All the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate are putting their money and their hard work into carving a political identity that distinguishes them from their opponents. Karen Handel maybe more than any of them already has an identity. Unfortunately for her, it’s abortion. That alone makes her a longshot to win Saxby Chambliss’s seat in November.
On paper Handel stands as good a chance as any of the candidates to win the GOP nomination, providing she can raise enough money to get her on TV as regularly as her opponents are.
She’s a woman in a field of men – an identity in itself. She’s the only one to have run for statewide office, for governor in 2010. She just had Sarah Palin endorse her, although that did Handel little good the last time it happened. And this week Handel caught a break when a video surfaced that showed Republican frontrunner David Perdue making the rookie mistake of criticizing Handel for not having a college degree.
But Handel is sentenced by her political history to be the abortion candidate. That’s what people who know of her first think about when they think about her at all. Her views on other issues – the economy, the federal budget, Obamacare – are too much alike the other GOP candidates to allow her to separate herself from the pack based on those policy positions.
Karen Handel? Isn’t she the one who butted her head against the brick wall also known as national Planned Parenthood? (She is.)
There are plenty of pro-life Republican voters. But there are also other pro-life Republican candidates in the race. So Handel, despite her pro-life history, will be hard-pressed to consolidate the pro-life vote behind her candidacy. Many pro-choice voters, on the other hand – especially moderate, undecided women – will probably vote against her.
Worse for Handel is the new rift between Georgia Right To Life and Georgia Life Alliance. The second one of those just replaced the first one as the national affiliate of National Right To Life.
It has to do with rape and incest exceptions to legal abortion, and with the potential unelectability of GOP candidates in a state of increasingly ‘purple’ demographics.
Suffice for the point at hand that Handel is with the pro-life moderates. That means she is stuck in the middle when it comes to attracting votes around the very cause she is known for. Some hardcore pro-lifers will vote against her, most significantly in the Republican primary, and committed pro-choicers will vote against her, most significantly in a potential general election contest against Democrat Michelle Nunn.
With this split in the pro-life community, and with rumors swirling that Karen Handel’s candidacy is a reason for it, Handel in the coming Republican debates is going to find herself bogged down in the details of this political tiff.
Handel, a former Georgia Secretary of State, is no amateur. And she has shown an ability to both throw and take a punch. But the only way she is likely to break the mold of her typecast as “the abortion candidate” is to break it herself by means of an aggressive TV ad campaign. Alas, for now at least, she has been unable to raise enough money to match the TV presence of GOP frontrunners David Perdue and Jack Kingston.
Doubtless she is trying to hold her powder until the public focuses more closely on the race in May. But additional fundraising may be even tougher now, in the aftermath of the Georgia Right To Life controversy. Potential campaign contributors may worry about her electability in a race against Michelle Nunn.
Anything could happen in this condensed primary campaign of just seven more weeks. But the shortened campaign is all the more reason for handicappers of this Republican race to search for even the smallest advantage or disadvantage for this candidate or that one.
Karen Handel has a disadvantage: It’s abortion.
