NYT:

“I don’t think the Lord Jesus could win as a Democrat in Alabama,” said Brad Chism, who runs a Democratic communications firm in Mississippi that has conducted surveys of female voters in Alabama in recent weeks. “They’re just waiting for the Republican Party to tell them how they’re going to fix this,”…

Abortion is one of the few issues that caused people to switch parties in past years, said Clyde Wilcox, a professor of government at Georgetown University who has studied the politics of abortion. But, he said the party sorting process has essentially played out, and stances toward abortion are now nearly synonymous with party identification.

“We’ve become so tribal to our politics, we want our tribe to dominate Congress for all kinds of reasons,” Professor Wilcox said. “Of all those issues, the one that is the easiest to say, but also maybe the most intense, would be abortion.” If an anti-abortion Democrat were running in the Alabama race, Professor Wilcox said, “my guess is most of the people saying ‘abortion’ would just be saying something else.”