Why the Abortion Issue Didn’t Save Democrats
In our collective political memory, the 2022 midterm elections are remembered as a historic underperformance by the Republican Party, while the 2024 presidential election will be remembered as a historic victory and realignment ushered in by Donald Trump. In truth, 2022 and 2024—from the overall results to the issues at play—were more alike than they were different.
In both election cycles—the first two since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade— Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to place the issue of abortion front and center. Given how unpopular the incumbent Democratic president was in 2022, the GOP's performance in House races was historically weak. That performance, combined with the rout of the pro-life movement in statewide abortion referenda, led some to believe the issue could prove fatal to GOP political prospects in 2024. It didn't, and it shouldn't be surprising that there weren't enough single-issue abortion-rights voters to elect Harris.
The GOP's performance in 2024 was consistent with the results in 2022. That year, House Republican candidates won the national popular vote by about 3 percentage points . (Since, unlike senators, House members face election every two years, overall vote totals serve as a good comparison with the presidential popular vote.) In 2024, Donald Trump is currently leading Kamala Harris in the national popular vote by 3.3 points (that lead will shrink somewhat as West Coast states finish counting votes). In 2022, Republicans only squeaked by to a narrow House majority—control of the House still wasn't officially called this year—and history seems to be repeating itself in 2024 with the GOP on track to win another small House majority.
Trump's decisive win in 2024 would be consistent with another narrow House GOP majority because of the changing nature of party coalitions. Following Trump's populist takeover of the GOP and the Dobbs decision, the Republican Party is now weaker among white voters in the suburbs, but it is improving its margins among Latino and black voters in metro areas and running up the score in rural America. Between his 2020 loss and 2024 victory , Trump's margin decreased by 1 point among white voters, but he performed 3 points better on net among black voters and a whopping 27 points better on net among Latino voters, according to exit polling. (The black share of the national electorate dropped by 2 percentage points and the Latino share dropped by a point between 2020 and 2024.)
This new GOP coalition is suboptimal for Republicans in their battle for the House: There's no credit for losing a deep blue urban House district by 10 points less than usual or winning a deep red rural House district by 10 points more—only the purple battleground districts that can be flipped matter in the fight for the House. But even in 2022, this GOP coalition that barely won a House majority showed it was capable of winning the presidential race. As Nate Cohn of the New York Times reported , House GOP candidates collectively won more votes than House Democratic candidates in 2022 in each of the seven presidential battleground states that Donald Trump would go on to win in 2024. This GOP strength was obscured by the poor performance of 2022 Senate GOP candidates like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia. "Republicans would have won the Senate, and fairly decisively, if only the likes of Dr. Mehmet Oz or Herschel Walker had fared as well as Republican House candidates on the same ballot," Cohn wrote in December 2022. If abortion is a decisive issue for any given voter, it makes little sense for that voter to cast a ballot for a pro-life House candidate but against a pro-life Senate candidate.
The collective performance of House GOP candidates in 2022 was one sign the abortion issue would not be decisive in 2024. Another sign was that year's reelection of every incumbent GOP senator and governor, including senators who supported federal limits on abortion and the governors who signed abortion restrictions into law. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, for example, signed a law banning abortion with exceptions after a human heartbeat is detectable and won reelection by 8 points in 2022.
None of this is to say that the abortion issue didn't matter in 2022 or 2024—it surely helped Democrats keep Republicans from winning even larger majorities in the House in both cycles and limited the size of the GOP Senate majority in 2024. The issue may have helped Harris keep the race close in the battleground states, but it shouldn't be surprising that the issue wasn't decisive in those states. Electing a president and Congress in favor of a federal abortion law was not going to significantly change the legal status of abortion in most of the seven states that decided the presidential race. Four of those states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada—already had permissive abortion policy. North Carolina allowed elective abortion through the first trimester. Only one—Georgia—had a restrictive six-week limit, but enough voters didn't care about changing that law to defeat Kemp in 2022 or defeat Trump in 2024.
In Arizona, more than 60 percent of voters approved an amendment creating a broad right to abortion throughout pregnancy , even as a majority voted against Kamala Harris. It's debatable how much this split result may be attributed to Donald Trump's decision to throw the pro-life movement under the bus in 2024 by attacking state-level heartbeat laws and promising to veto a 15-week federal limit on abortion. There are examples of 2022 GOP Senate candidates who backed a federal abortion bill and did just as well—or better—than Trump in 2024. In 2022, North Carolina Senate candidate Ted Budd co-sponsored the 15-week bill and won by 3.2 points; Trump carried the state by 3.4 points in 2024. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio backed the 15-week federal abortion limit and won by 16.4 points in 2022; Trump carried the state by 13.1 points in 2024.
The results in Arizona shouldn't be surprising because a significant slice of voters in other states had already demonstrated a willingness to back referenda creating a right to abortion while voting against candidates who support legislation to do that. In 2022, Ohio voters reelected GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, who signed the state's heartbeat bill into law, by a 25-point margin . In 2023, Ohio voters approved an abortion amendment by a 13-point margin . In 2022, Kentucky voters opposed a referendum declaring there was no right to abortion in the state constitution by 5 points even as they reelected GOP Sen. Rand Paul, sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, by 24 points .
The 2024 elections revealed that the pro-life cause continues to perform poorly on ballot questions: Abortion measures were approved this week by voters in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New York, Maryland, and Missouri . The pro-life movement was badly outspent by the abortion-rights movement in every state, but money was potentially the difference-maker only in Missouri, where the pro-life side lost by only 3 points .
But the pro-life movement was able to snap its losing streak this week. In arguably the most consequential 2024 abortion referendum, a Florida abortion amendment fell a few points shy of the 60 percent threshold needed to pass. In South Dakota, an abortion amendment was defeated by 18 points . In Nebraska, voters defeated an abortion amendment by 3 points, while simultaneously approving an amendment by 11 points that effectively codified the state's 12-week abortion limit (while permitting the legislature to pass more restrictive laws in the future).
The results in Nebraska are perhaps the most interesting of all the referenda. Since the Dobbs decision, abortion opponents have theorized that sweeping abortion referenda have passed in red states because voters see it as an all-or-nothing proposition. Nebraska's 2024 ballot initiatives were the first time American voters were given a choice between pro-life incrementalism or abortion-rights maximalism as competing referenda, and the results demonstrated that pro-life incrementalism is a viable political strategy.
But on a national level, perhaps the most interesting data point is that the overall gender gap has been remarkably stable both before and after the Dobbs decision. In 2018 and 2020—the last general elections that preceded the Dobbs—exit polling found that men were voting more Republican than women by 23 points on net. In 2022, House Republicans lost female voters by 8 points and won male voters by 14 points—a gender gap of 22 points. In 2024, Trump lost female voters by 8 points and won male voters by 13 points—a gender gap of 21 points. The issue of abortion may move votes, but it seems to move the overall votes of men and women about the same. And that movement simply wasn't enough to elect Kamala Harris in 2024.
