Election Day 2023: Abortion Cost Republicans Big at the Ballot Box — Again

Republicans rejoiced when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the national right to abortion.

Seventeen months later, the decision is now arguably the greatest threat to the party’s electoral success.

That was clear – once again – on Tuesday night, where abortion rights and the candidates who support them won in deep red states like Kentucky, one-time bellwethers like Ohio, battleground Pennsylvania, and bluer havens like Virginia.

Nearly two years after the Supreme Court overturned the decades-old abortion precedent, the threat to abortion rights is proving to be a massive motivating issue for Democrats across the country – and the Republican Party has not yet come up with an effective position on when, or if, abortion should be permitted.

While Democrats wring their hands over President Joe Biden's poor polling, his performance on the economy, and concerns about crime and international crises, it was clear across multiple states Tuesday night that abortion rights are still driving people to the polls for Democratic candidates and causes, something that uplifts even dour Democrats.

“Abortion is an issue that isn’t going away,” said a top Republican operative late on Tuesday night. “We need to figure out a way to address it.”

The trio of Democratic victories have the party’s top operatives eager to tie Republicans to the Supreme Court decision in 2024, believing it could be the most persuasive argument the party has to reelect Biden and defeat former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Republicans are just extremely outside the mainstream on abortion,” said Josh Schwerin, a Democratic operative who worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. “It is highly problematic for them.”

Schwerin said this is particularly true for Trump, who successfully nominated three Supreme Court justices who overturned the abortion law but has tried to urge Republicans to soften their message on abortion despite his own harsh language. The Republican Party is currently divided on what kind of state abortion legislation to pursue, with some preferring 15-week laws, others passing 6-week bans and some Republicans even pursuing laws that prospective people who cross state lines for an abortion.

“Trump runs around bragging about being the one to overturn Roe, while Biden is a champion for keeping abortion legal,” said Schwerin. “This is going to be a major part of the debate in 2024 and it has repeatedly proven to be a motivating force in elections since the Dobbs decision came down.”

The issue for Republicans is that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade only made the 1973 decision more popular. A Gallup poll released this year found “a record-high 69% say abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy” and a near record on the belief that abortion “should be legal under any circumstances.”

It remains to be seen whether Republicans will temper or change their message on abortion, but party operatives have not altered their message after a string of victories for abortion access over the last year and a half. Statements from anti-abortion groups in the wake of the losses showed little appetite for reflection beyond needing to soften their message.

“Issue 1 passed because abortion activists and outside Democrat donors ran a campaign of fear to Ohio voters: Vote for this ballot measure or women will die," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the powerful anti-abortion SBA Pro-Life America, who went on to blame the millions spent by abortion rights advocates and media coverage of the debate. “There have been many valuable lessons learned from Issue 1. Moving forward in states where abortion will be on the ballot in 2024, pro-life, pro-woman coalitions will need to devote more resources to compassionate pro-life messages for women and their children, combating the campaign of fear from the other side.”

One issue Republicans have been able to overcome is how they respond to the personal stories Democrats have used to advance their abortion access message.

Beshear's campaign, in possibly one of the most illustrative ads run in 2023, ran a spot that featured the story of Hadley Duvall, who was raped by her stepfather at 12 years old. In the ad, Duvall directly takes on Cameron for supporting strict abortion laws with no exceptions for rape or incest.

"This is to you, Daniel Cameron,” Duvall said to Beshear’s opponent. “To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable.”

The attack flustered Cameron, who struggled to answer how he would handle a case like Duvall’s before he backtracked and said he would support exceptions.

And the governor highlighted the importance of that ad and Duvall’s story by noting she was at his victory party and calling her a “brave young woman who came forward to share her story” and whose courage “is going to be a better place.”

The same was true in Ohio, where the coalition behind the “yes” campaign used sophisticated digital ad-targeting techniques to reach voters with ads that resonated with them, pulling from their list of testimonial ads that feature a grandmother who had to leave Ohio for an abortion, a pastor from Cleveland or parents who had a medically necessary abortion.

“It’s clear (again) that reproductive freedom is galvanizing for Democratic voters and volunteers — and it’s bringing Republicans and Independents to our side,” said Yasmin Radjy, the Executive Director of Swing Left, an organization that worked in both Ohio and Virginia. “Republican politicians are completely out of step with voters, and they have nothing to offer beyond their extremist, unpopular agenda. In the meantime, we'll keep working to make sure pro-reproductive freedom Democrats keep winning.”