Will support for abortion rights help the Democrats in November?

Almost as soon as the results of the August 2 vote rejecting an anti-abortion referendum in Kansas came clear, pundits and politicians lost no time in drawing the lessons of the Kansas vote. Phrases like “game-changing”, “earthquake,” “choice-quake” and “shockwave” dominate headlines.

As the Washington Post put it, “In the wake of a decisive victory for the abortion rights movement in Kansas, Democrats on Wednesday sought to capitalize on indicators of strong voter anger over conservative efforts to curtail access to abortion, as they looked ahead to the midterm elections and other ballot measures with new vigor. . . .Voter turnout was high in Kansas, a conservative state — a major surge during a midsummer vote and in the eyes of many Democrats the first major data point that abortion could prove to be a significant motivator in the fall.”

Until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June, the midterms were shaping up to result in the drubbing of the Democrats as the “party in power” in Washington. There was no shortage of evidence for that expectation.

At the top of the list is President Joe Biden’s low approval rating. With fewer than four in 10 Americans supporting Biden, his popularity is at (or even worse than) Trump levels. State-level redistricting left more districts where Republicans will be favored to win. And economic concerns, like inflation and the first indications of a recession, were leaving most Americans in a sour mood.

So all of the stars seemed to be aligning to send the Democrats packing from both houses of Congress and leaving Biden tied up with non-stop congressional investigations through 2024. But a confluence of events, unfolding during the summer, seemed to suggest that the stars may not be aligning quite as expected.

Starting in mid-June, gasoline prices began to drop. The U.S. House hearings on the January 6 attack on the Capitol gained millions of viewers who learned of a multi-pronged conspiracy, with Trump at the center, to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And on June 24, the Supreme Court issued its reactionary decision overturning Roe.

With the fall of Roe, the anti-abortionists began calling in their chips from Republican politicians. Within weeks, a string of conservative states implemented partial or full bans on abortion. Horror stories, like that of a 10-year-old being forced to carry a rape-induced pregnancy to term or doctors withholding care from actively miscarrying patients until they reached the stage of life-threatening sepsis, emerged from a variety of states with abortion bans. And, in case anyone had doubts about where the right’s target would move next, Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the Dobbs case openly invited challenges to same-sex marriage, contraception and sexual privacy.

Still, opinion polls consistently showed that solid majorities oppose the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe. If anything, support for abortion rights has increased. Depending on the survey, results show about 60-70 percent of Americans supporting the right to abortion. The referendum in conservative Kansas verified this. In fact, the abortion rights side of the referendum won in every Kansas congressional district, including the most conservative rural districts.

Liberal Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted: “It is time to reevaluate the conventional wisdom about the midterms after this vote in Kansas. People are mad as hell at having their rights taken away.” The campaign manager for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—a Democrat running against a candidate who is on the record as saying that the results of the 1973 Roe decision legalizing abortion were worse than the Nazi Holocaust—tweeted: “Any Dems still on the sidelines worried about the politics of abortion need to look at *KANSAS* for a reality check.”

Most midterm elections are low-turnout, predictable affairs where the “party in power” in the White House usually loses seats in Congress. Standard public opinion indicators—like the president’s approval rating, the party voters say they will vote for (a.k.a., “the generic ballot”) and the public judgment on whether the country is on the “right track” or not—normally predict which party will win during the midterms. Judged on those terms, the Democrats are toast.

For the party in power to defy those odds, it’s taken an extraordinary series of events that temporarily override historical trends. In the last century, this happened three times: in 1934, 1998 and 2002. The least likely parallel to today’s situation is 1934’s, when the American working class was waging an historic class struggle during the Great Depression. The incumbent Roosevelt administration capitalized on those events to increase its Democratic Party majorities in Congress.

In 1998, the Republicans convinced themselves that their crusade to impeach President Bill Clinton over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was popular. Soon, they would drive the president from office. Instead, they found out that their crusade was extraordinarily unpopular. The Republicans lost seats in Congress, and, instead, their Great Helmsman House Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign.

In 2002, the intervening event was the 9/11 attack. This handed the George W. Bush administration an unearned boost in popularity in the nationalist climate that ensued. Bush and his operatives were too willing to campaign against Democrats, who they characterized as being de facto allies of Osama bin Laden, in their drive to launch a war in the Middle East. Even though nothing could be further from the truth (in fact, the Democrat-led Senate passed a resolution authorizing the disastrous Iraq war before the midterms), the Republicans’ scare campaign worked.

Today, liberals are hoping that the shocks of overturning of Roe, the revelations from the January 6 commission, and the GOP’s nominations of some truly awful candidates might provide some margin for hope that the Democrats won’t suffer the expected drubbing.

As the moderate Democrat Ed Kilgore explained, “Beyond the immediate issue, though, both the outcome and the enthusiasm exhibited by those who turned out to vote “no” to abortion bans in Kansas suggest that if Democrats make this a signature issue for the 2022 midterms, their currently bleak prospects in November — much of it based on the assumption that discouraged Democrats won’t vote — could turn around quickly. It’s clear the anti-abortion movement and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, may have miscalculated with an assault on a right deemed basic by a majority of Americans, who may sooner than expected wake up and fight back.”

But there is a difference between a referendum and an election for a candidate. A referendum vote usually presents the electorate with a clear-cut choice on an issue. That’s different from voting for a candidate, especially for catch-all capitalist parties like the Democrats and Republicans. Candidates start with a certain level of support based on what partisan “team” they’re on. Then they trim their positions and polish their personal images to get to the level of support they need to be elected. For these reasons, it’s difficult to read the results of a single referendum into those of hundreds of candidate-centered contests.

The Republicans want to keep their campaigns focused on Biden’s unpopularity or on public perceptions of a weakening and unlivable economy. But given that the GOP is so closely identified with the far-right anti-abortion zealots, it’s possible that Democrats can “nationalize” the midterm elections to turn them into a referendum on abortion rights and GOP extremism. Can they?

Here’s where the Democrats’ history on the topic of abortion comes back to haunt them. Although they have long identified themselves as the “pro-choice” party, they have mostly tried to downplay their positions on abortion. In the Clintonian formula, they supported the right to abortion as “safe, legal and rare.” Will a party whose funders, consultants, operatives, and politicians have made a habit of running away from the issue of abortion—when not actually helping Republican efforts to restrict it, as when they supported Medicaid and Affordable Care Act restrictions on abortion—suddenly want to make it a centerpiece of their efforts?

Abortion rights activists have rightly criticized the Biden administration for its flat-footed and lackadaisical response to Roe’s overturning. The White House even criticized abortion rights activists as being too pushy and unrealistic. White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield exemplified this sentiment in a July interview with the Washington Post: “Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party.” When the White House communications director makes a statement like that, on-the-record, to the main newspaper that political Washington reads, you can take that as the official Biden/Harris position.

The comparison of the Democrats’ position today with the Bush White House’s position in 2002 is instructive. For most of the fall campaign, the Bush White House and almost all Republicans ran a disciplined, relentless, scorched-earth campaign against the Democrats. Even given the jingoistic climate of the time, the conventional wisdom held that the race would be “too close to call”. But the Democrats flubbed it anyway. They weren’t even able to hang a recessionary economy around Bush’s neck.

If the word from the Biden White House is any indication, the Democrats are likely not to be as relentless as the GOP was in 2002. And if politicians aren’t willing to pledge publicly that they will pass federal abortion rights legislation even if they have to scrap the senate filibuster to do it, they will be unable to capture the energy they need to be able to accomplish it.

Can the Democrats avoid defeat in the face of a “red wave” that politico pros and pundits have expected for months? Could they even defy the last century’s history to retain control of their “trifecta” in Washington (i.e., holding the White House, the House and the Senate)? To both questions, the answer still is “probably not.” And even if Democrats defy expectations, the fight for abortion rights will have to be a grassroots effort that isn’t tied to any one election cycle, or the fate of Democratic Party “fair-weather” friends.