When Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, abortion rights advocates celebrated having a candidate who — unlike Joe Biden — knew how to talk about an issue that had been a winner since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Ten states also put statewide abortion-related measures on their ballots, sure to drive Democratic turnout in battleground states.
What ended up happening is that some abortion initiatives won out: Missouri became the first state to effectively overturn a near-total abortion ban, and New York passed an unprecedented Bill of Rights expansion. But measures to protect abortion — in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota — failed for the first time since Dobbs.
Most significantly, Harris lost to Donald Trump, who has continuously bragged about overturning Roe.
“The results are clear, just incredibly disappointing,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to TargetSmart, which tracks voting data. “I think for Democratic candidates in general and for those of us that expected to see just, frankly, more of a change in the electorate due to Dobbs like we had seen since the decision … we clearly didn’t see that.”
Some of the competitive down-ballot races in which Republican candidates tried to present themselves as moderate on abortion — such as the Senate races in Nevada and Arizona and the race for Rep. Don Bacon’s House seat — are still too close to call. In Nebraska, where an abortion rights measure failed, the Senate race was close but ultimately went to GOP Sen. Deb Fischer.
Bonier wouldn’t go as far as to conclude that abortion does not work to drive Democratic votes — he said abortion could have “blunted” the national rightward political movement in some states — but he added that “it’s undeniable that it wasn’t enough to not see these states swing wholesale to Trump and to Republicans.”
Another Democratic strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly, told NOTUS that abortion “clearly didn’t deliver directly the way that it did in 2022” but said that ticket splitting between abortion rights initiatives and Republicans should have been expected.
“Part of the discussion going into it was, this is going to help juice Democrats, it’s going to help put Republicans on defense on this,” the strategist said. But they added that “a vote to protect abortion rights … did not lock you in automatically to vote for a Democrat for anything. You’d be very, very naive if you thought that.”
In the 2022 election, Democrats like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Gov. Andy Beshear in Kentucky centered their campaigns on abortion and won. But polling experts warned that the midterm outcomes would not predict the presidential one.
“There are other issues now that are motivating other constituencies to turn out to vote that are not abortion,” said Mollyann Brodie, executive vice president and executive director of public opinion and survey research for KFF. “As opposed to the ’22 elections, the midterm elections, the special elections, there wasn’t as much of that countervailing influence” driving people to vote other than abortion.
Brodie told NOTUS ahead of Election Day that Trump’s messaging on immigration and the economy might be enough to move some voters toward him, regardless of their feelings about abortion rights.
Anti-abortion advocates immediately started celebrating Republican wins, suggesting that the electorate isn’t as supportive of abortion rights as their opponents may have thought. (Polls show that most Americans support keeping abortion legal and most identify as “pro-choice.”
“Democrats led by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz went ‘all in’ on abortion as their number one issue,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Ahead of Election Day, SBA spent more than $92 million in canvassing against Harris and Democrats in Congress, which the group said was its largest investment in an election.
“Time after time, these crucial conversations change minds and change votes that make the difference in close elections. We succeeded,” Dannenfelser said.
Anti-abortion advocates are expected to challenge the seven newly approved constitutional amendments, setting the stage for courts to decide how these measures protect abortion. Laurie Sobel, associate director of women’s health policy for KFF, told NOTUS that with restrictions adopted when Roe was in place, courts were tasked with deciding whether they violated the landmark case or whether they were acceptable.
“Now we’re going to see that at a state-by-state level of what’s allowed under these constitutional amendments,” Sobel said. “Some of them are very clear and some of them are not, and so it really depends on each of the constitutional amendments about exactly how clear they are.”
Arizona, for example, has a 15-week abortion ban in place. The constitutional amendment in that state won’t automatically overturn the restriction, but abortion opponents will likely mount a challenge to have the state’s highest court interpret the text of the initiative, which creates a “fundamental right to abortion” and “limits the state’s ability to interfere with that right before fetal viability.”
But the measure also says that the state can interfere if “it has a compelling reason and does so in the least restrictive way possible.” The Arizona Supreme Court, Sobel said, will decide what exactly that means.
However, even the idea that voters will get to directly decide on abortion through initiatives in other states is nearly over. Sobel told NOTUS that Arkansas and Oklahoma were the only states left that haven’t had an abortion initiative that could put one forward under their state constitutions. (Advocates in Arkansas tried to add one to the ballot, but the state’s secretary of state rejected it.)
Trump’s argument that abortion is up to the states and state politicians might have worked with voters better than Democrats’ hypothetical scenario that if Republicans gain power, a national abortion ban will ensue.
“The reality is, it was a false argument that I don’t feel like we won this year. I don’t think the average voter went into the polling place yesterday feeling like their vote in the presidential election, or even down-ballot campaigns, would have an impact on the future of abortion rights, and I think that’s a big problem,” Bonier said.
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Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS.