Supreme Court decisions on abortion and guns could shake up 2022 election

Guns were once a winning issue for the GOP, but the rising frequency of mass shootings over the last decade has moved voters in favor of stricter laws, surveys show.Mike Davis, a conservative strategist who has worked on Supreme Court nominations at the highest levels of the GOP, said he’d welcome a battle over the courts in the midterm election.“As Hillary Clinton in 2016 and four former Senate Democrats in 2018 learned the hard way, focusing on the Supreme Court is a winning issue for Republicans,” Davis said, adding that it “unites and motivates conservatives” and “wins over independents.”In 2018, a heated fight over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh fired up conservatives who believed he was mistreated over decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct. In response, he has created a commission with a broad ideological range of voices to study the structure of the court and recommend changes.One Republican Senate campaign aide predicted that the rulings on guns and abortion would elevate the voices on the left calling for expanding the Supreme Court, saying it would enable Republican candidates to run against "court packing," which is unpopular.Other conservatives downplay the political impact of the Supreme Court cases, suggesting that the outcomes are uncertain and that the justices may take incremental steps with consequences unlikely to be felt broadly or quickly by voters.“It’s difficult to look into the future and predict how the court might rule on either issue, let alone what the political reaction would be,” said Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor and oil-and-gas executive.