(LifeSiteNews) – After two years of Republicans and Democrats alike operating from the assumption that the American people were losing sleep over the future of “choice” in a post-Roe v. Wade world, Republicans’ wipeout of Democrats in the 2024 elections overwhelmingly disproved the conventional wisdom.
Not every state has finished counting its votes, but as of Thursday, November 7, according to Decision Desk HQ, former President Donald Trump won the Electoral College 312 to 226 and the popular vote by more than 4.6 million, Republicans will have a Senate majority of at least 52 seats and a projected 221-seat majority in the House of Representatives, and the GOP won eight of 11 gubernatorial races. According to the Associated Press’s VoteCast national exit polling, Trump expanded his support among several traditionally-Democrat minority groups and even improved slightly among women.
Why is not a mystery. Throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, he was plagued by deep dissatisfaction with the border crisis caused by his lax immigration policies, and the increased cost of living caused by his inflationary federal spending, yet at no point did his administration seriously attempt to undo its mistakes.
After replacing the elderly incumbent as the Democrat nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris was always going to face an uphill battle distancing herself from the record of an administration to which she belonged, but she exacerbated the problem in a fateful interview in which she declared that “there is not a thing that comes to mind” as to how she would differ from Biden – a clip the Trump campaign used to great effect in its advertising.
Instead of taking advice from within their own party to reverse course and take seriously the needs and priorities of ordinary Americans, Democrats gambled that the combination of voters’ personal distaste for Trump’s character, personality, and legal troubles (the remainder of which are likely to be ended soon), and a heavy focus on using fake news to stoke fear about pro-life laws, would be enough to get them across the finish line.
To that end, Democrats and their allies spent massively on abortion messaging this year. In September, left-wing Vox reported that the ACLU had pledged $25 million, Planned Parenthood $40 million, and another $100 million from a coalition of other national liberal groups. According to Politico, Democrat candidates and super PACS spent $175 million on pro-abortion TV ads just in Senate races. For months, Americans watching mainstream television could not get through a single commercial break without seeing multiple ominous warnings about Trump and Republicans supposedly putting women in mortal danger.
That strategy was based on three main factors: the fact that an expected “red wave” failed to manifest in the 2022 midterm elections (the first since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade) despite the consequences of Biden’s border and economic policies having already begun; an undeniable and concerning increase in “pro-choice” sentiment since 2019; and an unbroken string of pro-abortion victories in ballot initiatives to enshrine abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
However, the conclusion that a clear pro-life stand had become a liability was never justified. As LifeSiteNews argued and analyzed at length on multiple occasions, the actual evidence did not show that pro-abortion sentiment was a significant factor in the 2022 midterms but rather a scapegoat for a number of exceptionally poor candidates who had made it through GOP primaries. And while the amendment results did reflect a lamentable pro-abortion trend, most voters continued to select candidates based on other issues that were more important to them – such as their own economic welfare.
Which is exactly what Tuesday’s results showed. Exit polls by ABC News, Business Insider, CBS News, and others agree that discontent with the Biden economy was the primary driver of Trump’s victory, with abortion ranked lower in their priorities. Remarkably, The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reported the day after the election, “In 2022, Dems won voters who said abortion should be ‘legal in most cases’ by 22 points, 60-38. Today, those voters split 49-49.”
According to CBS, “Harris led Trump among those who said abortion should be legal, but Trump did capture 28% of those voters, indicating these voters’ position on the issue was not as salient when it came to their vote choice.” That is consistent with a warning CNN data analyst Harry Enten gave Democrats in May, that “only 23% of Americans say that candidates must share (their) views on abortion,” which only 5% of CNN’s respondents rated as their top issue.
While it is true that pro-lifers lost in seven of the 10 state battles over abortion amendments this year, victory in the remaining three proved that such defeats are not inevitable, and more to the point, the rest of the election results provide even more proof that single-issue referendum outcomes do not correlate to candidate wins and losses.
The one major caveat to all this is how Trump himself dramatically backed away from the clear pro-life stance of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, muddying his message to voters on the issue.
While continuing to embrace his role in the fall of Roe, he aggressively came out against any more federal pro-life laws, forced a rewrite of the Republican platform to remove its longstanding commitment to eventually banning abortion nationwide, bragged about making the GOP less “radical” on the issue, criticized multiple state pro-life laws for being “too tough,” proclaimed himself the “father” of embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization, pledged to continue allowing the illegal mail distribution of abortion pills, and even promised his administration would be “great” for women’s “reproductive rights” – all while assuming (correctly, as it turns out) that most pro-life voters would put up with it because he was the sole alternative to the radically pro-abortion Harris.
What all that means for the future of pro-life policies and principles in the Republican Party is a question for another day. But for the subject at hand, it could, at least theoretically, be construed as meaning that Trump’s abortion pivot is one of the reasons he won. But while those who want a less pro-life Republican Party will surely embrace this theory, there are a number of reasons it does not hold up.
First, as his own continued embrace of the Dobbs ruling tacitly acknowledges, Trump ultimately shares credit for every state pro-life laws it has and will enable, whether he wants it or not. Voters who prioritize abortion “access” understand that, and for most of them, whether their state or the judiciary is the proper venue for the issue matters little.
Second, while several down-ballot Republican candidates followed Trump’s lead in emphasizing abortion as a state issue, most did not go nearly as far as the once-and-future president did in courting pro-abortion voters, and it strains credulity to believe that in just one election, the electorate completely reoriented the general impression they have held all their lives of the GOP as the party that opposes abortion.
Third, even if voters knew what Trump said he would do about abortion, that does not necessarily mean they believed it was what he would actually do, which cut both ways. Pro-life and “pro-choice” activists alike held out hope and fear, respectively, that Trump’s move to the center was just a temporary smokescreen for political expediency, and that once in office he would revert to the pro-life agenda of his previous term.
Fourth, the aforementioned advertising juggernaut ensured that the impression of Trump as a pro-life hardliner was far more visible to voters than Trump’s insistence to the contrary. With the exception of some last-minute ads by a pro-Trump and pro-abortion PAC bizarrely (and without the family’s blessing) named after the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, most pro-Trump ads focused on attacking Harris and touting Trump’s promises for the border and the economy. By contrast, Harris and her allies saturated the airwaves with a narrative that Trump was going to ban abortion and punish women, sometimes using video of Trump himself.
Ultimately, the 2024 election proved that the high-water mark of pro-abortion fearmongering’s political potency has come and gone. As more Americans see for themselves how the actual results of pro-life laws in their communities do not match the abortion lobby’s hysteria, it may fade further still.
Indeed, Republican candidates could help it fade by finding the courage to speak up and actually make the pro-life case to voters, which has largely been neglected in the last two election cycles. Many politicians who avoid the issue seem to have forgotten that, while the general public is not prepared to fully end abortion, the Democrat Party’s position of unregulated abortion through all nine months (and beyond) at taxpayer expense is not any more popular. Further, refusing to answer lies about women dying from pro-life laws has actually fed the impression they fear, by letting them settle in people’s minds unchallenged.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the Left’s pro-abortion blitzkrieg utterly failed, because whatever else they may wrongly believe about abortion-on-demand, the American people recognized it was not the solution to the real problems in their lives. President Trump and the incoming Republican majority now have an opportunity to address those problems, and if they are successful, they will be rewarded with more political capital with which to fight for life and further defang the abortion lobby’s fearmongering.
It is now the pro-life movement’s responsibility to demand that they make the most of it.