By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post (c) 2024
Democrats have many difficult issues to wade through after a disappointing 2024 presidential election. But among the leading ones is: Why did their emphasis on abortion rights not achieve the desired result?
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats in the 2022 midterms performed historically well while winning voters who said abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 22 points, according to exit polls. This time, those voters split evenly, 49-49.
Similarly, the 2024 exit polls show voters preferred Vice President Kamala Harris over now-President-elect Donald Trump by just four points on the abortion issue, 49-45. That’s a margin that would have been almost unthinkably small just weeks ago.
So Harris gained only a muted advantage on abortion rights and lost, even as abortion rights continued to perform well on ballot measures across the country.
One prominent theory suggests that perhaps those two things are related. It holds that Democrats’ move to put abortion rights on the ballot in 10 states – something they had hoped would juice Democratic turnout and keep the focus on the issue – might have actually backfired.
Perhaps it gave voters an attractive chance to split their ticket: to directly register their support of abortion rights and believe those rights would be protected, while voting in the presidential race on other issues (like the economy and immigration).
It’s plausible, but the evidence isn’t overly compelling.
A good way to test this hypothesis is to compare the states that did and didn’t have such ballot measures. If these ballot measures indeed gave abortion-rights-supporting, would-be Trump backers more of a permission structure to vote for him, you’d expect the vote to have shifted more his way in them.
That iswhat happened.
In the 10 states that had such measures, the current vote tallies show Trump gaining an average of 5.6 points from his 2020 margins. That’s larger than the nationwide shift, which The Post’s Philip Bump calculated Thursday will wind up averaging about 4.6 points per state toward Trump.
But this comes with all kinds of caveats.
Given relatively few states had such measures, the larger shifts in them could owe to other factors that they had in common.
Indeed, two of the states happened to be Florida and New York, which had already trended toward Republicans in 2022 much more than the rest of the country. Perhaps this was more about that trend continuing, irrespective of the abortion ballot measures. Another state is Maryland, and many of Trump’s largest gains came in blue states in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
But after those three states, the next biggest shifts toward Trump among the 10 states with abortion ballot measures came in inopportune places for Democrats: the swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
As of now (with about one-quarter of the vote uncounted in Arizona), the margin in both states has swung around six points for Trump. That’s larger than the nationwide average. Perhaps there were at least some voters in them who saw those ballot measures as enabling them to vote for Trump.
But the margins by which Harris lost – currently nearly six points in Arizona and more than three points in Nevada – suggest this wasn’t what made the difference.
And when it comes to Harris’s broader struggles, the exit polls mentioned above suggest this was about her losing the messaging battle more than anything.
Trump sought to mitigate this issue by saying he would leave the issue to the states and keeping harsh abortion bans at arm’s length. Democrats routinely claimed Trump was hiding his true intent. But it appears Trump’s posture was good enough for lots of people, to the point where 45 percent of voters – many of whom generally support abortion rights – said they preferred Trump on the issue.
To the extent those numbers are accurate and reflect people’s true feelings, a sufficient number of abortion rights supporters didn’t really need some external justification to feel comfortable voting for him.