WASHINGTON – Ten states considered measures to protect or expand abortion rights on Tuesday. Voters approved seven of those proposals, including one in Arizona that overturned a 15-week ban and enshrines abortion access in the state constitution.
Democrats were counting on these ballot measures to propel their presidential nominee and other candidates.
Vice President Kamala Harris made reproductive rights a cornerstone of her campaign, promising that her “first priority” would be to reinstate nationwide abortion protections the Supreme Court ended in June 2022 when it overturned Roe v. Wade.
Backlash gave Democrats a big edge in the 2022 midterms, just four months after. But two years later, that fresh anger has fizzled.
Former President Donald Trump, who had delivered on his 2016 campaign promise to install justices who would overturn Roe, handily defeated Harris.
She won only three of the 10 states with abortion ballot measures, all Democratic strongholds: Maryland, New York and Colorado. Results in two battleground states – Arizona and Nevada – remained undeclared Thursday, though Trump led in both.
“It’s pretty clear that they thought they could just take the playbook from 2022 – abortion, abortion, abortion – and just run it,” Ralph Reed, chair and founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, an evangelical conservative group, told reporters at The National Press Club the day after the election. “Voters didn’t buy it.”
Samara Klar, a political science professor at the University of Arizona, said the ballot measures actually hurt Harris in Republican-leaning battlegrounds where wooing voters was already a “tough ask” for her.
“Without abortion on the ballot, you’d have to channel your support for reproductive rights through candidate choice,” Klar said. “But by having it on the ballot, you could split. You could say, ‘I’m voting for Trump – and I’m voting for abortion (rights).’ ”
The disconnect wasn’t just seen in the presidential race.
In Missouri, where conservative Republican Sen. Josh Hawley coasted to reelection, voters also overturned a near-total ban on abortion.
In Montana, where Republicans flipped a U.S. Senate seat by ousting Sen. Jon Tester, voters also added abortion rights through viability to the state constitution.
The lack of abortion-rights enthusiasm for Democrats was a major turnaround from the 2022 midterms, four months after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling.
Abortion measures were on the ballot in five states in November 2022. In each, voters either added protections for abortion rights or rejected efforts to restrict such rights, as Kansas voters had done three months earlier.
Democrats defied historical patterns in that midterm election by expanding their Senate majority by one seat, though Republicans did take narrow control of the House.
Typically, the president’s party suffers big setbacks in a midterm election. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that views on abortion and the Supreme Court far outweighed pocketbook issues in congressional races that year.
But, said conservative political consultant Sean Noble, “The boil was lanced in 2022.”
By focusing so intently on abortion two years later, he added, Harris and other Democrats handed Trump and fellow Republicans the opening to dominate the conversation on such issues as inflation and border security that were more likely to motivate voters.
Democrats need a new playbook with less reliance on abortion, he said.
Harris asserted that Trump would pass a federal abortion ban. Trump did take credit for the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe – cementing support among evangelicals and other conservatives who had sought that outcome for decades.
But he denied Harris’ allegation that he would seek to impose a federal abortion ban, pledging to veto any such bill Congress sent to his desk and affirming that abortion rights should be “up to the states to decide.”
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Harris was mistaken in using the issue as a “weapon” against Trump, Reed said.
In Arizona, Proposition 139 sailed through. Support stood at about 61% with ballots still being counted Thursday. The measure enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution through fetal viability, roughly 24 weeks into pregnancy. That overturns the current 15-week ban.
The popularity of that measure didn’t rub off on Harris, though. With 69% of ballots counted Thursday, Trump led by 5.5 percentage points.
The Harris campaign had hoped the abortion issue would boost turnout among women and younger voters, Arizona and elsewhere.
Anger over the Dobbs decision was much more widespread among women in the runup to the 2022 elections. Pew Research Center found a large gender gap, with 62% of women but only 52% of men saying they disapproved of the ruling.
Whatever their current views, it didn’t affect turnout, which was roughly flat among women from the 2020 presidential election.
Turnout among women has been significantly higher than among men in all three elections in which Trump was on the ballot – 2016, 2020 and 2024 – said Kelly Dittmar, a professor at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics.
But this week’s results proved that women are “not at all monolithic,” Dittmar said, and many factored in numerous issues besides abortion.
“The expectations for many people were greater than the outcome,” Dittmar said. “There is evidence that a lot of women did prioritize this and it did motivate their mobilization. At the same time, we cannot and should not assume that is true of all women.”
