Republican politician Reid Ribble, who preceded Gallagher in Congress, said he believes a Democrat can indeed flip the 8th District.
But Ribble cautions against focusing too intently on abortion — and losing sight of other issues like infrastructure and security.
“Dr Lyerly, being an OBGYN, she can get so zoned in on abortion that she loses the bigger picture that we need roads to drive on. We need trucks to do transportation,” said Ribble. “We need a military to take care of us in a dangerous world.”
Ribble described the district’s voters as working-class moderates: “Reagan Democrats who loved to deer hunt but were part of a union and attended a Catholic church”.
But while voters in the district supported Republican candidate Donald Trump during the last two presidential election cycles, Ribble said there was also a strong base of support for figures like Bernie Sanders, the left-leaning progressive from Vermont.
“If you get into the rural areas of Wisconsin’s 8th District, which is a lot of it, there’s an awful lot of Bernie Sanders voters in those regions as well,” Ribble explained.
“I don’t think the district is as is as conservative as it is populist.”
Other experts warn that Democrats may not be able to count on the same wave of indignant voters who supported them after the Supreme Court’s decision.
Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette University Law School Poll, told Al Jazeera that polling conducted prior to the June presidential debate suggested that voters in Wisconsin ranked abortion third among their top priorities, behind the economy and immigration.
Less than 10 percent of the independents polled placed abortion as their primary issue — despite 76 percent saying they supported abortion rights wholeheartedly.
“Preaching to the choir may get a lot of cheers at Democratic rallies. They agree on the issue of abortion rights,” Franklin said. “But can the campaign raise the salience of the issue so that more votes are swayed by their abortion position, rather than by the economy or the immigration position?
Jackie Esker, 37, is among the voters in Wisconsin’s 8th District. She describes herself as “not a political person”. Speaking from her family’s hardware store in the small town of Wittenberg, she too expressed scepticism that abortion alone will draw voters to the Democratic Party.
The recent July 13 assassination attempt against Trump felt like a more pressing issue, Esker explained. “I’m sure [abortion is] going to be on the back burner because gun control is on more people’s minds than abortion is.”
