The Daily - Why Abortion Rights Won Even as Kamala Harris Lost

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Last Tuesday, voters across the country approved measures to protect abortion rights, while rejecting the presidential candidate who claimed to champion those same rights.Kate Zernike, who covers the issue for The Times, explains that gap and what it tells us about the new politics of abortion.Guest: Kate Zernike, a national reporter at The New York Times, writing most recently about abortion.Background reading: Abortion rights ballot measures succeeded in seven of the 10 states where they were proposed.President-elect Donald J. Trump has distanced himself from the idea of a federal abortion ban, but will face pressure to enact one. Here’s how it could happen.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobauro. This is The Daily. Last Tuesday, voters across the country approved measures to protect abortion rights, while rejecting the presidential candidate who claimed to champion those same rights. Today, my colleague Kate Cernighi explains that gap and what it tells us about the new politics of abortion. It's Tuesday, November 12th. Kate, so much of the focus on Election Day was quite naturally on the race for president. And I think as a result, a lot of us, and here I'm guilty

myself, didn't quite understand how much abortion was on the ballot. And literally, not in that spiritual way that we sometimes talk about in political reporting that something is on the ballot. No, this was actually on the ballot. That's right. So in 10 states and pretty diverse states across the country, there were amendments on the ballot to establish abortion rights in the state constitution. This was a record number of ballot measures on abortion. In seven of those ten states, those amendments won. So quick math, that's a 70% victory rate in all of these states and has to be seen as a very big win for abortion rights.

Absolutely. And this is really the biggest victory for abortion rights groups since Roe was overturned two and a half years ago. OK, and just explain how these 10 measures ended up on so many of these state ballots at the exact same time. Between the time of Roe in 1973 and Dobbs, ballot measures were actually something that anti-abortion groups used to their advantage. So there were 44 in that time period, almost 50 years, and only four of them were put forward

by abortion rights groups. Huh. So basically ballot initiatives have been a tool of anti-abortion forces. Absolutely. That's even true coming out of Dobbs, the decision where the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Anti-abortion groups know that under Dobbs, the question of how you regulate abortion is going to go back to the states. So they think we're going to continue this playbook. We're going to have all these abortion ballot measures to ban

abortion in the states. So the first place we see this is in Kansas in August of 2022, which is two months after Dab's. Anti-abortion groups have put a measure on the ballot saying there is no right to abortion in the state constitution. And they think they're going to sweep this. They think this is a given. It's going to be a sleepy August election. Nobody's going to turn out except for their voters and they'll win. Right. And as you said, history is on their side when it comes to ballot initiatives, restricting abortion.

That's right. It turns out abortion rights groups really rally their supporters to work against this ballot amendment and it fails in August. So abortion rights groups look at Kansas and think, wow, we got a ton of support there, maybe these ballot measures can actually be a way of establishing abortion rights and guaranteeing abortion access in other states. And so they begin to put measures on the ballot in the midterms of 2022. And by the end of that year, we see really a winning streak for the abortion rights side.

They've won six out of six ballot measures. The next year, they try for Ohio, first real red state, they win Ohio. So now, going to this year and the presidential contest, abortion rights groups are seven for seven. And just to be very clear about what it is we're talking about here that's happening in the seven states you just mentioned, increasingly after Kansas, and correct me if I'm wrong, these are efforts to put something in a state's constitution that protects abortion and therefore means that if a Republican legislature in the state decides to try to restrict it, they can't. A judge would look at the constitution and say, you just can't do that. The voters in the state have said, this is a right.

Therefore they'd strike down any legislative effort to ban abortion. That's right. And most of these measures are establishing a right to abortion until viability, which is the time in pregnancy when a fetus can survive outside the uterus. That's actually the standard that was in Roe v. Wade. And most of the states also say that after that point, the legislature can regulate abortion, but they can't prohibit women from getting abortions

if they need them in a medical emergency. So essentially, what all of these ballot measures are doing is restoring Roe, but in the state constitution, instead of having it in the federal constitution. Fascinating. So let's turn to the mechanics of the 2024 ballot initiatives and the plan to extend this abortion rights winning streak to a much broader set of states with the reality, of course, that must have been in the back of everyone's head that 2024 was different

because it's the presidential year. Right. It's the first presidential year post-DOPs. So there are two ways of looking at this, and those two ways do overlap. And the first is that abortion rights groups are looking at all these states where post jobs there are bans on abortion and thinking these ballot measures can be a way of restoring abortion access. Democrats meanwhile are looking at how abortion has galvanized all these voters. The lesson coming out of the 2022 midterms was that the candidates of abortion rights won. You know, the Democrats headed off the red wave in the

House of Representatives, anti-abortion candidates lost in a couple of states, and they're thinking, okay, we can use this issue to power victories for our candidates who stand for abortion rights and Democrats in particular. This is really going to galvanize turnout. Right. The thinking was that even when Joe Biden was the nominee and a relatively weak nominee vis-a-vis Trump in the polls, that abortion rights could make the difference in a few key battleground states because it was going to bring out voters who care about abortion and those voters would see the Democrat as the only logical candidate to protect abortion rights given Trump's role in reversing Roe v. Wade.

Yeah. And this wasn't some pie in the sky thing. This was a proven strategy. So this was something not only that Democrats thought was going to work, but that Republicans thought was going to work. How do folks end up choosing the 10 states that they do where these ballot amendments end up being? So as abortion rights groups and Democrats go into 2024 and the presidential race

There are only 17 states in the entire country that allow Citizen sponsored ballot measures, which means that people can sign a petition You know you gather petitions outside your grocery store your your hardware store, whatever, and people put this question directly before the voters. And of those 17 states, 10 of them had abortion bans. So this was always going to be a limited strategy. Got it. So when it comes to the 10 measures that are on the ballots this year, some of those are blue states that are just trying to enshrine a right to abortion that's already in state law. And that's New York, Colorado, and Maryland. Then you have red and purple states where either abortion is already banned or the state legislature and the governor are trying to ban abortion. And the goal of

the ballot measure there is either to overturn the ban or to hold the ban off. So those states are Montana, Missouri, South Dakota, Florida, Nebraska, Nevada, and Arizona. And of course, two of the states that you just mentioned in your red and purple list are battleground states, Nevada and Arizona. So as everyone gears up to try to protect abortion rights in these 10 states in time for last Tuesday, what ends up being the playbook deployed in all of these states? So the sponsors of these ballot measures are seeing that there's a shift in the way Americans are thinking about abortion. A lot of Americans, a lot of people I talk to, particularly men,

thought or think that abortion is something that irresponsible women use as birth control. And that's not necessarily true, but that was sort of the bias. That was the real stigma around abortion. What's happening is you see all these states ban abortion as people are seeing the very real consequences of this. And they're seeing that women who have much wanted pregnancies can't get medical care when they need it. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a mom. I'm lucky to have my son, but I wasn't lucky with my second pregnancy. There was a fetal anomaly, and to protect myself, I needed an abortion. The abortion rights group sponsoring these ballot measures

really take that idea of abortion as healthcare and put that at the center of their campaigns. Thinking of politicians interfering, denying my wife the care she needs. It's unforgivable. Missouri's abortion ban goes too far. You know, the ad that I think about a lot was one in Florida where you have this couple

and the woman is saying. Due to the abortion ban, I was being forced to carry the baby from 23 weeks all the way to 37 weeks. I had to carry a pregnancy to 37 weeks, even though I knew, and even though doctors told me this would not be a healthy child. Having to watch your wife be in pain

and continue to tell her to keep going, that everything's gonna be okay. Knowing it's not. That was the hardest thing. And the ad ends with the woman saying, This ban is torture. This ban is torture. Right. These ads end up feeling quite strikingly nonpartisan or almost postpartisan.

They're all about women's health. Yes, and polls are showing that these ads are changing minds, that people who see them are more inclined to support abortion rights. Hmm. You mentioned, Kate, that Democrats end up seizing on these ballot initiatives as well, hoping that they're gonna boost turnout for them. My recollection is that they end up adopting very similar messages to the sponsors of these bills, right? Yeah, so once Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, she really makes this the centerpiece of her campaign. Working people, working women, have to travel to another state

to get on a plane sitting next to strangers to go and get the health care she needs. You have her surrogates like J.B. Pritzker. Americans don't want to be forced to drive 100 miles to deliver a baby because a draconian abortion law shut down the maternity ward. Gretchen Whitmer, Michelle Obama, all coming out and talking about this. One woman spent 22 days in jail on murder charges after she miscarried in her own bathroom.

We are seeing doctors unsure if they can treat ectopic pregnancies. Right, she spoke very explicitly about women bleeding out on a hospital bed because of some of these state bans on abortion. Yeah. And that message from Michelle Obama really closes out Kamala Harris's campaign talking about how you need to vote for Democratic candidates because this issue is life and death for many women. And on election day, when we look at the results of these ballot

measures, it's an incredible success for the abortion rights side. In Arizona, it wins by 62%. In Nevada, by 64%. Missouri becomes the first state to overturn a ban on abortion, and they get 52% of support. In a very red state. Yeah, even one of those three states where the ballot measure didn't succeed, which is Florida, it still got a majority of support. It was 57%. It was just that Florida required 60% to pass. So not just wins for abortion rights in these seven states, but clear majorities. Yeah, and I think in some states it was even more support for abortion rights than the

sponsors expected. Hmm. It also helped Democrats in some down ballot races for Congress and state legislatures. But the Democrat, who everyone thought it would help the most, did not benefit from this. And that was Kamala Harris. We'll be right back. So Kate, how much did these mostly winning abortion rights amendments not help Kamala Harris quantify that for us? It's a pretty huge gap. And of course, the votes are still being counted.

But from what we know now, on Monday afternoon, if you look at Arizona, for instance, Battleground State, remember I just told you that 62% voted for the abortion measure. Right. 46% voted for Harris. That's an eight-point gap. Nevada, it's even bigger. Abortion, the ballot measure gets 64%. Harris gets 47.5, almost 17 points. In Missouri, which is a red state where Harris was never expected to win, abortion rights gets 52%, Harris gets 40.

Wow. Then you look at Florida, where I think some Democrats had begun to hope that abortion might actually pull it out for them. The abortion ballot measure got 57% support, Harris got 43%. Wow, so you're talking about, in a bunch of these cases, double digit gaps between those who cared enough about abortion

to vote to enshrine it in their state's constitution and those willing to vote for Harris. And essentially what this data you just cited reveals is that a bunch of people were capable of holding two thoughts in their heads at once and splitting those two things up. That's right. And you know, this is something that a lot of people had actually tried to warn about, that even in some of the earlier ballot measures, like in California in 2022,

the ballot measures were outperforming Democrats. The ballot measure in California got more votes than the state's popular governor, Gavin Newsom, who's a Democrat. So this shouldn't have been seen as a silver bullet strategy, but by the end, people really thought it was going to be that. But I think it's worth explaining why Democrats especially thought that a vote for abortion rights was quite logically going to be a vote for Kamala Harris in this race. And that's because of the unique singular role that Trump played in appointing the Supreme Court that overturned Roe. Because as you just told us, Kate,

in the first half of this conversation, Democrats seem to benefit a lot from the issue of abortion in the last election, the 2022 midterms. And because Kamala Harris was campaigning so emphatically and explicitly as the candidate of abortion rights. That's right. And I think also, if you think about the way abortion has traditionally been framed, it's an issue of women's rights.

So I think a lot of Democrats thought it was reasonable to think all these people coming out to support abortion rights are also going to be excited about the idea of electing the country's first female president. So just walk us through, in the kind of post-mortem way that I'm sure Democrats are, the understanding of why so many voters split their ballot. One way to think about this is that Harris was actually a victim of her own success and the way she changed how the country thought about abortion.

Just explain that because that's a little bit of a complicated idea. If you're coming at this from the perspective of wanting to increase abortion access or guarantee abortion access, it was really smart to talk about this as a matter of health care, as a matter of health care freedom a matter of healthcare freedom and the right to make your own decisions. Because it really appeals to a libertarian spirit in this country and a sentiment that a lot of independents and Republicans have. So you saw people crossing traditional party lines to vote for abortion rights.

But those people who might now see abortion rights as something they want to support aren't necessarily going to be on board for the rest of the democratic agenda. They're not necessarily going to be the people who want student loan forgiveness, for example. They're not necessarily going to be the people who want to vote for the country's first female president. But of course, the thing that also has to be true here for those who are going to split their tickets on this scale that we're talking about is that these voters have to not see Trump as a threat to abortion rights. Right. And Trump effectively neutralized the issue for himself, because as much as he was saying to anti-abortion groups, I'm the guy who finally

got the court to overturn Roe v. Wade, he was saying to people who support abortion rights, you don't have to worry about me. I'm not going to impose a national ban on abortion. I just want to give all this back to the states. And polls showed that people believed him. For instance, in a Times poll two months before the election, 70% of Trump voters said they did not believe that he would sign a national ban on abortion. So in some sense, the way to look at this is Harris's strategy was effective, but so

was Trump's. In the end, Kate, what seems really significant about this election is that it gave voters who cared about abortion rights the ability to say so in their vote without voting for the candidate who claimed she was the champion of abortion rights Kamala Harris and that makes me wonder are Democrats looking back and asking themselves if putting Democrats looking back and asking themselves if putting abortion on the ballot as its own issue was a mistake, that they could have done it a different year and then ask people

to vote on abortion by voting for Harris. I think that conversation is surely happening. But for abortion rights groups, the immediate issue is restoring abortion access. Right. And so they're looking at that conversation and saying, don't be so cynical. Like, if we're talking about this as a matter of women dying, we're not going to wait another year and let more women die. We need to fix this now.

Issue over a party. Absolutely. And that's not to say that, of course, these groups wanted Kamala Harris to win the White House. But they're also incredibly grateful to her. You know, her legacy becomes that she spoke about abortion in a different way. They would say that she was a big reason that the issue won. The way she talked about abortion and got the Democratic Party, which had always like

really hesitated, you know, Joe Biden did not want to say the word abortion. Right. Kamala Harris changed all that. And so her legacy is this expansion of abortion rights, this protection of abortion rights in some states. And that's not nothing. Put it a different way. Abortion rights didn't help Kamala Harris win in 2024,

but Kamala Harris helped abortion rights win't help Kamala Harris win in 2024, but Kamala Harris helped abortion rights win in 2024. That's certainly how abortion rights groups see that. It strikes me, Kate, that for many Democrats and many Democratic women, there's going to be a lot of dissonance in the results of this election because there is simultaneously this huge electoral win for what many see as an essential woman's right and abortion and a huge electoral defeat for the woman candidate for president who championed that right. And I think that dissonance is at the heart of a lot of shock that many women are feeling about this.

Because for so long, feminism and abortion were intertwined. So it was easy for them to think the public has really moved on abortion rights. That means the public supports women's rights. The reason that abortion rights groups used to center the phrase and the idea of my body, my choice was because they really saw abortion as the right of women to determine the course of their own lives. But in this election, that wasn't how we talked about abortion. Kamala Harris and the supporters of these ballot measures didn't talk about feminism and abortion.

They decoupled those two things. You know, abortion is about protecting women who want to be mothers and, you know, making sure that a husband doesn't need to worry about his wife. Right. You know, giving him and her doctor the ability to help her make this decision. So the path for abortion rights

is making it less and less of a feminist idea. You know, it's making it more about protecting women, but in a paternal way. And that's not the same as autonomy for women. Right. None of those campaign ads and none of those campaign speeches acknowledge the simple reality that a woman in the United States might want to have an abortion because she might not want to have a baby. Right. That decoupling leaves feminism in a really uncertain place. It really diminished the question of do we trust women to determine the course of their own lives? So when you

look at last Tuesday, you can argue that the results tell us that we've changed the way we talk about abortion. We've changed the way we think about abortion. But what we haven't changed is the way we think about and talk about women. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to under day. With two senior appointments, President-elect Trump laid the groundwork for carrying out the large-scale deportation of undocumented immigrants that his campaign long promised. According to the Times, Trump is expected to name Stephen Miller as his White

House Deputy Chief of Staff for policy and Tom Homan as his border czar. During Trump's first term, both men promoted the zero tolerance policy that led to the separation of thousands of undocumented immigrants from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border. And... This is the last time I will stand here at Arlington as commander-in-chief. It's been the greatest honor of my life to lead you, to serve you,

care for you, to defend you, just as you defended us generation after generation after generation. On Monday, President Biden observed his final Veterans Day as president at Arlington National Cemetery, where he lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Without mentioning Trump by name, Biden offered a firm contrast with the former president, who, according to aides, mocked veterans who were killed in battle. To all the military families, to all those with a loved one still missing or unaccounted

for, to all Americans grieving the loss of a loved one who wore the uniform, Jillo and I want you to know we see you, we thank you, and we'll never stop working to meet our sacred obligation to you and your family. Today's episode was produced by Astha Chaturvedi and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lynn, contains original music by Alisha Baitup, Pat McCusker and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderland. That's it for the day later. I'm Michael Boborow. See you tomorrow.