he’s not a total pander machine this time around. He just … seems to be in the grip of a political death wish. I can’t even explain this in terms of him wanting to stick by a position he espoused in the past in order to signal to voters that he’s “authentic” and won’t bend on his principles easily. His position, ostensibly, is that he’s pro-life. This makes him look like he’s inching back towards his pro-choice past. Is he in fact pandering to centrists here, with an eye already towards the general election, or what?

As a primary strategy to win with the 30% of the liberal republican vote it is a sound strategy. As a general election strategy it is disaster waiting to happen.

The number of Republican voters who vote republican strictly for the Abortion issue is considerable. This decision by Mitt Romney will throw them away in a general election, why because they remember this:

Yesterday morning if you asked me if I would vote for Romney if he was the GOP nominee I would have answered “yes”. If you ask me that same question this morning my answer is “I don’t know”.

And let me clue the GOP in, the Radical feminists and media will applaud this but still will vote for Obama.

I have said it will take a massive act of GOP stupidity for President Obama to win reelection, well this is it, made to order. If the GOP does this to itself, it has only itself to blame.

Update: This is called damage control.

Can anyone credibly assure me that if nominated, we won’t see a bunch of “clarifications” and “explanations” like this on a regular basis if a particular poll or focus group thinks its necessary?

If we do this to ourselves, we and the GOP will deserve the end result, both in this election and in 2014.