The Journal. - Abortion Was A Winning Issue – Just Not for Kamala Harris

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

After abortion access wins in 2022, Democrats made a bet that voters backing abortion on states’ ballot measures would also back Democratic candidates. WSJ’s Laura Kusisto explains why that bet turned out to be wrong. Further Listening: The Scramble Is on to Fill Trump’s Cabinet  What a Republican Congress Could Mean for Trump  Further Reading: Voters Continued to Back Abortion Rights. It Didn’t Help Democrats.  A State-by-State Guide to Abortion Access in the U.S.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the campaign trail, one issue Vice President Kamala Harris leaned into was abortion rights. And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law. Harris was a very articulate spokeswoman for these women who had not been able to get care for women who were sort of outraged at the rollback of their rights. That's our colleague Laura Casisto. She says that the Harris campaign hoped abortion rights would energize voters to come out and vote blue.

They spent big on ad buys across swing states, emphasizing why nationwide access to abortion should be restored. One of the ads, certainly one of the toughest ads that they had, was with a woman named Hadley Duvall in Kentucky. And the ad opens and she is making breakfast for herself. And she tells this story about being sexually abused by her stepfather until she got pregnant at the age of 12. I didn't know what it meant to be pregnant at all but I had options. Because Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, girls and women all over the country have lost the right to choose. even for rape or incest. Donald Trump did this.

He took away our- Trump appointed three conservative justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. And for Harris, that was the message that they were really trying to get across. That whatever Trump might say now, he is responsible for the overturning of Roe and for these kinds of stories.

On election day, 10 states had abortion rights on the ballot. In seven of them, voters came out in favor of abortion access. But those votes didn't translate into votes for Harris. One Democratic strategist talked about it as mind-boggling. And so I think we have to understand this as abortion rights, in essence, being more popular than Democrats right now. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, November 12th.

Tuesday, November 12th. Coming up on the show, why abortion won on election day and Harris lost. This episode is brought to you by TELUS Business. This Black Friday, TELUS Business is helping small businesses get more done and save. Get the latest technology for your business at exclusive Black Friday prices. Shop these limited time offers today at telus.com slash business Black Friday. Conditions apply.

TELUS. Proud supporter of Canadian business. TELUS. Proud supporter of Canadian business. TELUS. Proud supporter of Canadian

business. There's a reason Democrats thought abortion could energize voters for their candidates. started two years ago. In a sweeping ruling that overturned a half a century of presidents, five justices ended the right of American women to choose abortion under the Constitution. Roe v. Wade is overturned in June 2022, and the rollback of a constitutional right is unprecedented. And so no one really knows how the public is going to respond. And I remember sitting in my office in August of 2022, about a month

after this, and watching the results start to roll in from a ballot referendum in Kansas. And that referendum was about whether to eliminate abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution. Kansas is considered a conservative state. And so there was an expectation that abortion rights would be restricted. But when the votes came in, almost 60% of Kansans voted to keep abortion protections in place. And I remember this feeling of being, to be honest, stunned by those results. We were starting to see these results come in and, you know, 57, 58, 59% of Kansans pushing back on this and, you this and expressing support for abortion rights

for this ballot measure. And I wasn't the only one watching those results and taking that message away. I have talked to anti-abortion leaders who say that this was a wake-up call for them, that abortion rights were much more popular than they had anticipated. And the 2022 midterms showed Kansas wasn't a fluke. Ballot measures protecting abortion access passed in states across the country. — Well, Michigan has now voted to protect abortion rights.

— 54% voted against new language, stripping any guarantee of abortion rights from Kentucky's Constitution. — Vermont voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure to amend the state's constitution to explicitly protect abortion rights. The momentum went beyond ballot initiatives, boosting Democratic candidates throughout the country too. Democrats held control of the Senate and fended off much deeper losses in the House than many

people had expected nationally. And so to be clear, the issue helped turn out voters for Democratic candidates in 2022. We can make that connection. Yeah, I mean, all evidence that we have is that it was a motivating factor for Democratic women to come out. It also prompted independent and Republican women

to switch and vote for Democratic candidates. And Trump himself, I should say, on social media said as much. He basically said, we are going to lose elections unless we figure out how to talk about this issue. Republicans are too extreme on this issue. So there was really kind of bipartisan consensus that this was good for Democrats in 2022. And I think the message, I know the message that Democrats took away is we have the winning issue in the country right now, the issue that speaks to people's hearts and emotions.

And it was kind of a galvanizing moment for Democrats. This is a big part of what the Harris campaign was relying on going into last week's election. The hope was that having abortion on the ballot in so many places would drive turnout among voters who supported abortion rights Democratic strategists assumed those voters would also support Harris as part of that strategy Democrats adjusted their messaging around abortion One of the messages that was really resonant in Kansas and that I think carried through campaigns after that was one about medical rights and medical privacy.

I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one's own body, should not be made by the government. It was very different than the way people had talked about abortion before. They talked about it, they compared it to mask mandates and vaccine mandates, and just talked about getting the government out of my business. And that was clearly resonant with sort of libertarian voters who might otherwise vote Republican but for whom freedom was this really powerful issue. While Harris framed herself as a champion of abortion rights, Trump took a different

tack. He said that the question of abortion should be left up to the states. There were strategists and anti-abortion groups who were really pushing him to say, you know, you should be out in front of it. You should have a position that you can sell to voters. And Trump made this really kind of last minute calculation that he was not going to do that. Instead, he was going to just say, I'm not going to take a position on this.

This is up to the states. And this, I think, made some of his own strategists nervous because it felt like he didn't have a kind of response to Harris on this issue. But it turned out out by all accounts to be a pretty winning strategy. It made it hard for Harris, I think, to persuade voters that their rights were under threat

if Trump won the White House. It made him just harder to pin down an attack on this issue. Trump's bet paid off with a wave of split tickets. Voters who supported both abortion access and Trump. That's next. This episode is brought to you by TELUS Business. This Black Friday, TELUS Business is helping small businesses get more done and save. Get the latest technology for your business at exclusive Black Friday prices.

Shop these limited time offers today at telus.com slash business Black Friday. Conditions apply. TELUS, proud supporter of Canadian business. Of the 10 states that had abortion on the ballot last week, seven of them voted to protect it, including blue states like Colorado and New York, and also some red states like Missouri and Montana. Only three states voted not to protect the procedure, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Florida, which Laura says was kind of a special case.

On the one hand, 57% of voters voted in favor of the ballot measure in Florida. And that's in line with what we saw in other states. But the tricky thing with Florida was it has a 60% threshold to pass a ballot measure. Very, very unusual. So majority of voters did support abortion rights, but they were still 3% short. Correct. Yes. Yeah. So it came very close.

Yes. Ballot measures also passed in Arizona and Nevada, two swing states where Harris was hoping to get a bump from turnout for abortion rights. Instead, what you saw was a divergence where abortion rights won easily by more than 60% in both of those places, which is really quite remarkable. But Harris also lost. And it ultimately didn't seem to move the needle in terms of getting them to vote for Democrats.

So is it fair to say like a lot of Trump voters had to support these ballot measures, support abortion rights in order for these ballot measures to pass? Yes, there is no other way to do that math. That is the only way to understand this is that a lot of people, millions of people voted for abortion rights and also for Donald Trump. And you heard from some of these voters. What did they tell you? So there's one voter we talked to in Missouri,

a man named Aaron Turner, who's exactly that sort of type of voter. He voted for Trump and he voted for abortion. And, you know, for him, abortion was a kind of freedoms issue, which is something we hear from a lot of more conservative voters. There is some conflict in my mind regarding the abortion of a fetus, whether or not that's a child or not. I personally believe it is, but at the end of the day, I don't have the capacity or I

believe the right to weigh in on every single decision. And I also don't believe the government has the right to weigh in on that either. He just felt like, I don't want the government in this business. This is an individual choice. So it almost sounds like the Harris campaign's messaging on abortion as an individual freedom worked. It just didn't work for Harris. And so what do you make of this? So I think two ways to think about this, two different categories of voters that I have

in my mind. So one of them are voters who I talk to who say, yes, I support abortion rights. If you ask me a straight up or down question about abortion, I'm going to say yes to abortion access. But it's not my number one issue. And so even if I support this, Trump is talking about other issues that are more resonant to me, like immigration, like the economy, you name it. And then the second category of voters are people who I talk to

who abortion is quite important to them. Even people who were really passionate about voting, for example, for the abortion amendment in Arizona. I talked to one woman who fits this description, but she said, I take Trump at his word that he's not going to do anything about this. I take him at his word when he says this is a state's issue, that the federal government is out of the abortion business. I believe that message.

16 states still have either a near total abortion ban or a restrictive six-week ban. But after last week, about two-thirds of the country now has some form of legal access to abortion. Laura says for advocates of abortion rights, that could be a good sign. If I quickly do the math, so we have had abortion on the ballot in 17 states since Roe was overturned and it has won in 14. I think when Roe was overturned, the expectation was that about half of states would ban abortion. And so it is certainly fair to say that with that in mind, abortion rights groups are doing

better than we would have expected. And I certainly don't take away from Tuesday night that abortion ballot initiatives are a losing strategy at all. They still won seven out of 10. Florida had a unique threshold that we don't see replicated in other states. And so yeah, I think for abortion rights groups, putting Democrats aside for now, but for abortion rights groups, I think this remains a winning strategy. Yeah, it's so interesting because I remember, you know, I mean, abortion rights groups, I think this remains a winning strategy. Yeah, it's so interesting because I remember, you know, I mean, abortion rights activists were very like nervous and scared after Roe was overturned.

But it seems like, yeah, the effort state by state has been more or less successful for them. Yeah. And I would caveat that with the fact that since Roe was overturned, we have had a democratic administration federally. Biden has been in the White House that entire time. And so I don't think any of us quite knows what the world looks like if you have a Republican

president in power. One thing abortion rights groups are worried about is access to abortion pills by mail, which right now is available even in states with abortion restrictions. There has been a huge surge in that practice over the last couple of years. It has allowed a large number of women in states like Florida and Texas

and all over the country, states with bands, to get abortion pills. If that policy were to change, and that could no longer happen, I think women in those states would feel the impact of abortion bans in a different kind of way. Trump now heads back to the White House, with Republicans regaining control of the Senate and on the verge of keeping the House. So how likely is it that Republicans in Congress will try to push through a national ban on abortion?

So I think the likelihood of an abortion ban making it through Congress remains relatively low. There are still moderate Republicans who don't support that and other Republicans in just politically sensitive districts who just do not want to take that on. In my estimation, we'll see. Trump has also said explicitly that he would veto such a ban. And so I think that also makes it just less likely that anyone tries to take on a national abortion ban. So does this change how you think about abortion rights as a political issue or a campaign issue?

So I think certainly a question I have going forward is, will we see another abortion rights campaign? This was one of the top few issues in this campaign. It was certainly the top issue for Democrats. You saw them blanketing the airwaves with these very poignant ads. And so a question for me is, will you see Democrats continuing to talk about this? Or will you see this fade from the political discourse? And I think for abortion rights groups, yes, like they're, this is going to be a real question,

right? Is can they get Democrats to keep talking about this? Or is this sort of the end of the road and you'll have ballot measures, but you won't say this be a national issue in the way that it was over the last two years. But do you get a sense that this issue is losing steam at all? I don't get a sense that it's losing steam. I think because you still saw so many ballot measures win, because all of the polling I see still says that this is popular, also that still the issue that voters rank third behind the economy and immigration and what determined their vote.

I think that the answer, as far as we can tell at this point, is it just was overshadowed. That I think it's still a kind of key political issue, but that it was a pretty wild campaign with some other also very big issues that resonate with voters like the economy and immigration. And even though it was still important to voters, it just wasn't the number one issue for enough of them. That's all for today, Tuesday, November 12th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Jennifer Kalfus.

Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.