With just four weeks remaining before election day, Democrats have staked their claim to abortion rights as they fight to ward off a GOP takeover in Congress. But months after the Supreme Court ruling that rolled back abortion rights and rattled the nation, fears from the left have surfaced that the singular issue won’t be enough.
Reproductive rights became a central theme for Democrats after the Supreme Court reversed nearly 50 years of precedent this summer protecting the right to an abortion. Seeking to cling to power in both chambers of Congress, Democrats were granted a counter to Republicans’ narrative on inflation with the high court’s ruling during a year when a red wave seemed all-but inevitable, with low presidential approval and typical midterm outcomes suggesting a painless victory for the GOP.
Those fortunes appeared to change in a matter of months, propelled by a surge of women and young people registering to vote in the wake of the high court’s decision on abortion.
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But while voters begin casting their ballots in the final stretch leading up to election day, some have begun to question the strategy.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in an op-ed published in the Guardian on Monday outlined that although he has a “lifetime 100% pro-choice voting record,” he believes that Democrats may be relying too heavily on the issue, while failing to fend off Republican messaging on the economy.
“In my view, while the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders argues that Democrats’ “closing argument” should not focus solely on abortion. But when it comes to money and messaging, that’s exactly where Democrats have been setting their sights.
A recent report from the Wesleyan Media Project found that Democratic advertisements have centered on abortion in recent weeks, becoming the top issue in Senate and House on the Democratic side. Nearly 40% of ads supporting Democrats in the House, which has appeared destined for a Republican takeover, mentioned abortion, while 27% of pro-Democratic ads in the Senate did the same. Meanwhile, Republicans have focused much of their energy and their advertising on topics related to the economy.
Sanders noted that “in poll after poll Republicans are more trusted than Democrats to handle the economy,” which he notes is the issue of the “most importance to people.”
“I believe that if Democrats do not fight back on economic issues and present a strong pro-worker agenda, they could well be in the minority in both the House and the Senate next year,” he warned.
Indeed, a recent Gallup poll found that inflation and the economy more broadly are among Americans’ top concerns, while abortion falls lower on the list, among issues like election reform and crime.
Even so, Democrats’ faith in the issue as a salient midterm message appeared to be supported not once but twice. A Kansas referendum in August gave the first glimpse of how the backlash from the Supreme Court’s decision may have the political force to jolt the midterm elections out of a GOP wave that many analysts had predicted.
Voters in Kansas turned out in record numbers in the deep-red state with a Republican-controlled legislature and refused to give the decision on abortion rights back to their elected representatives. By a staggering margin, Kansans decided that the protections for abortion should stay.
Another test of abortion’s political power played out in a House race in upstate New York later in August, when Democrat Pat Ryan campaigned on fighting for abortion access to win the swing district that has for years moved with the national mood, while his opponent touted opposition to President Joe Biden, inflation and crime.
But whether support for abortion – or opposition to it – will motivate voters across the board in the midterms remains to be seen. Polling from the Pew Research Center found that 56% of voters in August said that abortion is “very important” to their vote in the midterms, up 13 percentage points since March. But that increase has almost exclusively been among Democrats.
And while the two examples of abortion’s political power occurred just weeks after the high court’s decision, for the November election, the decision may not remain so fresh in the public’s memory.
