Be careful what you wish for is a recurring theme in politics. Unintended consequences rebound on members of Congress at election time.

In this vein, as conservatives seem closer to winning their battle to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide, Democrats furrow their brows and suggest it won’t go well for Republicans. Without Roe to fight over, they warn, conservatives will lose their most potent motivating issue and the GOP will suffer.

This “concern trolling” is everywhere in the aftermath of Supreme Court oral arguments on Dec. 1, during which the five or six originalist justices were skeptical about allowing the 1973 abortion decision to besmirch the politics and jurisprudence of our nation any longer.

Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan told the New York Times that ending Roe would be “an incredibly powerful issue” in the 2022 election and beyond, motivating Democratic voters. Sen. Maggie Hassan, seeking reelection in New Hampshire, made it plain she’ll campaign similarly, saying, “What is fundamentally at stake is that every woman in our country should be able to make her own healthcare decisions.”

But there are two flies in the Democratic ointment. One is that Republicans also expect to fire up their base voters with the newly ascendant abortion issue. Swift progress from cause to effect — from appointing originalist justices to getting long-desired judicial decisions — demonstrates the benefit of conservatives’ political involvement.

The second problem for Democrats is that the Left is now so extreme and flaky that sensible, ordinary people have many more reasons to vote for conservative candidates.

As the Washington Examiner noted in our editorial, Virginians who voted based on abortion in the recent governor's election broke for Republican Glenn Youngkin by a margin of 20 points. But the Left has gifted Republicans much additional cultural ammo, and cultural issues are more powerful in engaging ordinary people than are purely political ones, such as bloated government spending.

The Virginia election showed, for example, that schools and connected concerns about race and gender stoke parents’ anger against teachers, their unions, and school administrators — the heart and soul of the Democratic Party — who shut down schools unnecessarily during the COVID pandemic, and who have been secretly indoctrinating children with woke racism and pernicious nonsense on matters of sex and gender.

Having drunk their own Kool-Aid, Democrats believe popular opinion is with them on abortion. Republicans can only respond, bring it on! They will echo perhaps the greatest of all campaigners, Napoleon Bonaparte, whose maxim was, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

GOP candidates doubtless yearn for Democrats to base their campaigns additionally on education, race, and gender. The party of the Left is out of touch. How it lost education to conservatives is the theme of the Washington Examiner magazine this week. Virginia Aabram interviews the president of the new University of Austin, founded to revive classical education, and Ilya Shapiro writes about his effort to take on the local school establishment.