Quick recap.
Almost immediately after the Dobbs ruling, a standard narrative formed pushed heavily by Politico and the New York Times which argued that the Supreme Court's decision would have very limited impact on the upcoming midterms and diminishing influence going forward. When the results of the midterms did commit, these same pundits and data journalists conceded that ballot initiatives about abortion had done very well and the issue had substantially influenced the election, but they very quickly started coming up with reasons why the same thing wouldn't happen in 2024. These included:
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Emotions over the issue will tend to fade with time.
Voters who skip midterms but show up for general elections tend to be less engaged (and younger, but we'll get to that later). These voters are less likely to be motivated by the issue.
Lots of Republican women who support ballot initiatives will still vote the straight party ticket in terms of candidates.
Surveys showed that most people did not associate Trump and the Republicans that strongly with unpopular anti-abortion laws.
Trump and the Republicans had effectively contained the issue.
Trump and the Republicans had moderated their stance on the issue.
There were other arguments being made but I think I have hit the main ones. Now let's look at the political landscape in autumn of 2024 compared to 2022.
We have seen more laws and they've become increasingly draconian with disturbing, often horrifying primary, secondary, and tertiary effects. The risks associated with pregnancy whether planned or unplanned have greatly increased. Healthcare for all women in anti-abortion states has been negatively affected. Basic rights like privacy and freedom to travel are being restricted. And every day a new heartbreaking story emerges, be it a child forced to carry a pregnancy to term, or a young couple losing the chance to ever start a family, or a woman bleeding out after being turned away from an emergency room. What were once easily dismissed hypotheticals have become tragically real horror stories and martyrs.
Even the term "abortion" is no longer descriptive of the issue. With the rise of the fetal personhood movement, we are now talking about reproductive rights in the broadest possible sense. Though Republicans are doing their damnedest to downplay the issue, the debate over in vitro fertilization is raging and Republicans are very much on the wrong side of it if you've been following the story closely, you also know that a number of conservatives have been talking about going after the right to contraception. The polling on these Republican positions is beyond terrible.
Abortion and other reproductive rights are effectively on the ballot everywhere this election. Though Trump's position, being unmoored from any sense of principle, has swung from one extreme to the other, when given the biggest audience he is likely to have during this campaign, he refused to rule out signing a national abortion ban. The specter of a national ban hangs over not only the presidential race, but every Republican running for Congress as well.
In addition to being implicitly on the ballot in every state, abortion is explicitly on the ballot in a large number of them. It is possible that a lot of voters will vote yes on these initiatives then turn around and vote for the same Republican candidates who are pushing these restrictive laws, but that's unsupported by convincing data and is wildly contrary to common sense, particularly when you take into account...
The Republicans have a huge misogyny problem starting with the adjudicated rapist at the head of the party. JD Vance has been a nightmare on this issue. An especially memorable aspect of Mark Robinson's porn and Nazis scandal has been the numerous clips of him equating the right to abortion with female promiscuity. Robinson and other prominent Republicans such as Peter Thiel are also on the record saying disparaging things about women's suffrage, an issue which is not likely to help close their gender gap.
On the other side we have Kamala Harris. While the Democratic message on reproductive rights is essentially the same as it was under Joe Biden, the change in messenger is tremendously significant. Even before Biden stepped down, Harris was the campaign's point person on abortion. The arguments were always more effective coming from her and this is even more true now that she is the nominee.
We are in uncharted territory in terms of post Dobbs presidential elections. N=0. We can't say how any of these things will play out or interact with each other. The best we can do is try to make reasonable directional assumptions and possibly, with great trepidation, think about possible ranges of magnitude. That being said, it is entirely reasonable and possibly even likely, that the combined impact of everything listed above will mean that reproductive rights will have a considerably greater impact in the upcoming election than it did in the previous one. With the standard exception of Josh Marshall (and even there a very cautious Josh Marshall),
Nothing I've said so far is intended as a prediction. I'm not even talking about probabilities at this stage, just thinking through some possibilities in their implications, but I will close with one prediction. If reproductive rights does have a big and widespread impact in November, the vast majority of the pundits and data journalists who completely missed it will find a way to claim they knew it all along.
