California Lawmaker Airs Viral Abortion Ad to Support Vulnerable Democrats

Gregory Korte
·3 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- US Representative Eric Swalwell will soon be running a provocative abortion rights ad in areas where he isn’t even on the ballot, an attempt to keep the issue in front of voters and help Democrats besieged by Republican attacks on inflation.

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The ad, first released in a longer format online, shows a dramatic depiction of a woman being arrested in front of her children for having had an abortion.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic political consultant working with the Swalwell campaign on the ad, said it will air in various competitive districts ahead of November’s vote, especially in Swalwell’s home state of California. He did not specify which candidates the ads will be used to support, but the San Francisco Democrat’s own district, with its 43-point Democratic advantage, is not the target.

Instead the move allows Swalwell, a one-time presidential hopeful, to raise his profile outside of his district, keep abortion on the minds of voters months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and help fellow Democrats whose elections are less secure as the two parties vie for control of both the narrowly divided House and Senate.

“It’s not about re-electing Eric Swalwell to Congress. That’s going to happen,” Bardella said. “The point of it is to show Democrats how to fight back and take the fight, take the offensive, against the MAGA Republicans.”

As a social post, the ad went viral, being shared more than 40,000 times on Twitter and 1,400 times on Facebook. It sparked widespread media coverage that reached more than 3 million people, an advertising value equivalent of more than $23.1 million, according to media monitoring company Onclusive.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released last week suggested that the economy is higher in voters minds than abortion rights. But Democrats see an opportunity in the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. Focus on the issue recently helped the party’s candidates clinch victory in competitive special congressional elections.

Bardella declined to give details on how much Swalwell spent to produce the video, which uses moody lighting and actors to portray a dinner-table scene that turns quickly when police knocked at the door. He also declined to say how much Swalwell plans to spend running to ad. The candidate has less than $1 million in cash on hand.

The video resonated among media outlets friendly to Democratic audiences, including Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid the first to air the campaign-produced video, touting it as an “exclusive.”

“It is chilling, and as a former prosecutor when I looked at the Republicans’ abortion laws criminalizing abortion, mandating pregnancy, I thought through what is this going to look like as it plays out across America,” Swalwell told Reid in an interview. “And it’s that scene right there.”

But it also got attention in conservative outlets like The Blaze, the New York Post and the Fox News Channel, where Republican critics said Swalwell’s video was an attempt to distract from the fact that Democrats don’t have answers on economic issues.

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