Last night's Democratic presidential debate featured a slew of predictable boilerplate from the candidates advocating for abortion.  First, Sen. Amy Klobuchar got asked about it, and she stated the usual stuff, and then Sen. Elizabeth Warren got asked a slightly different question by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow about whether there was any room left in the Democratic Party for a pro-life Democrat, such as Louisiana's governor John Bel Edwards.

Warren was evasive, failing to answer the question directly, but she made it pretty clear there was no room.

According to the NBC transcript:

MADDOW: Just this weekend, Louisiana re-elected a Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards. He has signed one of the country's toughest laws restricting abortion. Is there room in the Democratic Party for someone like him, someone who can win in a deep red state but who does not support abortion rights?

Senator Warren?

WARREN: Look, I believe that abortion rights are human rights. I believe that they are also economic rights. And protecting the right of a woman to be able to make decisions about her own body is fundamentally what we do and what we stand for as a Democratic Party.

Understand this. When someone makes abortion illegal in America, rich women will still get abortions. It's just going to fall hard on poor women. It's going to fall hard on girls, women who don't even know that they're pregnant because they have been molested by an uncle. I want to be an America where everybody has a chance.

And I know it can be a hard decision for people. But here's the thing. When it comes down to that decision, a woman should be able to call on her mother, she should be able to call on her partner, she should be able to call on her priest or her rabbi. But the one entity that should not be in the middle of that decision is the government.

(APPLAUSE)

Yes, they clapped and clapped, cheering the "right" to kill of an innocent life, and a quite disgusting thing that was.

But that knee-jerk effort to advocate for abortion as if it were popular with the public, as Klobuchar did, and Warren's effort to shift the topic away from Bel Edwards misses a pretty important elephant in the room.

Bel Edwards just won an election against a formidable Republican opponent.  Won.  And in fact won big, and won against all odds.

Up until Bel Edwards achieved that victory, nearly every candidate President Trump endorsed had won handily.  Bel Edwards was some kind of exception, some kind of Trump-beater, and in his re-election campaign, he was up against the full force of President Trump delivering his hearty endorsement to Bel Edwards's GOP challenger, making at least two speaking appearances in the state to rally the voters.

It was a rare misfire for Trump.  Voters elected Bel Edwards instead, despite the headwinds.  Warren is treating that like an embarrassment when she ought to be treating it like a template for winning elections.  Klobuchar was nattering on a great deal about how she's the one who has what it takes to beat Trump as her campaign pitch.  But the lesson of Bel Edwards belies that because the likely game changer for Bel Edwards is that he was pro-life.

As the Susan B. Anthony List tweeted:

Moderator at #DemocraticDebate: Is there room in the Democratic Party for a #ProLife candidate?@ewarren refuses to answer

79% of Americans OPPOSE late-term abortion: The Democratic candidates’ abortion extremism is a major political vulnerability in November 2020

— Susan B. Anthony List (@SBAList) November 21, 2019

Yet there Klobuchar and Warren go, selling the old tired script...and wondering why they are losing elections.  Normal people clamor to a winner.  Democrats just spew the same old tired lines.

Image credit: CBS News via shareable YouTube screen shot.