The Iowa caucuses are two weeks away, and the New Hampshire primary follows a week later. This is the official starting gun for the 2024 elections, but the battleground has already been laid. When RedState reported earlier in December on Kate Cox and the lawsuit over Texas' Heartbeat Law, this prescient statement was made.

Tragically, in the case of Kate Cox, the agenda bled through. Whether Cox was driving this or someone was driving Cox is yet to be seen. But it was clear the focus was to challenge the Texas law in order to create an issue that would carry into the 2024 election. Most of the posts on X are fomenting negative sentiments about Republicans and voting two of the Texas Supreme Court justices off the bench, so you cannot tell me this was not calculated by the pro-abortion lobby.

In early December, the gauntlet was officially thrown. (emphasis added)

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision last year to eliminate a nationwide right to abortion was a moment of triumph for conservatives who had labored for five decades to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

Nearly two dozen Republican-controlled states have taken advantage of the ruling to impose new restrictions on abortion, curtailing access to the procedure for tens of millions of women.

But the ruling has also turned the issue into a political liability for Republicans. Voter backlash was widely credited with limiting Republican gains in the 2022 congressional midterm elections, as well as propelling Democrats to victories last month in Virginia and Kentucky.

Every statewide ballot question about reproductive rights since 2022 - seven in all - has yielded victory for abortion rights advocates, including in conservative states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky.

Republican presidential candidates, including frontrunner Donald Trump, have struggled to articulate a position on abortion that would satisfy both the evangelical Christians who comprise a critical Republican voting bloc as well as the swing voters who prefer abortion remain accessible.

President Joe Biden's re-election campaign and Democratic-aligned groups intend to put abortion rights at the center of next year's White House contest.

Democrat Leftists would not be mounting this campaign if they did not see it as something they could easily manipulate in their favor; and the battle in Texas is but one example. The Supreme Court Justices' weighing in on the cases of Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which challenge restrictions on the so-called abortion pill, will also factor strongly in the 2024 Elections.

Republicans have nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. This leftist publication also sounded the warning bell.

“With abortion, there’s really a kind of catch-22 for Republicans,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis and a leading expert on the history of abortion in the US. “On the one hand, you have a lot of base Republican voters who really care about opposing abortion and on the other you have a huge group of something like 70% of Americans who don’t like abortion bans.”

The US supreme court meanwhile set the stage for another major showdown over abortion rights, this time just months before the 2024 presidential election. The court has agreed to decide a case that could determine the accessibility of a widely used abortion pill, including in states where the procedure remains legal.

But whether abortion will continue to fuel Democratic victories in a presidential election year is also unclear.

Republicans cannot cast blame or run for cover. It is high time they align and unify on the party's pro-life stance, become adept at properly articulating the message, and then learn to defend the state-level successes on promoting laws that encourage a culture of life. Florida's Ron DeSantis, Alabama's Kay Ivey, and Iowa's Kim Reynolds should be the examples upheld for other pro-life governors to model. If Republicans shift their tactics, it would blunt the assumption that Democrats will be victorious in this fight. 

Here's the problem: Republicans have never been good at it (see, Akin, Todd, Missouri). It's time for that to change, and it needs to happen with every Republican candidate up and down the ballot. The younger generation of conservatives and Republicans may lean center or left on issues like homosexuality and climate change, but on the issue of the preborn, they remain staunchly pro-life.

This New York Times article written before the 2020 election was pre-Dobbs, and established that the sole issue keeping the younger generation voting for Republicans was their stance on life.

In interviews with two dozen Republicans ages 18 to 23, almost all of them, while expressing fundamentally conservative views, identified at least one major issue on which they disagreed with the party line. But more often than not, they said one issue kept them committed to the party: abortion.

While polling shows an age gap in opinions on abortion, it is smaller than the gaps on some other issues, and researchers say that for people who oppose abortion, that opposition has become more central to their political choices.

Even as young Republicans often accept the science of climate change and support L.G.B.T. rights, abortion remains a powerful force pulling them toward the Republican Party — and toward President Trump, whom many of them dislike.

Post-Dobbs and post the November 2023 special election in Ohio surrounding Issue 1, "Meet The Press" decided to interview Young Republicans about abortion. Their displeasure over the losses and issues with the party were not because of abortion restrictions, but were because the party has no concept on how to message or go on offense about their stance.

WATCH:

Young Republicans weren’t shy in criticizing the way their own party has campaigned on the issue of abortion at a gathering for the Young Republican National Federation in Des Moines, Iowa. ⁠@AlexanderTabet reports. pic.twitter.com/O7uHqMEkl0

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) November 14, 2023

The pro-life organization Students for Life of America (SFLA) is working to change this relationship between Republican candidates and the issues important to the Pro-Life Generation. They have installed 31 new state captains with plans to mobilize and utilize the power of the youth vote.

 Students for Life Action (SFLAction) says its success moving into the election cycle will depend heavily on their student leaders and ground game, with more than 1,400 groups in all 50 states, as well as close to 170,000 trained activists. Gen Z and Millennials, comprising one third of the voting bloc, are a pivotal component to SFLAction’s success in electing pro-life champions who introduce life-saving legislation at all levels of government.

This organization is taking the issue of life seriously in regards to the 2024 elections. It is high time Republicans did the same. SFLA is holding its annual summit in January of 2024, and they are not shying away from the Democrat salvo of making abortion the battleground in 2024.

This year’s theme will be Equal Rights for All, an acknowledgement of the legal rights of preborn as well as the human rights atrocity of abortion. 

SFLA President Kristan Hawkins speaks to this challenge of putting abortion on the ballot and is saying, "bring it on."

The human rights issue of our day – abortion – is on the ballot across the country as two radically different visions for America are in conflict. Students for Life of America is heading into 2024 more determined than ever to train unapologetically pro-life leaders. We are demanding governments at the local, state, and federal level protect every child from the violence of abortion. We are demanding equal rights for all. 

Here's every state where abortion is on the ballot in 2024. We'll see you there!https://t.co/5gx5QSX9OW

— Kristan Hawkins (@KristanHawkins) December 29, 2023

The group is empowering young voters and they hope to empower Republican candidates to boldly and unapologetically take the ground.

Doggedness and moral conviction have always characterized the anti-abortion movement. Activists have sustained their energy for 50 years “by believing that success was possible, even in the absence of clear victories,” Daniel K. Williams, a history professor at the University of West Georgia, told me. Dobbs gave this new generation a taste of victory. Activists like Hawkins are bolder now. Without Roe, they reason, anything is possible.

It's time for Republicans to start believing this and act accordingly.