Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Last May weighed in on Florida’s abortion ballot measure, suggesting that advocates not only faced a high hurdle getting it passed, but also an uphill battle trying to use it to mobilize support for Kamala Harris. in a state that was beginning to tilt decidedly Red. Florida is especially notorious for split-ticket voting on ballot measures – while even conservative voters might support a ballot measure, that didn’t mean they would support the party and its candidate promoting it. Florida has just proven the point in spades. While the measure did come quite close to passage (receiving 57% support from voters, just shy of the 60% threshold required), Sunshine State voters cast their ballots in record numbers for Donald Trump, with a victory margin of nearly 14 points. If there were any doubt that Florida has joined the ranks of traditional Red states elsewhere in the south and southeastern, the outcome of the 2024 election has completely dispelled them.
But the problem extends far beyond Florida. In Arizona, voters overwhelmingly affirmed (by nearly two thirds) an abortion ballot measure that continued to protect abortion rights in the state against ultra-conservative forces that want to roll them back. But in the general election, Trump cruised to victory, besting Harris in the vote for President by a solid 6 points, 53%-47%. There was also good abortion news in two other states – New York and Colorado, but both are solid Blue states, which Harris captured, and no one had expected the abortion measures to sway the general election battle one way or the other.
Yet, even in these states, it’s quite clear that abortion did not work out as Harris and the Democrats had hoped. Harris won New York by 38 points, but that was 15 points less than Biden’s victory in 2020. In Colorado, Harris’ margin over Trump was just over 10 points, down from Biden’s 14 points in 2020. In both cases, as in Florida and many other states, there were significant shifts in the electorate toward Trump among working class voters, especially men and men of color. But it was Harris’ underperformance among women that is especially noteworthy.
There are two dimensions of underperformance that are especially troubling for Democrats. One is whether abortion can get larger numbers of women to the polls; the second is how women and voters overall vote in the election beyond the abortion ballot measure. In 2024, women did not turn out in record numbers, and even worse, when they did, they did not vote overwhelmingly for Harris.
Harris’s national margin among women was just 10 points, 54%-44%; that’s actually less than Biden’s 55% showing in 2020, and 12 point margin over Trump. But in Florida and Arizona her margins were far worse.
What’s the powerful lesson for Democrats and their female supporters here? Democratic women may find abortion a compelling reason to vote for Harris, but they’re already voting for Harris anyway. Among the general electorate, and even among women voters generally, abortion was not a top priority. Less than 10% of the voters, and in some polls, as few as 5%, even listed abortion as a priority concern, compared to the economy, immigration and crime – the issues highly touted by the GOP. Most Americans do support abortion rights – and oppose strict bans – so if abortion is on the ballot, they will vote for a state measure to protect those rights. But they won’t let their ballot measure vote sway their presidential election preference – quite the contrary.
Looking back, Democratic women – and indeed, many pundits and pollsters generally – appear to have misread the results of the 2022 midterm election where Democrats defeated Trump-supported Senate candidates in states with abortion measures on the ballot. Midterm elections aren’t general elections – the entire fate and political direction of the nation is not at stake. Moreover, many of those Trump-supported candidates – like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania – were weak contenders that ran sub-par campaigns. Their own crass opposition to abortion and their general lack of credibility contributed mightily to their vulnerability and defeat.
One also shouldn’t underestimate the effect of Trump’s own clever political maneuvering, downplaying his opposition to abortion. Trump early on – and quite wisely – came out against a national abortion ban favored by many in his party, including South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham and his own VP running mate JD Vance.on the abortion issue. As the campaign wound down, Trump pivoted even further, announcing his strong support for IVF and even declaring his support for Florida’s abortion rights measure (on the grounds that a 6 week ban was “too harsh). One can dismiss these maneuvers as disingenuous – in fact, it turns out that Trump voted against Florida’s measure) – but one shouldn’t underestimate their tactical utility. Trump was giving pro-abortion female voters multiple reasons not to fear his next presidency, giving them an excuse to cast their ballots for him on the bread-and-butter issues that concerned them most. And that’s exactly what so many of them did.
All this said, one shouldn’t underestimate the victories that the abortion rights movement did achieve last week. In 7 of the 10 states where pro-abpotion measures were on the ballot, those measures passed, sending a clear signal of where most voters stand on one of America’s most contentious “hot button” issues. Most noteworthy was the victory of the ballot measure in Missouri, where abortion was hitherto illegal, almost without exception (except for the life of the mother). Amendment 3 passed two years after Missouri became the first state to outlaw abortion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the campaign backing the measure, collected more than 380,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot – enshrining some of the language of Roie v. Wade enshrined in the state constitution – and it passed just narrowly – with 53% support – but in a one-time swing state that Trump won by nearly 19 points.
The upshot? Trump’s victory, while disheartening for progressives, shouldn’t obscure the fact that abortion rights are still on the march virtually everywhere. Even if the GOP makes a clean sweep of the White House and Congress, there’s no filibuster-proof majority will be available to pass a national abortion ban, or any other ban. Undoubtedly, Trump will come under pressure from pro-life forces to restrict abortion rights where he can, possibly through executive orders but it’s not quite clear that he will be predisposed to take aggressive action on this front, given his other priorities, his own waffling in the issue and in light of opposition to abortion extremism from within his own party. Reinstituting Roe v. Wade? That was never going to happen given the gridlocked balance in the Congress which will likely persist for some time. The best path ahead is continued promotion of abortion rights at the state level including increased pressure on state and local candidates to support abortion, including wherever possible, efforts to enshrine Roe V. Wade within state constitutions. The most immediate need, however, is to protect the 7 new state abortion laws from likely court challenges. Especially in states with a high proportion of conservative judges – the outcome of these challenges is unpredictable.
Looking further ahead, Trump’s victory – and the likely consolidation of GOP power nationally – makes it incumbent upon Democratic women to better understand how the abortion issue – and culture war issues more generally – play with a wide range of voter groups. Groups like Hispanics that conservatives have long insisted would be opposed to abortion en masse on religious and moral grounds are, in fact, quite open to protecting abortion access. But they may not be as open to supporting transgender rights if those rights include such measures as equal access to women’s bathrooms or to participation in sports previously designated for “biological” women. Are pro-abortion women open to reconsidering what has been to date a broad and rather uncritical alliance of disaffected sexual minorities, all in the name of fighting the amorphous specter of “patriarchy.”
It’s also unclear to what extent successful messaging on these “freedom” issues depends fundamentally on the messenger and on the campaign strategy that the messenger chooses to adopt. Harris, for reasons known only to her and her top advisors, chose a female-dominant mobilization strategy and hyper-feminized messaging campaign in the hopes of driving up the participation of women, especially younger unmarried women, whom the campaign assumed would vote overwhelmingly for Harris. Neither assumption was borne out in practice. In fact, by tilting so obviously – and crassly toward one gender – Harris probably alienated large swaths of otherwise sympathetic male (and female) voters who thereby became susceptible to Trump’s own gender-based appeals. Harris failed to take advantage of numerous venues – mostly notably, Joe Rogan’s podcast, but there were others – where she might have explained her views to predominantly male audiences and generally broadened her electoral appeal. Her rejection of these venues – with less than credible excuses – evinced a defensiveness and insecurity about herself and her campaign that was plain for voters to see. Future candidates, especially women, need to step up and embrace these challenges, otherwise they lose credibility.
Finally, progressive women need to take stock of what happened here and avoid the knee-jerk impulse – already apparent in recent columns by long-time feminists like Joan Walsh – to blame “racism” and “misogyny” – or even worse female “stupidity” – for Trump’s breakthrough victory. This is self-serving – and counter-productive. Harris lost because she was a weak candidate who failed to think through the appeal of her candidacy and her campaign beyond the 53% of voters who are female. Many of those same voters rejected her candidacy for failing to address the issues that most concerned them. Harris and the Democrats should have known this from the polling and their own surveys but proceeded lemming-like to march over a cliff to an ignominious defeat that has left the entire party brand in shambles. Hoping for a 2028 do-over with a better candidate isn’t likely to improve Democratic prospects. The party needs to take a good long look at itself in the mirror and decide what it really stands for – and with whom. Otherwise, this could well be the first of many more defeats ahead.
