A pro-life congressional Democrat who opposed ObamaCare and refused to support Barack Obama in 2012 on Tuesday beat back a far-left primary challenger. The win for one of the last few remaining conservative Democrats drew a collective shrug from the networks on Wednesday. ABC and NBC ignored the tightly contested race.
Dan Lipinski defeated Marie Newman 51 to 49 percent in a race that featured massive amounts of cash thrown around by pro-abortion groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood. The pro-life Susan B. Anthony List donated $120,000 and sent canvassers up to the Illinois district to support the Democrat.
MSNBC's Steve Kornacki on Tuesday night covered Lipinski’s victory, saying that this “anti-abortion Democrat” “will survive” in the “era of Trump.” The MSNBC analyst could not get over the shock, repeating, “This is a bit of a surprise.... A bit of a surprise result there.”
He explained:
There are a grand total of three Democrats in Congress who call themselves anti-abortion and one of them is named Dan Lipinski the third district of Illinois. He was being challenged in a Democratic primary by a woman named Newman. She said she was inspired by the women's marches when Trump was elected. She challenged him. There was a lot of energy behind her campaign…. Almost 100 percent of the vote is in and Lipinski, it looks like, is actually going to survive. This is a bit of a surprise. Dan Lipinski is a son of a former congressman. Again, it looks like an anti-abortion Democrat is going to survive a very well energized primary challenge in the era of Trump. So, a bit of a surprise result there.
Despite a combined six hours of available air time on Wednesday, NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America skipped the story. (The first hour of CBS This Morning was preempted in much of the east coast due to snow coverage. But This Morning did not cover it in the second hour.)
Party primaries often don’t get much coverage, but if a conservative Democrat had lost to a Trump-hating progressive, it seems likelier that journalists would have shown some interest.
A transcript of the MSNBC coverage is below. Click “expand” to read:
Last Word
3/20/18
11:46pm ET
STEVE KORNACKI: Interesting story in the third district of Illinois. A lot of people don't know that number, may not know the name, but there is a very particular type of Democrat who came in tonight endangered in the Democratic primary. Talking about the issue here of abortion. Let me put this in some perspective before we get to what happened here. Go back to when the abortion issue came on the national scene back in the '70s. 43 percent of Democrats in congress said they were anti-abortion back then. You go forward to the 1990s, it fell to 34 percent. Fast forward to today. It's already down at 1.6 percent.
There are a grand total of three Democrats in Congress who call themselves anti-abortion and one of them is named Dan Lipinski the third district of Illinois. He was being challenged in a Democratic primary by a woman named Newman. She said she was inspired by the women's marches when Trump was elected. She challenged him. There was a lot of energy behind her campaign…. Almost 100 percent of the vote is in and Lipinski, it looks like, is actually going to survive. This is a bit of a surprise. Dan Lipinski is a son of a former congressman. Again, it looks like an anti-abortion Democrat is going to survive a very well energized primary challenge in the era of Trump. So, a bit of a surprise result there.
