Try to stifle your surprise here: It turns out that abortion was a central issue in this year’s elections, and that Democrats knew what they were doing when they hammered the issue in ads and on the campaign trail.
Politico has a nice deep dive on the focus groups and polls and conversations that motivated Democrats to really seize the issue after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision allowed dozens of states to sharply restrict or wholly ban abortion. But it’s particularly interesting to square that reporting with the media’s general tone of disbelief that the loss of a key right might be a major factor in the midterm elections, and the credulous reporting on Republican claims about a coming red wave.
RELATED STORY: Remember some people criticizing the Democratic 'message'? Yeah they were all wrong
Campaign Action
As Democrats spent nearly $358 million on ads focused on abortion rights, Republicans tried to avoid the issue. But instead of the media seeing this as avoidance, headlines often followed the Republican message, suggesting inflation was the single major issue of the midterm elections. Inflation was a big issue, to be sure, but not enough to drown out voter rage over the loss of abortion rights.
Democrats saw abortion resonating outside of the areas and groups of voters where it would have traditionally been something they talked about.
“If you would ask me a cycle ago, I’d probably say, ‘You talk about abortion in Philly. You probably don’t talk about it anywhere else,’” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Senior Political Adviser Devan Barber told Politico. “This past cycle we saw it resonate in broader parts of the state, in media markets where you may not expect.”
In Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman spent a lot of time talking about abortion rights—and the media kept sliding right past that to talk about his stroke recovery. Even in a debate where Fetterman’s opponent, Mehmet Oz, said “local political leaders” should have a role in women’s abortion decisions, the media kept talking about Fetterman’s vocal stumbles. But Fetterman ended up winning by 5 points.
The unexpectedly broad resonance of abortion was also a factor in Michigan, where a focus group of undecided white women voters showed the potential power of the issue less than 48 hours after the leak of the Dobbs opinion draft, and where abortion was literally on the ballot. In both Michigan and Pennsylvania—key battleground states with gubernatorial races and in the latter, a Senate race that had the potential to determine control of the chamber—exit polls showed that abortion was voters’ top issue.
That was 2022. But one key point Democratic strategists make in the Politico piece is that abortion is not going away as an election issue because it’s not coming back as a federally guaranteed right until big political change happens. “Abortion access is a core value that hits you in your gut,” said former EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock. “It is going to be a huge part of every election going forward until we get this right back.”
Actually, it’s not just Democratic strategists saying that. “In these true swing states, if abortion rights are dramatically threatened, it’s going to be really hard to win as a Republican in this new normal,” a Republican consultant who worked for Colorado Republican Senate nominee Joe O’Dea said.
In the wake of significant losses in their state, Arizona Republicans held two focus groups of Republican and independent women five weeks after the elections. They found that abortion was a powerful motivator with these voters who are so important to their party’s prospects. Every woman in the room said that they or someone they knew had experienced unplanned pregnancy or abortion. That nearly universal personal experience creates an emotional connection to the issue that many men are likely to miss.
On top of that, one independent voter in the focus groups noted, “It’s about control, controlling women and suppression of women.” A Republican focus group member said, “It’s a slippery slope. If they are demanding control here, where does it end?”
“Abortion was THE central issue of the campaign,” a memo from the pollster who conducted the focus groups noted—or the central issue “[a]side from Trump,” which isn’t good news for Republicans, either. “The combination of Trump influence and what they considered extreme abortion positions took Republican candidates out of consideration for many of these women, including women who consider themselves pro-life,” according to the memo.
That’s a postmortem on one state in 2022, but it’s also a potent warning for Republicans in 2024. Reproductive freedom advocates are working on ballot measures to protect abortion rights in multiple states, including Ohio and South Dakota, and are expected to emerge in Missouri, Arizona, and Oklahoma. If some of those states sound like very long shots for abortion rights votes, remember that voters in Kansas, Montana, and Kentucky this year rejected anti-abortion ballot measures.
Democrats cannot let up on this issue, both because it is so important as a policy matter and because it is not going to get less potent as a political one. More and more pregnant people are being forced into excruciating situations, from being forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will to being forced to spend money they don’t have to travel out of state for medical care, to being forced to suffer through a health-endangering miscarriage without adequate care. This is an ongoing tragedy, and we need to rack up the wins required to fix it.
Jenifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win is our guest on this week’s Daily Kos’ The Brief. When we spoke with Jenifer back in April, she was right about Democratic messaging—and had the data to prove it. More election data has been rolling in from the midterms, and Jenifer is back to talk about what worked and what needs to change in order for the Democratic Party to keep winning.
RELATED STORY:
To everyone who declared abortion a losing issue, Kentucky would like a word. So would Montana
