Republicans beware – abortion retains its saliency. As a corollary, Joe Biden is down but not out.
On election day this week, voters in Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky embraced individual autonomy and reproductive rights. Looking forward, the US supreme court’s decision in the Dobbs case and the Trumpian majority’s rejection of privacy as a fundamental constitutional right stand to haunt Trump and his party as they enter the 2024 election season.
Buckeye voters enshrined abortion rights in their state after having twice backed Donald Trump. Meanwhile, in the purplish Old Dominion, both houses of the legislature swung Democratic, a rebuff to the efforts of Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor, to enact a 15-week abortion ban. Safe to say, he will not be running for president any time soon.
In Kentucky, Andy Beshear, the state’s Democratic and pro-choice governor, handily defeated Daniel Cameron, the state’s Republican attorney general. Last Saturday, Trump figuratively embraced Cameron as Maga-approved. On Wednesday, Trump trashed Cameron as a Mitch McConnell swamp creature.
Practically speaking, the Republican party-induced demise of Roe may keep the Republicans from returning to power for another four years. The personal really is the political.
In abortion, the Democrats have an issue to be wielded. It unites the party. By the numbers, 83% of Ohio’s Black voters, more three-quarters of its youngest voters, 73% of the state’s Latinos and five-of-eight of its college graduates identified as pro-choice, according to exit polls.
On the other hand, little more than one in six Republicans supported the measure. With Trump having repeatedly bragged about his supreme court picks, the Republican party owns the issue.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that nearly 65% of the 72.2 million women aged 15–49 in the US currently use contraception. That figure appears to have left little to no mark on the Republicans’ collective psyche.
In 2022, 195 House Republicans voted against the Right to Contraception Act, including Mike Johnson, the current speaker; Kevin McCarthy, his predecessor; Steve Scalise, the present majority leader: and Elise Stefanik, the chair of the conference. Conveniently, Johnson no longer recalls how he voted. As a lawyer for the rightwing Alliance Defending Freedom, he argued that hormonal birth control was tantamount to abortion and should be banned.
Also last year, Matt DePerno, Michigan’s failed Republican attorney general, openly mused about restricting accessibility to contraception. At a Republican debate, he questioned the validity of Griswold, the pertinent 1965 supreme court ruling.
For good measure, DePerno also spearheaded efforts to undo Biden’s 150,000-vote win in Michigan. These days, he faces four felony election interference charges. Pro-tip: everything Trump touches comes to pain.
As Republicans lick their wounds, they ought to ponder what Ray Collins said to Orson Welles in Citizen Kane: “If it was anybody else, I’d say what’s going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.”
Still, Democrats cannot afford to gloat. They too face headwinds of their own – crime and immigration. One only needs to look at New York to see their impact.
There, residents of the Bronx, a majority-minority New York City outer borough, ousted an incumbent Democrat and elected a Republican to the city’s council after a decades-long drought. On eastern Long Island, Republicans wrested control of the Suffolk county executive’s office after a similar dry spell. Even as crime recedes in the Big Apple, immigration and housing pose new crises.
To put things into perspective, when the mayor and the president are clashing about immigrants, it is no longer a theoretical or another Republican talking point. On that score, if Senator McConnell gets his way, aid to Israel and Ukraine will be linked to an immigration overhaul.
Turning to the map, abortion will likely play a key role in swing states. In Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, more voters favor abortion rights than not. In Georgia, there is a 48-49 split, according to data from Pew Research.
Republican hostility to abortion may also save endangered Democratic incumbents in Ohio (Senator Sherrod Brown) and Montana (Senator John Tester). Earlier this year, Montana’s Republican governor signed legislation restricting abortion access. Days later, the state’s highest court struck down the legislation as violating the state’s constitution. Said differently, in Ohio and Montana, abortion is a live issue.
Right now, President Biden is the underdog. He trails Trump in most electoral battlegrounds. The president also ages before us, and lacks the manic energy of his predecessor. Biden will not get any younger. The clock runs.
The 2024 elections are now less than 365 days away. Against this backdrop, abortion will likely emerge as a go-to issue if for no other reason than it gets people to the polls, older suburban women and college students alike.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice during the George HW Bush administration
This article was amended on 9 November 2023 to correct the list of states in which voters strengthened individual autonomy and reproductive rights.
