Republican candidates hit the panic button after Democrats win key special election

After Democratic candidate Pat Ryan won the House special election on Tuesday, in a moderate district where the poll incorrectly said the Republican was ahead by eight to ten points, the National Republican Congressional Committee bizarrely claimed that there was nothing to see and everything was fine. But it turns out some Republican candidates aren’t taking the NRCC’s word for it, and are instead scrambling to try to change their messaging.

When the Supreme Court derangedly struck down Roe v. Wade, numerous Republican candidates loudly hailed it as a victory. That might have helped them in their Republican primary races. But given that a large majority of Americans are opposed to banning abortion, this was bad general election messaging for the Republicans. Yet they’ve loudly stuck with it, even after their primaries were over, because the current Republican mantra is to be as obnoxiously extremist as possible.

Now that Democrat Pat Ryan has won a moderate district by being loudly pro-choice, some Republicans are suddenly backing down from their loudly anti-choice positions. For instance Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Arizona, has just been caught removing his overt anti-choice rhetoric from his campaign website.

But that’s not going to work. Masters has already, loudly and publicly, staked himself to what he called a “100% pro life” position. This will make it easy for Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to call out Masters for his extremism, as the two face off in the general election. Masters won’t be the only Republican candidate to hit the panic button like this. They thought they could get away with being anti-choice because they never thought the courts would actually go there, and now they have no idea what to do.