Throughout the campaign, Kamala Harris stayed as quiet as she could on nearly every issue, with one notable exception: abortion. On that topic, she expounded freely and often.
It turns out that Democrats thought the abortion issue would sweep them to victory. The New York Times explores the mystery of what went wrong:
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, many Democrats argued that the issue would be the key to winning future elections. It was an alluring idea because it suggested that a central progressive policy goal — protecting abortion rights — doubled as a savvy political strategy.
But it hasn’t worked out. Instead, Republicans swept this year’s elections even as Democrats made the subject central to their campaigns and even as abortion-rights ballot initiatives passed in seven states. Today, the Democrats’ belief in the political potency of abortion looks like wishful thinking.
So, what went wrong? For one thing, the importance of the issue may have been overestimated following the 2022 midterms. It turns out that the evidence was mixed. Thus:
“It is the only thing we’re really talking about,” Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee for governor in Ohio, said in her 2022 campaign. “We think it is the issue.” Three weeks later, Whaley lost to Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who had signed abortion restrictions into law, by 25 percentage points.
But the Democrats went all in:
“There’s a history of political commentators not understanding the intensity the abortion issue has brought to Dem grassroots,” one party strategist wrote on social media, predicting that it would push “Dem performance to upper end of what’s possible.”
This belief shaped the party’s 2024 strategy. Abortion was “by far the most prevalent topic in 2024 Democratic messaging,” Politico reported, “beating out health care, the economy and immigration.” The Harris campaign’s final round of advertisements mentioned abortion more than any other subject, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.
But the abortion strategy failed. The Times asks, why?
There seem to be a few reasons that the Republican Party’s unpopular abortion position didn’t hurt it more.
First, the Biden administration’s record was out of step with public opinion on other big issues, such as immigration.
Amazingly enough, this is the paper’s only concession to the fact that abortion is not the only issue that concerns Americans. Or, for the vast majority, the primary issue. The Times tries to put a positive spin on it:
Polls showed that the people who cared most about the issue tended to be highly educated, politically engaged Democrats. That’s a very different group from swing voters in presidential elections.
I would add that the voters obsessed with abortion, in addition to being highly educated and politically engaged, are mostly elderly–i.e., early-generation feminists. But back to the Times:
Second, Trump seemed to moderate his abortion stance, backing away from a national ban and saying he would allow states to decide their own policies.
Is that a change? Trump has never prioritized abortion as an issue. But here is a salient point:
Third, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, her running mate, refused to answer questions about whether they supported any abortion restrictions — and most Americans do.
It is Democrats, not Republicans, who are most often abortion extremists. In Tim Walz’s Minnesota, for example, abortion is legal up to and including the moment of birth. And most observers think that by repealing the Born Alive Act, the Walz administration has legalized post-birth “abortion” in at least some cases. This is a far more radical position than is embraced by any mainstream Republican, and some voters, at least, have figured that out.
But the Times’s post mortem barely acknowledges the most relevant point: a few people are obsessed with abortion, and most of those are indeed on the Democrats’ side. But vastly more voters are worried about the cost of living, the Southern border, a sluggish economy, race and sex discrimination under the banner of DEI, medical experiments being carried out on children, and other important issues. Who ever could have thought that the abortion issue could trump all of these policy areas in which the Democrats’ policies are deeply unpopular?
Democratic candidates and their political consultants, that’s who. The Times concludes with a word of advice for its fellow Democrats:
[A]s the Democrats try to figure out their party’s future, there is also a broader lesson.
The idea that your own policy preferences make for smart political tactics is very attractive. (The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it “the pundit’s fallacy.”) If that’s the case, you don’t have to make compromises. You run on principle, you highlight your priorities — and you win.
Yet the idea can be self-defeating. If you read public opinion wishfully rather than realistically, you can hurt your own ability to win elections.
That is actually good advice. Our own side of the aisle is not immune to such wishful thinking. But for the moment, it is good to see the Democrats falling into that trap.
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