In the months since the supreme court voted to overturn Roe v Wade last year, the effects of the court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization have become clear. More than a dozen states across the country have passed the legislation limiting or outright banning access to abortion, severely restricting the reproductive rights of millions of people and threatening to imprison abortion providers.
But as Republicans have pushed these bills, voters have also taken every opportunity to rebuke them at the polls, leading to midterm defeats and emerging as one of the GOP’s biggest vulnerabilities.
After initially celebrating victory in their nearly five-decade campaign to end the constitutional right to abortion, Republicans now find themselves struggling to simultaneously reduce their electoral losses and defend unpopular anti-abortion policies. Reproductive rights are expected to be a key issue in next year’s general election, with implications from the presidential campaign to the polls. While the GOP hasn’t stopped passing anti-abortion bills, including in South Carolina and North Carolina last month, it’s starting to worry about the price it’s paying for them.
“As Republicans we need to read the room on this issue,” South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace, who supports anti-abortion policies, told ABC News in April. “We are going to lose a lot if we continue down this path of limbs.”
Polls after the Dobbs decision showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the court overturning Roe, with a Pew Research Center survey from last July shows that almost six in 10 adults opposed the sentence. The Pew poll also showed that a majority of Americans in the mostly conservative states where abortion was to be banned also disapproved of the decision. A separate NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll since April of this year, found support for abortion access around an all-time high, showing, notably, that about a third of Republicans overwhelmingly support abortion rights.
The electoral implications of Republicans’ push against abortion after Dobbs began to unfold early, when heavily conservative Kansas voted no in a referendum last August on whether the state should repeal the right to the abortion of its constitution.
“The vote in Kansas sends a decisive message that Americans are angry about efforts to roll back their rights and will not stand for it,” Sarah Stoesz, then-president of Planned Parenthood in the region, said after the vote.
Despite the warning from the Kansas contest, Republican leaders still believed they would take advantage of President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and inflation concerns to return to power on a “red wave” during the midterm elections. That never materialized, and instead Republicans underperformed when an energetic Democratic base went out to vote. Michigan Democrats flipped the state legislature for the first time in nearly 40 years, Pennsylvania Democrats scored victories against anti-abortion candidates, and ballot measures in five states, including Kentucky and Montana, resulted in the voters choose to support abortion rights.
After the midterms, Republican leaders realize they have a problem. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel appeared on Fox News on Sunday in April to discuss the issue, saying abortion had played a big role in key swing states and that party candidates needed to tackle the issue “head on.”
“A lot of our candidates generally refused to talk about it, thinking, ‘Oh, we can just talk about the economy and ignore this big issue,’ and they can’t,” McDaniel said.
But Republicans have struggled to find a consistent line on abortion, with lawmakers divided on the level of restrictions they would place on reproductive rights. republican leaders’ range of opinions from insisting on a total ban on abortion to cutting off access at 15 weeks of pregnancy, to washing their hands of the problem and saying that it is the responsibility of the states to decide.
Similarly, presidential candidates have found themselves caught between different party factions and voter interests. Donald Trump told allies he viewed the federal abortion ban as a losing proposition for the election and his said the spokesperson of the campaign Trump believes bans should be left to states, threatening a rift with evangelical voters who have been a big part of its base.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, currently Trump’s most prominent challenger, has taken a harder line and signed a six-week abortion ban in April, prompting a major Republican donor stopped its funding to DeSantis. Other candidates have hesitated to adopt a specific position, including Nikki Haley that last month declined to state the specific number of weeks of pregnancy that would limit abortion.
Influential and deep-pocketed conservative Christian groups have further complicated the dynamic, insisting that without Roe to stop them, Republican politicians should pass strict abortion bans. Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion nonprofit and political organization, pledged campaign against Trump if he didn’t support a 15-week abortion ban.
Meanwhile, Democrats have been focusing on abortion access in speeches and campaigns. Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd at Howard University that “this is a time for us to stand and fight” in a speech in April, as Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin presided a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that same month titled “The Assault on Reproductive Rights in a Post-Dobbs America.”
Democrats also scored a big win in Wisconsin earlier this year when liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the state’s supreme court. Protasiewicz, who spoke openly about his personal support for abortion during the campaign, defeated a conservative opponent who had accepted $1 million in campaign donations from an anti-abortion political action committee.
Protasiewicz’s victory ended a 15-year conservative majority on the court, and could mean the liberal justices overturned an 1849 law banning abortion that went into effect in the state when Roe was overturned lada
