Democrats want to talk about “personhood” and reproductive freedom. They want to tell voters about a stubborn pay gap and women hurt by a low minimum wage. But what they don’t want to do is talk about a “war on women.”

Indeed, the party that so effectively deployed the “war” rhetoric to help defeat Mitt Romney in 2012 has now sworn off its catch phrase, dropping it almost completely from a campaign strategy that, in so many other ways, is still very much about women’s issues.

“[Saying] ‘Republicans are waging a war on women’ actually doesn’t test very well,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “Women find it divisive, political—they don’t like it.”

So Democratic candidates, who need to expand their margins among female voters and bring unmarried women to the polls in November, are shifting the language they use to pitch these issues to voters. Instead of the “war,” Lake said, testing has shown more effective language casts Republicans’ positions as “too extreme” or the GOP as “out of touch with women’s lives.”