Thread by @ashtonpittman

The people who wanted Roe overturned voted consistently Republican for 40 years to get that outcome.

When they didn't like a GOP candidate, they held their noses and voted anyway because getting a right-wing, anti-Roe majority was more important than likability.

They succeeded.

As an evangelical teen in 2008 who would be 18 by election day, I told my youth group that I didn't like John McCain as a candidate.

My youth leader told me to vote for him anyway because all that mattered is that he would put anti-abortion judges on the Supreme Court.

When I left evangelicalism and went to college (and became familiar with real Democrats/liberals/left-wingers, not caricatures), I was struck by how comparatively little emphasis there was on the Supreme Court and the connection between it and elections.

That's why I was quite certain on Nov. 8, 2016, that we were on the cusp of the end of Roe v. Wade (among other things).

Evangelicals moved past their initial dislike and went all in for Trump for the same reason that youth leader told me to vote for McCain in 2008: SCOTUS.

When @mattyglesias says there was no conservative long game, he's simply dead wrong. The long game was well-known, not only among the anti-abortion political class, but even among lay evangelicals.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1540349278530732032

Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban was part of that strategy. The Alliance Defending Freedom, an evangelical legal organization in DC, wrote the legislation after Trump's election and sent it to Mississippi lawmakers in 2018. Their goal: "To eradicate Roe."mississippifreepress.org/20042/to-rule-…

"We have a plan to make Roe irrelevant or completely reverse it,” Kevin Theriot, VP of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Life, told a crowd of anti-abortion activists on Jan. 20, 2018.

The plan was to get a state to pass their 15-week ban.
mississippifreepress.org/20042/to-rule-…

Soon after that 2018 rally, three Mississippi lawmakers (Sen. Joey Fillingane and Reps. Angela Hill and Becky Currie) introduced identical 15-week bans in the Legislature—bans authored by the ADF. Currie's copy made it to the governor's desk.mississippifreepress.org/20042/to-rule-…

In the Dobbs dissent, Justices Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor cite an interview I did with Sen. Fillingane in which he says that, after Trump won election and began changing the Supreme Court, they decided the time was ripe to start "testing the limits of Roe."

Don't let anyone fool you into thinking a Mississippi lawmaker "authored" the state's 15-week abortion ban at the center of Dobbs.

That was hatched in Washington, D.C. by the ADF, which says it wants "a Christian worldview in every area of law."mississippifreepress.org/20042/to-rule-…

Glance at the 15-week bans Mississippi lawmakers introduced in 2018:

Rep. Currie: billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2018…

Rep. Hill: billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2018…

Sen. Fillingane: billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2018…

The text is identical because they all got the bill from the same source: The ADF!

Anti-abortion evangelicals and Catholics held fast to the "Vote Straight GOP" mantra even when the candidate was nominally pro-Roe—e.g., Susan Collins.

Why? Because they knew she would usually vote for anti-abortion SCOTUS justices, including: Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch & Kavanaugh

I'm not saying anti-abortion evangelicals' consistent GOP voting is the sole factor. There are others (as @sarahkendzior notes).

These are my experiences as an #exvangelical of why anti-abortion evangelicals voted the way they did over the past 40 years.