(Bloomberg) -- For an issue that was considered central to the US presidential race, abortion rights turned out to be largely untethered to national politics.
Case in point: At least 2.6 million voters cast ballots in favor of both Donald Trump and state-level abortion protections.
Seven of ten states where residents voted directly on abortion-focused ballot measures passed constitutional amendments to expand or protect access this week. Two of those states also voted to elect the Republican nominee. He led in two others — Arizona and Nevada — as of Wednesday afternoon.
At least one in seven Trump voters in states with ballot measures chose to protect abortion access, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of election results via the Associated Press. In more than 150 counties, these crossover voters represented 20% or more of Trump’s vote.
Democrats leaned heavily on abortion rights in hopes the issue would drum up enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris, especially in key battleground states like Arizona. The vote tally and Trump’s ultimate victory indicates that efforts to pin the fall of Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion bans on him ultimately failed, even as most Americans continue to support reproductive rights. For some voters, the chance to solidify abortion access at the state level gave them leeway to cast a ballot in favor of Trump and his other policies.
Shadd Campbell, a 49-year-old in Las Vegas, said he voted for Trump because the economy was the most important issue to him. Yet he also supported Nevada’s ballot measure that would kick off a two-step process to enshrine abortion access in the constitution, saying he was in favor of states being able to make the decision.
“I don’t think anybody should be trying to tell a woman what to do,” Campbell said. “I was raised with all women, so that was really important to me.”
He is hardly alone: In Missouri — a state that Trump won and that passed a pro-abortion ballot measure paving the way for a repeal of the state’s near-total ban — more than half of Trump’s voters in Lewis and Benton counties were in favor of the amendment.
Reproductive care has been a galvanizing cause for Democrats since the constitutional right to an abortion was overturned in June 2022, a Supreme Court decision that was bolstered by support from three justices picked in Trump’s first term. The issue propelled Democrats to unexpected success during the midterms cycle later that year and helped rack up wins on ballot measures even in conservative states like Montana and Kentucky.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, was a more comfortable communicator on reproductive rights than President Joe Biden and made it a key pillar for her campaign. But the Trump voter results suggest it isn’t panning out to be a starkly partisan issue, and may not be the silver bullet that pro-abortion politicians were hoping for.
Crossover voters will likely play a pivotal role if Trump succeeds in winning Arizona and Nevada. As of Wednesday, the overlap for these voters was greatest in Missouri, where the initiative to protect abortion passed with a margin of about 100,000 votes. There were at least 300,000 voters who cast ballots for abortion protection and Trump.
“Too many pundits and political operatives have an overly simplistic, and overly inflated, sense of the impact that abortion has on any particular election result,” said Ziad Munson, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University who researches abortion politics and the changing political landscape of suburban America.
Abortion is historically not a winning issue in presidential elections, he said, noting that the Democrats over-estimated the turnout abortion would bring in comparison to tried-and-true issues, like the economy. Midterms tend to be more nuanced and policy-focused, with a different voter population, he said.
But even the 2022 midterm results show that abortion may not be a strictly partisan issue. In that election, four states – California, Vermont, Michigan and Kentucky – saw voters cast ballots in favor of abortion protection and Republican candidates in state-wide races. The number of crossover voters was as low as 13,000 in Vermont’s senate race and as high as about 700,000 in California’s gubernatorial race.
For a significant cohort of voters unhappy with the direction of the country under Biden and Harris or more concerned with the economy “that must have weighed more heavily on their vote choice for who would be the next president,” said Kelly Dittmar, associate professor of political science at Rutgers University–Camden, who is also director of research and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics.
Neither the Trump nor Harris campaigns immediately replied to email requests seeking comment.
“I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions and aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body and not have their government telling them what to do,” Harris said in her concession speech Wednesday at Howard University. “This is a time to roll up our sleeves,” she said.
Turnout Disappointment
Among states where more than 90% of votes have been counted, Florida and New York saw relatively large drops in turnout and some of Trump’s biggest vote-share gains. This suggests that Democrats’ hope that ballot initiatives about reproductive rights would boost turnout in their favor failed to materialize.
And on Tuesday, a Florida ballot measure to expand access to abortion garnered 57% support even as the state saw a major shift to the right. (The measure, known as Amendment 4, still fell short of the 60% threshold for approval.) That 57% figure, however, is still a higher share than those who voted for Trump in the state.
The discrepancy suggests many voters are “just not holding Trump accountable for the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” said Jennifer Lawless, who researches women and elections as a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Virginia.
It’s possible that Trump’s shifting messaging around abortion may have also worked to his advantage. The president-elect has previously taken credit for the overturning of Roe. But in recent months, he has tried to present himself as a moderate voice on the issue, pledging to veto a federal abortion ban if it hit his desk. He has said it’s best to leave the matter to states.
“Donald Trump was more ambiguous about what he’d do when he faced a ban. I think the ambiguity served him well,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and expert in political rhetoric. “The assumption is that people believed him when they said that he doesn’t support an abortion ban.”
Trump’s position resonated with John Jimenez, an Arizona resident who voted for the former president as well as the state ballot measure to enshrine abortion access. Although he personally opposes abortion, he believes the decision should rest with individuals, not the government.
“I've known people that have made that decision throughout my life, and whether it was good or bad, it was their decision to make,” he said.
Next Steps
As Trump heads for a second term, anti-abortion groups are signaling that they’ll push for more restrictions in the next four years. “President Trump’s first-term pro-life accomplishments are the baseline for his second term,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement Wednesday. Dannenfelser added that “in the long term, GOP pro-life resolve must be strengthened.”
Reproductive rights advocates and abortion providers say a multi-pronged approach is needed to fight back.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which along with partners spent a record $69.5 million in the cycle, said the group will work to “win our rights back — state by state, ballot by ballot.” Other groups said they’d help push protective policies through state legislatures, kick off ballot measure processes and continue organizing to provide practical support to patients contending with restrictions.
“We are going to use all of the tools in the toolbox,” said Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center.
Lawless, the UVA professor, said Harris’ loss is a “real wake-up call and shocker.”
“But we are going to continue to hear about this,” she said. The most important learning lesson of the split-ticket voting, she added, is that abortion will remain on the ballot in future elections.
--With assistance from Amanda Albright, Madlin Mekelburg, Eliyahu Kamisher, David Ingold and Simone Foxman.
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