Vice President Kamala Harris and down-ticket Democrats may have overplayed their hand on abortion by making it the primary focus of their campaigns this election.
A close look at recent election results and public polling reveals that, while Democrats have an advantage on the topic of abortion, it is not likely to prove determinative, and their focus on it may harm them with voters worried about immigration, inflation, and other major concerns facing the nation.
“Democrats are kind of like a degenerate gambler going back and back and back to the same slot machine that they got their first win on, and they’re now going to start to lose,” conservative strategist Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told the Washington Examiner.
Harris has made advocating abortion her central focus, blaming the state laws against abortion passed in 25 states since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision on former President Donald Trump. She has also promised that she will oversee the passage of abortion rights legislation should voters also deliver a Democratic-majority in Congress. She’s also portrayed Trump as opposed to in vitro fertilization and cast herself as the candidate of freedom.
But Trump, and to a lesser extent the GOP as a whole, has aggressively moved toward the center on abortion policy. They’ve successfully raised the political salience of the border crisis and the high cost of living. Now, they appear in a strong position to make gains in the first presidential election following the demise of Roe v. Wade.
Democrats bet on abortion because it helped in 2022 and 2023
It’s not difficult to understand why Democrats have bet heavily on abortion-rights politics. The issue was a winner for the party in the 2022 midterm elections and in state referenda following the Dobbs decision.
Democrats spent about $600 million in House races in 2022 solely on abortion messaging, while Republicans were focused on crime, the border, and the economy.
Republicans expecting a red wave were sorely disappointed, as Democrats almost held on to the House of Representatives and, defying all predictions, gained a seat in the Senate. It was the best midterm election performance for an incumbent president in decades.
A Republican House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about his party’s electoral failures, told the Washington Examiner that Democrats “successfully defined Republicans as extreme on the issue” of abortion following the policy confusion post-Dobbs.
“What we didn’t realize was, for so many Americans, abortion was a disqualifying issue for them, so even if they agreed with everything we had to say about their top three issues, if they believed what the Democrats spent so much money telling them about our position on abortion, which wasn’t true, it would effectively disqualify Republican candidates from receiving their vote,” said the Republican staffer.
Meanwhile, voters have consistently opted in favor of legal abortion in referenda post-Dobbs, sometimes in near-overwhelming numbers. In Michigan, for example, an amendment establishing abortion as a constitutional right passed with 57% of the vote. In conservative Kansas, in August 2022, voters rejected a measure to establish that nothing in the state constitution establishes a right to abortion, 59% to 41%. In 2023, Ohioans voted in an abortion rights amendment with 57% of the vote.
Those and other results led Democrats to believe that they could win on abortion even in red states.
They also led to recriminations among conservatives, some of whom blamed Republicans for being unprepared to campaign in a post-Dobbs environment, which Schilling described as the “perfect storm.”
“The cold front was the consulting class that never wants to do anything on these issues, that only want to talk about jobs and the economy,” said Schilling,” and then you had the hot front, which was the pro-life groups not being unified and getting into territory battles instead of focusing on getting what we could get done at the moment.”
In the wake of Dobbs, Schilling said the anti-abortion movement was divided between those that are intimately involved in electoral politics and those that “only care about principles and not care about actually winning,” with the latter putting too great of emphasis on passing “the perfect bill” instead of middleground, practical policy. The result was a series of high-profile losses.
Overinterpreting the results of 2022
Yet there are good reasons to believe that Democrats have exhausted the opportunities to capitalize on the abortion issue, and have now overextended themselves.
The first is that the 2022 results were not as dire for anti-abortion politicians as a cursory scan of the results would make it seem. Most notably, two prominent Republican governors who had signed abortion bans that took effect in 2022 cruised to reelection.
Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) signed a six-week ban in 2019 and it took effect in 2022. DeWine won reelection in 2022 with 62% of the vote.
In purple Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) signed a six-week abortion ban for Georgia in 2019 that took effect after the fall of Roe. Nevertheless, he won reelection relatively easily, with 53% of the vote, even though he faced a well-funded Democratic challenger, Stacey Abrams, who had focused on abortion.
Their experience shows that abortion alone is not enough to prevent voters from siding with Republicans whose politics they favor for other reasons.
And abortion-rights voters, who were fired up in 2022, are not likely to be in a position to exert as much influence in a general election as they were in the midterm elections. This year, more people will head to the polls, most of whom are far from single-issue voters.
“Because midterm elections are typically relatively low turnout affairs, there’s just more room for some very unusual political factor to bring turnout up,” Steven Greene, professor of political science at North Carolina State University, told the Washington Examiner. “In a presidential year, most people who have any kind of propensity at all to vote are already going to be voting.”
Polling reveals that abortion is not the top issue
Abortion was very important to all voters in 2022, but now, it isn’t even the highest priority among women or left-wing voters nationwide, suggesting that the Democratic strategy may be falling on deaf ears.
According to an October poll from the healthcare think tank KFF, only about 13% of female voters nationally say that abortion is their No. 1 issue this election. That’s up from 10% in June.
Female voters under 30 drove this modest increase, with nearly 40% saying it is their top concern, followed by another 30% citing inflation as their top worry.
But youth voters historically have made up a small percentage of the overall electorate, accounting for only about 14% of voters in the 2020 election despite record turnout. During the 2022 midterm elections, about 27% in the 18 to 29 age group voted, making up about 10% of the total voting population that year.
Even a majority of Democratic women, regardless of age, do not say abortion is their top issue this year. Instead, they see threats to democracy and inflation as the top priorities, with only 18% of all female Democratic respondents to the KFF poll identifying abortion as their No. 1 issue.
Abortion’s importance for Democratic voters of both genders has also declined since the 2022 midterm elections.
Prior to the overturning of Roe, only 35% of Democrats saw abortion as a “very important” issue in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. That shot up to 74% in August 2022, two months after the Dobbs decision.
But as of last month, only 67% of Democrats see abortion as a “very important” issue. Just over half of voters overall said in September that abortion is a very important issue.
The Pew survey found that the top three issues for Democrats were healthcare, Supreme Court appointees, and the economy. The top three issues for Republicans were the economy, immigration, and violent crime.
Abortion polling in swing states
The importance of abortion is even less clear in swing states, with most voters on the whole saying their chief worry is the economy.
A September New York Times-Siena poll found that only 18% of Arizonans thought abortion was their No. 1 issue. More than a quarter said the economy and 21% said immigration were their top priorities.
That same poll found that only 16% of voters in Georgia saw abortion as their most important policy issue, outranked by 28% saying the economy. In North Carolina, 13% cited abortion as their highest concern — right in line with the national average.
A different New York Times-Siena poll, also in September, found that 24% of voters in Nevada said the economy was their chief concern. Abortion and immigration were tied in Nevada at 14%.
Only 10% of Michiganders last month said in a Marist College poll that abortion was their top driving issue.
In Pennsylvania, a Spotlight PA-MassINC poll in September found that nearly 70% of voters said they were concerned about jobs, wages and the economy, while only 49% expressed concern about reproductive rights, but the poll did not ask respondents to rank their issues by order of importance.
To summarize: In recent off-year elections, voters have favored abortion rights when asked to vote directly on them. But polling indicates that, for the majority of the public, abortion is not an overriding consideration or even a top priority — and may not be an obstacle to pulling the lever for a GOP candidate.
Updated abortion playbook for both sides in 2024
Both Democrats and Republicans have updated their strategy on abortion for the high-stakes presidential election.
One advantage Democrats have now that they did not in 2022, Greene said, is the stories of women who have been harmed in the wake of confusion about medical care following the implementation of abortion bans.
“Certainly with core audience that Democrats are trying to motivate and in some cares scare about losing access to abortion, I think it probably is still a fairly potent motivator, in part because in 2022 it was still so new, not a lot of state laws had really had a chance to take effect,” said Greene.
Harris and other Democrats most recently have used the story of Amber Nicole Thurman, who died from abortion pill complications in Georgia, to highlight the harms of abortion restrictions.
Thurman’s parents, who blame their daughter’s death on Georgia’s six-week gestational age limit on abortion, even engaged in a campaign event with Harris last week. They say that Harris’s plan of passing federal abortion protections through Congress would have saved their daughter.
Meanwhile, under Trump’s influence, Republicans on the national stage have largely rallied around the position that abortion policy is now left to voters at the state level, forswearing federal responsibility for abortion oversight.
Trump, last week on the comedy podcast Flagrant, cited the Ohio abortion rights amendment as a prime example of voters directly taking charge of abortion policy when elected officials may have gone too far.
“What we did is that we moved it back to the states and a vote of the people, and now they’re voting,” said the former president. “I won Ohio by a lot, but they voted, and it’s up to them.”
Trump has said he would veto any federal abortion ban while simultaneously painting Democrats as extreme for their position of not supporting any gestational age limits for abortion, even in the third trimester.
Although there is still variation within the GOP on when to draw the age limit line, Schilling predicted that the most successful down-ticket Republicans will stress the need for limits after about 15 weeks into the late second and third trimesters, which is the standard in most European countries.
Schilling also said that, without sacrificing ground on the importance of other issues, Republicans must be as able to talk about abortion as articulately and as much as their opponents so as to not let Democrats define the issue again.
“You’re going to have to be as comfortable talking about abortion as you are on the economy,” said Schilling. “You might hate that you have to do that, but guess what? These are the rules and life isn’t always fair.”
Abortion doesn’t outweigh regional factors
In many races, other considerations are likely to determine the outcome, even if abortion is the topic elevated by Democrats.
Stan Barnes, a political consultant in Arizona, told the Washington Examiner that although abortion is the primary focus of the Democratic campaign against Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, it will likely be Lake’s other values that would be the source of her downfall should she lose.
Lake, a loyal Trump supporter, lost her bid for Arizona governor in 2020 due to what Barnes called the “McCain constituency” of traditional conservative Republicans who dislike the populist flavor of the Trump-era Republicanism.
He says that, although her lingering weakness with traditional Republicans is Lake’s biggest problem, Democrats will likely take a Lake loss as a sign that her anti-abortion position was a major liability and that their strategy worked.
“Our Democratic friends are spending all of their money and time connecting Kari Lake with her pro-life position and believe it’s going to work. And so if she does lose, it will be said she was wrong about abortion,” said Barnes.
But in the thick of campaign season, it is difficult to know what strategies are most effective.
“One of those truisms of politics is that, in any campaign, half the stuff you do works and half the stuff you do doesn’t work,” said Greene. “But you never actually even know which mattered and which didn’t.”
Greene, who has personal friends in local Democratic politics in North Carolina, said he wonders anecdotally whether politicians are “a little bit too much in their democratic bubble” in terms of messaging, seeing the issue “as being a savior for the Democratic Party.”
Abortion rights amendments
Ballots in 10 states, including the swing states Nevada and Arizona, will feature some version of an amendment to enshrine the right to an abortion into their respective state constitutions.
But many analysts do not believe that the presence of abortion rights amendments on the ballot this November will significantly influence the legislative, gubernatorial, or presidential outcomes.
In fact, the option of an abortion rights amendment on the ballot could spur abortion-rights voters to essentially split their ticket, casting their vote in favor of an abortion rights amendment while also voting for anti-abortion Republicans because of their alignment on other issues.
“People can do two things at once,” said Barnes. “And in this case, I think people can vote for Donald Trump and also for the pro-abortion question. Voters have a complicated decision matrix when it comes to candidates, especially candidates for president.”
Greene said that abortion referenda have “very, very different political dynamics” than voting for particular candidates, in part because partisanship is not directly attached.
“You may think that abortion should be legal, but also that you need to stop the ‘woke menace’ that is the Democrats, or the inflation that is the Democrats, or whatever,” said Greene.
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Abortion referenda may have a “very modest impact” in certain close legislative races, says Greene, but he predicts “it’s not going to fundamentally change the nature of legislative races.”
“The people that care first and foremost about the abortion issue, I believe, are already performing around that issue,” said Barnes. “Pro-choice people are already voting for Democratic candidates. Pro-life people are already doing the same on the other side.”
