OK, I'm going to insert foot in my mouth and make a wild prognostication. Voldemort is done messing with the abortion issue. I would be greatly surprised if he talks about a national abortion ban during his term.
If I'm wrong you will receive a free latte maker.
The abortion fallacy
By David Leonhardt, NY Times
Nov 13, 2024
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, many Democrats argued that the issue would be the key to winning future elections. It was an alluring idea because it suggested that a central progressive policy goal — protecting abortion rights — doubled as a savvy political strategy.
But it hasn’t worked out. Instead, Republicans swept this year’s elections even as Democrats made the subject central to their campaigns and even as abortion-rights ballot initiatives passed in seven states. Today, the Democrats’ belief in the political potency of abortion looks like wishful thinking.
How could this have happened, given that the Republican Party’s opposition to abortion really is unpopular? In today’s newsletter, I’ll try to unravel the mystery.
Evidence ignored
Heading into 2024, abortion’s political sway was genuinely unclear.
Most Americans support substantial access to abortion access: In every state that voted on a ballot initiative in 2022 and 2023, the anti-abortion side lost. The uncertainty was whether the issue could also swing the result of general elections by causing voters who had not traditionally supported Democratic candidates to do so.
There was some reason to think the answer might be yes: Democrats did surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms, just months after Roe’s demise. But there were also reasons to be skeptical.
It was hard to find a single election where abortion seemed decisive. Although it might have helped flip a few House elections, the Democrats who won hadn’t emphasized the issue more than those who had lost. And not a single incumbent Republican governor or senator lost in 2022, despite attempts by Democratic candidates to focus on the issue.
March 2023 New York Magazine
“It is the only thing we’re really talking about,” Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee for governor in Ohio, said in her 2022 campaign. “We think it is the issue.” Three weeks later, Whaley lost to Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who had signed abortion restrictions into law, by 25 percentage points.
The most reasonable conclusion seemed to be that abortion had played a modest role in the midterms. If anything, it would probably play an even smaller role in 2024. Polls showed that the people who cared most about the issue tended to be highly educated, politically engaged Democrats. That’s a very different group from swing voters in presidential elections.
Rather than grappling with this conflicting evidence, however, many Democrats engaged in motivated reasoning. Some were scornful of suggestions that abortion might have limited political impact.
“There’s a history of political commentators not understanding the intensity the abortion issue has brought to Dem grassroots,” one party strategist wrote on social media, predicting that it would push “Dem performance to upper end of what’s possible.”
This belief shaped the party’s 2024 strategy. Abortion was “by far the most prevalent topic in 2024 Democratic messaging,” Politico reported, “beating out health care, the economy and immigration.” The Harris campaign’s final round of advertisements mentioned abortion more than any other subject, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.
The strategy failed. Instead, many voters who support abortion access voted for Donald Trump and other Republicans, including in states with abortion initiatives on the ballot:
Alluring and dangerous
There seem to be a few reasons that the Republican Party’s unpopular abortion position didn’t hurt it more.
First, the Biden administration’s record was out of step with public opinion on other big issues, such as immigration. Second, Trump seemed to moderate his abortion stance, backing away from a national ban and saying he would allow states to decide their own policies. Third, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, her running mate, refused to answer questions about whether they supported any abortion restrictions — and most Americans do.
Finally, the demise of Roe has not led to a sharp decline in abortion access, thanks to efforts by advocates to provide pills through the mail. (Even in most states with bans, abortions increased between 2020 and 2023, Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz of The Times reported.)
My colleague Amy Schoenfeld Walker recently interviewed women who voted for both Trump and abortion-rights ballot initiatives and heard several of these themes. “I personally think Trump is someone who picks and chooses his battles,” said June Crozier, a Florida resident. “And he is saying everyone will have to deal with this from state to state.” Similarly, Aly Bennett, a St. Louis resident, said that states’ ability to set their own abortion policies led her to think, “OK, you can vote for the Republican candidate while still supporting your views on reproductive health.”
All of which helps explain why the 2024 election was not a referendum on abortion. But as the Democrats try to figure out their party’s future, there is also a broader lesson.
The idea that your own policy preferences make for smart political tactics is very attractive. (The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it “the pundit’s fallacy.”) If that’s the case, you don’t have to make compromises. You run on principle, you highlight your priorities — and you win.
Yet the idea can be self-defeating. If you read public opinion wishfully rather than realistically, you can hurt your own ability to win elections. You can make it easier for your political opponents to enact the policies you abhor.
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