EDITORIAL: Democrats form circular firing squad over abortion rights

April 25--An election campaign for, of all things, mayor of Omaha, Neb., is focusing attention on a major problem for the national Democratic Party. Republicans should be delighted. Democrats should be worried.

At issue: How ideologically pure must Democratic candidates be? Specifically, can a candidate be opposed to abortion rights and still expect support from the national party? Or should the party's principal focus be economic populism with everything else -- abortion, guns, immigration, gay rights, etc. -- subject to the "agree to disagree" rule?

At least on the issue of abortion rights, adherence to party orthodoxy has now been mandated. On Friday, Tom Perez, the former U.S. labor secretary who is now the Democratic national chairman, issued a statement saying "every candidate who runs as a Democrat" must share the party's position "that every woman should be able to make her own health choices. Period."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., disagrees. So do we. This newspaper has a long history of advocating a woman's right to choose. But we recognize that there are people on the other side of the issue who are acting out of moral conviction, too. Moral issues are important in politics, but there's more than one point of view.

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as part of the national party's "Unity Tour," visited Omaha, where Democratic state Sen. Heath Mello is a candidate in the May 9 runoff election for mayor. The office is nonpartisan, but incumbent Jean Stothert is a Republican, and these days, everything is partisan.

Mello, 37, is a practicing Catholic who says that as mayor, he would uphold abortion rights. But in Nebraska's unicameral legislature, he supported a 2009 bill that would have required women to be informed of their right to a fetal ultrasound before undergoing an abortion. The ultrasound was optional, but the bill was another of those backdoor attempts so common in conservative legislatures to make abortion more difficult.

Prominent women's groups objected to Sanders' and the national party's support for Mello. They called it a betrayal of women who have become the backbone of the Democratic Party.

Democrats haven't yet healed the rift that became apparent in the 2016 presidential primaries. Sanders came out of virtually nowhere and almost caught Hillary Clinton, the best-funded, best-prepared candidate in recent history. Clinton played identity politics, offering appeals to all of the party's constituent groups. Sanders focused relentlessly on economic issues and treated everything else as secondary.

In the general election, Republican Donald Trump focused on a single identity group -- white Americans aggrieved at all the attention focused on other groups. Clinton won the popular vote, where demographics and identity politics can work, but Trump won the electoral vote.

You'd think the Democrats could figure out that open displays of disunity are no way to win elections.

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