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Democrats scored decisive victories in major elections across the country Tuesday night, overcoming the downward trend of an unpopular president, persistent inflation and growing global unrest by turning to abortion, the issue that has become their salvation. since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. against Wade last year.
In elections held in parts of the South and Rust Belt, Democrats put abortion rights at the center of their campaigns and spent tens of millions of dollars on ads highlighting Republican support for abortion bans.
Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has won a second term, after repeatedly criticizing his Republican opponent for initially backing a state abortion ban that contains no exceptions for rape or incest. In Virginia, Democrats gained control of both chambers after an avalanche of advertising focused on abortion. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won a seat on the state Supreme Court, in a race that also saw a flood of abortion-related ads.
And in Ohio, a ballot measure that established abortion rights in the state Constitution won by a double-digit margin, a surprising show of support for abortion rights in a conservative state that Donald J. Trump twice won by convincing margins.
The results represented a resounding victory for abortion rights, demonstrating once again that the issue can energize a broad coalition of Democrats, independents and even some moderate Republicans. As the country approaches the 2024 presidential election, the Republican Party continues to search for an answer to an issue that has troubled them since the fall of Roe. Democrats, meanwhile, face a daunting question in a year in which President Biden’s record, personal brand and perceptions of his suitability to serve another term will be inescapable.
Will abortion continue to have enough electoral impact to overcome Biden’s political weaknesses?
Historically, re-elections have been referendums on the sitting president and his leadership. Democrats hope to transform the 2024 race into something different: an election that revolves not around the current occupant of the White House but around the previous one, Trump, and his party’s adoption of abortion bans that are not in in tune with a majority. of voters.
Democrats have already launched plans to use referendums, like the one that passed in Ohio, as a way to energize their base in 2024. Efforts are underway to put these types of measures on the ballot in swing states, including Arizona, Florida , Nevada and Pennsylvania. . For its part, Biden’s campaign released an early ad highlighting Trump’s support for overturning Roe.
“Abortion is the number one issue in the 2024 campaign,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat who donated money to support both the Ohio ballot measure and the Virginia congressional elections, said in an interview Tuesday. “If as a Democrat you’re not talking about protecting women’s reproductive rights, you’re not doing it right.”
It is still unclear whether Democrats will be successful next year in their effort to focus on abortion rights. The 2024 race will be the first post-Roe presidential election, plunging both parties into uncharted political territory. The political impact of abortion may be mitigated by the intense national conversation about a presidential race combined with Trump’s criminal charges and courtroom drama.
Democrats fell short of a complete victory in the election on Tuesday. In Mississippi, Republican Governor Tate Reeves won re-election, defeating Brandon Presley, a self-proclaimed “pro-life” Democrat.
Still, the Biden campaign felt validated by the results, particularly in Kentucky, where it had tracked millions of dollars in anti-Biden television ads. At the White House, Biden was making congratulatory calls to the night’s winners, including Beshear and candidates in Virginia, according to two people familiar with the matter.
In his career, Beshear has gone to great lengths to separate himself from the president, rarely (if ever) using Biden’s name. Beshear is one of the most popular governors in the country, while Biden remains politically toxic in a state he lost by about 26 percentage points in 2020.
Tuesday’s Democratic victories marked the conclusion of a surprisingly positive election cycle for the party, in which many of its candidates achieved victory by embracing the power of abortion rights as an issue. They surpassed Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election in 21 of 27 races this year, not counting Tuesday, according to a study carried out by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm for state legislative elections. In April, Democrats wrested majority control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from conservatives, when their liberal candidate scored an 11-point victory.
Democrats argued that Tuesday night’s results showed the resonance of abortion even in some of the most conservative areas of the country. In Kentucky, Beshear spent nearly $2 million on eye-popping ads featuring Hadley Duvall, a young woman who said she was raped by her stepfather when she was 12. Duvall was one of the first people Beshear thanked for her victory. Tuesday afternoon speech.
In Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, pro-abortion rights organizations raised three times as much in donations as their anti-abortion opponents to defeat an effort that was championed by the highest ranks of the state’s Republican Party. Support for the measure enshrining abortion rights was notably higher than support for the Democratic Senate candidate last year, particularly in swing suburban counties surrounding Columbus and Cleveland. The results will almost certainly require the State Supreme Court to invalidate a six-week ban with limited exceptions that was passed in 2019.
Republicans have been searching in vain for a successful message on abortion since the Supreme Court decision.
For nearly half a century, Republican candidates had simply proclaimed themselves “pro-life,” without delving into the details of what that meant. But Roe’s overturn plunged the party into a confusing debate over unpopular issues surrounding rape, miscarriages and terminal fetal diagnoses. An attempt to introduce a 15-week federal ban in the Senate backfired for the party in the midterm elections, quickly becoming a cudgel for Democrats in key races.
Virginia offered a new test, as Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, had proactively tried to define his party’s position as a “common sense” 15-week ban – with exceptions in cases of rape and incest – and, in Instead, he classified Democrats as extremists. . State Republicans attempted to change the language of the debate, reframing what is commonly known as a ban as a “reasonable 15-week limit.” But his party failed to take power in the state Senate and lost control of the House of Delegates.
“The 15-week thing doesn’t work because voters don’t want an abortion ban,” said Heather Williams, interim chairwoman of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which invested heavily in Virginia. “You can’t change that language now.”
Even some Republicans acknowledged that their party had failed to articulate a message that could cushion the impact of Democratic attacks on abortion.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate who lives in suburban Columbus and who voted against the Ohio measure, called the referendum a “losing battle.”
“Our pro-life movement, and I am part of it, needs to improve the way we discuss this issue,” Ramaswamy said on CNN Tuesday night. “There are deep reflections in the Republican Party and in the pro-life movement about how to do better from here.”
Democratic leaders and candidates face major obstacles in fulfilling their campaign promises. Biden has promised to restore the federal right to abortion by codifying Roe. Passing such legislation would require gaining 60 votes in the Senate or ending the filibuster, which currently appears unlikely. Beshear in Kentucky now faces a Republican supermajority in the state House, which will limit his power to legalize abortion in a state with a near-total ban.
Biden, a practicing Catholic whose position on abortion has evolved along with his party, often appears to personally shy away from direct discussion of abortion rights. He has dispatched Vice President Kamala Harris to be the administration’s top voice on abortion, focusing her attention on foreign policy and the economy. A Biden campaign statement about the election on Tuesday did not use the word abortion, instead presenting the issue as an issue of “personal liberties.”
For his part, Trump has attributed his party’s 2022 losses to abortion and has taken an intentionally ambiguous position, refusing so far to set a specific weekly limit.
Overall, Biden and the Democrats are doing better on the abortion rights issue than their Republican opponents. More registered voters said they trust Biden to do a better job on abortion rights than Trump, according to a recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College. However, the poll also indicated that some voters who support abortion rights would consider voting for Trump. Among voters who said they want abortion to be “mostly legal,” Trump is nearly tied, and a third of those people said they trust Trump more than Biden on abortion.
Democratic strategists say they have plenty of material to damage Trump on the abortion issue. Not only did he name the three Supreme Court justices who provided the critical votes to overturn Roe, but he has a history of making inflammatory comments on the issue.
“These races put an end to the claim that these red states are all for Trump, that there is no nuance,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge, the Democratic Party’s clearinghouse for opposition research. “Trump has an extraordinary weakness here.”