Many Democrats have come to believe that abortion access is the solution to their political problems. This week’s election results — with Ohio guaranteeing abortion access in a landslide and Democrats winning in both Virginia and Kentucky — support this notion.
But I continue to think that recent elections offer a more complex picture, and I want to use today’s newsletter to explain. I know that some readers are skeptical.
Widespread abortion access is clearly popular, even in many red states. When Americans have voted directly on the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, abortion rights have gone seven for seven. What’s less clear is how much abortion politics affect general elections between a Democrat and a Republican. Is the effect large — or usually only enough to tip very close races?
Ohio, the center of the abortion fight in this year’s election, offers a useful case study.
‘It is the issue’
A year ago, the Democratic Party set out to turn Ohio blue by emphasizing the Republican Party’s opposition to abortion.
Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate nominee, protested outside the Supreme Court the day it eliminated the constitutional right to abortion access. “J.D. Vance wants a national abortion ban,” Ryan said about his Republican opponent later in the campaign. “I think we go back to Roe v. Wade.”
In the Ohio governor’s race, Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee, went further than Ryan and organized her campaign around the topic, as Jessie Balmert of The Columbus Dispatch reported. “It is the only thing we’re really talking about,” Whaley said three weeks before Election Day. “We think it is the issue.”
None of this worked. Ryan lost to Vance by six percentage points. Whaley lost to Gov. Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent who had signed abortion restrictions, by 25 points.
These failures were part of a pattern. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke focused on abortion in his campaign for governor last year. So did Stacey Abrams in Georgia, as well as the Democrats trying to defeat Gov. Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio in Florida. All these Democrats lost, some of them by double digits.
Nationwide, not a single Republican governor or senator has lost re-election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
That pattern might seem to conflict with this week’s election results, but I don’t think it does. Most Americans support widespread abortion access and will vote for ballot initiatives that protect or establish abortion rights. Yet in an election between two candidates, only a tiny slice of people is likely to vote differently because of any one issue, including abortion.
That slice can still decide some elections. In Virginia this week, Democrats won several swing districts in the state legislature (although not as many as they had hoped, the political analyst J. Miles Coleman says), partly by emphasizing abortion rights. Similarly, two of the few Republican House incumbents who lost last year — one in Ohio, another in New Mexico — struggled to defend their abortion opposition.
But many other examples that Democrats cite as proof of abortion’s political potency are weaker. Yes, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky emphasized abortion during his successful re-election campaign this year, much as Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan did last year. Here’s the thing, though: Almost every incumbent governor, from both parties, who ran for re-election this year or last year won. The only exception was Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Nevada Democrat.
To argue that abortion has become a dominant factor in U.S. politics requires ignoring the results in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere.
Spinning oneself
Perhaps the most common mistake in politics is to believe that one’s own views are more popular than they in fact are. This mistake leads parties and candidates to focus too little on persuading undecided voters and to lose winnable elections.
The Republican Party has certainly damaged itself with its unpopular opposition to abortion, and Democrats can help themselves by highlighting the issue. Many other high-profile issues today — like inflation, immigration and crime — are much less favorable to Democrats, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, told me. If the Supreme Court hadn’t overturned Roe v. Wade, maybe Republicans would be enjoying a winning streak right now.
Nonetheless, Democrats have not been able to use the popularity of abortion to defeat many Republicans since 2022. And Nate’s latest article offers reason to think that the issue’s effect on the 2024 elections may be even more modest. The electorate next year — for a presidential campaign — is likely to be larger, less liberal and less engaged in politics than this year’s electorate, he explains. It will include more people who vote as much on gut instinct as on policy positions.
To put it another way, if Democrats want to expand abortion access in the U.S., they almost certainly need to win more elections than they have in recent years. And to win more elections, they will probably have to campaign on a popular agenda that includes abortion yet is much broader.
More on the elections
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