Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project rolled out an ad centered on abortion rights featuring a chilling line uttered by the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his politics would end my freedom, my rights, my life,” she says. “You chose hate over me.”
The ad, which depicts a woman dying in agony as she suffers complications while giving birth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to swing a demographic group they’ve dubbed “Dobbs Dads”—a group of men open to voting to protect or restore their daughters’ access to abortion—who just might be the downfall of Trump.
There’s evidence of such a shift in a recent Marist poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 20 points among college educated white men—a 5 point improvement over Biden’s 2020 margin with the same demographic.
“We call them Dobbs Dads,” tweeted Joe Trippi, a veteran Democrat strategist who works with the Lincoln Project. “And they are breaking to Harris. One [of] our most important target groups.”
The Dobbs Dads moniker, of course, comes from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling where the justices, led by three Trump appointees, effectively ended the federal right to access abortion. In the wake of that decision, 13 states have outright banned abortion, mothers have died due to lack of abortion access, maternal deaths in Texas doubled, infant deaths rose nationally, and Idaho’s legislature disbanded committees designed to investigate causes of maternal deaths, obscuring public understanding of how that state’s abortion ban has impacted mothers. With nearly two thirds of the U.S. public believing abortion should be legal, including 61% of men according to Pew research, the fast changing legal regime has made abortion rights one of the election’s top issues.
Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in swing states.
According to Stuart Stevens, another Lincoln Project advisor, pregnancy related medical trauma has left more men open to voting against Trump, who has refused to rule out signing a federal abortion ban, and for Harris, who would work to restore abortion rights. Those men include, as Stevens recently told MSNBC, “voters who are more conservative than not, many of whom would check a box to say they are anti-abortion. But they are appalled by the specter of these tragedies.”
“These are men who really have prided themselves as being the defenders of their daughter,” explains Trippi, “They suddenly are looking at what that means in terms of the Dobbs decision as they think about their daughter’s future and the world she’d live in.”
The Lincoln Project says its Dobbs Dads strategy is based on research conducted by a sister organization, the Lincoln Democracy Institute. An April 2023 LDI survey of over 17,000 voters helped their team zero in on two voting groups they considered ripe for persuasion: Dobbs Dads, and another they dubbed Red Dawn Republicans—older GOP voters who prioritize traditional international alliances, particularly in opposition to Russia.
Alex Shashlo, who helps run the Lincoln Project’s digital campaigns, said their “super targeted talking to dads approach on abortion” led them to choose female narrators for “Daisy”—the nightmarish ad set in a delivery room—and another similar spot, “This Year.” The strategy was partially inspired by a viral video clip of Taylor Swift speaking with her father about taking a political stand ahead of the 2018 elections. “If Taylor Swift said, ‘Hey, talk to your dad’, to all her followers, that would be a pretty powerful thing,” Trippi said. LDI’s research confirmed that the concept of daughters having conversations about abortion with their fathers could be effective in reaching men.
In a close election, the targeted campaign could make all the difference. The Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In a recent podcast, Trippi also mused on the demographic’s potential to “surprise people in these Senate races like in Florida, in Texas, maybe Montana.”
“There is an opportunity here,” he said.
