League Of Women Voters Did Poor Job With District 35 Debate

Yesterday I wrote a post analyzing the fundraising in North Dakota’s various legislative races. One race, in particular, stood out because of the huge amount of money involved so far.

Democrat Senate candidate Erin Hill-Oban, running in District 35, has raised nearly $65,000 for her race alone, not counting the $22,000 raised by her House running mates Tracy Potter and Darrell Miller. Hill-Oban’s fundraising alone represents 45 percent of what all Democrat state Senate candidates have raised.

In fact, Hill-Oban has so far raised more than four of the Democrats’ six statewide candidates.

On the Republican side, incumbent Senator Margaret Sitte has raised $46,278.52 on top of $19,000 from her House running mates.

That’s a huge amount of money for a legislative race, and the reason that race is attracting so much money is the abortion issue. Senator Sitte is an outspoken pro-life politician who was a key member of the bi-partisan coalition that passed several controversial pro-life bills in 2013.

Democrats are targeting Sitte because of her “extreme” (in their estimation) pro-life views.

So when Hill-Oban went on television with her attack ads target Sitte, you’d expect the abortion issue to have been mentioned. But it wasn’t.

You’d also expect abortion to have been an important topic during the debate between Sitte and Oban hosted by the League of Women Voters on September 29th. As you can see from the video below, abortion wasn’t even mentioned.

That’s probably to Hill-Oban’s benefit. As much as Democrats might want to paint pro-life legislation as extreme (those Democrats who didn’t vote for the bills in the legislature), they don’t seem to want to attach themselves to a pro-abortion point of view.

Even in a race that’s attracting money and attention because of abortion.

But still, shouldn’t the debate moderators have asked the question? Shame on them for avoiding it.