Some pundits tried to pin the latest Republican election losses on former President Donald Trump, but the GOP’s Tuesday trouncing was more likely tied to the party’s stance on limiting abortion, which they have struggled to define for more than a year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
The GOP’s muddled messaging on abortion post-Roe could spell disaster for the party in 2024.
Republican losses in Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania indicate abortion is a leading issue among voters. Those driven to the polls Tuesday rejected the party’s efforts to limit the procedure, even at 15 weeks, which is backed by a slim majority of Americans.
“Elections all around the country had one overriding message: The pro-abortion rights majority is still angry about the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future,” University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato told The Washington Times.
Democrats now see the GOP’s abortion quandary paving their path to victory in 2024, when the House, Senate and White House are up for grabs.
“Every time MAGA Republicans bring their abortion bans to the ballot box, they lose,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, Massachusetts Democrat. “Americans are making our voices heard and we believe medical decisions are between a patient and doctor — not a patient and a GOP politician on a power trip.”
SEE ALSO: Biden campaign says Trump can’t have it both ways on abortion issue
The Supreme Court’s landmark decision to overturn Roe in June 2022 ended federally legalized abortion and sent decisions about the procedure back to the states. Two election cycles later, Republicans are beginning to see the high court ruling long sought by their party crushing them at the polls.
“I don’t think it’s a big secret but in many states, abortion is not a winning issue for Republicans,” Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah Republican and former Republican presidential nominee, told The Times. “The winning issue relates to the economy and the cost of living. People are suffering high costs of food, gasoline, housing, health care, and they want to see people who can improve their lives. So focusing on abortion didn’t turn out to be a big winner. I think you would not find that as a surprise.”
Republicans lost the governor’s race in Kentucky and the Virginia statehouse, while voters in Ohio easily passed a citizen-sponsored measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. In Pennsylvania, Democrat and abortion-rights advocate Dan McCaffery won the open seat on the state supreme court.
Tuesday’s losses for the GOP come a year after Republicans suffered a similar thrashing in the midterm elections, where the abortion issue helped sink GOP candidates in key swing-state races. Pro-abortion turnout helped keep the Senate under Democratic control and limited the House Republican takeover to just a handful of seats.
In Virginia, a proposed 15-week ban on abortion drove enough Democratic voters to the polls Tuesday to dash Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hope of winning control of the statehouse.
Instead, voters flipped the Republican-led Senate and returned full control of the legislature to Democrats, blocking the GOP from implementing future abortion restrictions and dimming Mr. Youngkin’s allure as a rising GOP star.
A July AP-NORC poll found that 51% of adults support keeping abortion legal up to 15 weeks of pregnancy. But the proposed restriction didn’t sell with voters in Virginia, a once-red state that has leaned increasingly Democratic.
Mr. Youngkin campaigned on the 15-week limit and sought to define the Democratic position on abortion as extreme and without any limits at all.
In October, his political action committee spent $1.4 million on an ad campaign to dispel the claim by Democrats that a GOP-controlled statehouse would pursue an outright abortion ban, which under current Virginia law is permitted for up to 26 weeks.
In proposing the 15-week limit with some exceptions, Mr. Youngkin sought the middle ground with voters — far from the six-week abortion ban pushed by the most conservative wing of the party, including Republican presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Mr. Youngkin’s 15-week gambit, said Mr. Sabato, “didn’t work either.”
The party may have to consider another option, he said: “Avoid talking about it and change the subject.”
But Democrats won’t let Republicans duck the issue.
In Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear overcame President Biden’s unpopularity in his deep-red state to defeat Republican Daniel Cameron and win a second term.
Democrats in the Bluegrass State made abortion limits a central campaign issue.
Mr. Beshear bashed Mr. Cameron repeatedly about the Republican Party’s anti-abortion stance. A Bashear campaign ad featured a woman who was raped by her stepfather at age 12. She questioned the state’s current abortion ban, which prohibits the procedure even in cases of rape and incest.
The most ardent of the pro-life wing of the GOP on Wednesday rejected the notion that the party should back away from efforts to limit abortion.
They argued Republicans have done a poor job uniting behind a message of protecting the life of the unborn and failed to show voters that the Democrats’ position supporting limitless abortion is extreme.
“We have to unite our party together to fight their radical stance on abortion and win in 2024,” said Mercedes Schlapp, who worked as a communications director in the Trump White House and now hosts the nation’s largest annual conservative confab, the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming Republican, said navigating the abortion issue may not be that simple for the party.
“I think that we need to acknowledge that Americans really value and cherish their individual constitutional rights regardless of whether they ever intend to use them,” she said. “We as Republicans need to take that and try to move forward, and not change our core values, but remember that the core values of the individual American also involve the freedom to be an American. It’s going to be a huge challenge for us.”
Mr. Trump, who was blamed along with the abortion issue for 2022 midterm election losses and tagged by some for Tuesday’s defeats, long ago distanced himself from bans on the procedure in the first term of pregnancy.
He blamed Mr. Cameron’s loss in Kentucky on his GOP nemesis, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a fellow Kentuckian who endorsed Mr. Cameron but whose own approval ratings have dipped.
Mr. Trump took credit for the GOP’s only big win on Tuesday, the re-election in deep-red Mississippi of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves. He said Mr. Reeves “surged after my involvement.”
Mr. Trump in September called the six-week ban endorsed by Mr. DeSantis, arguably his top, but distant opponent for the 2924 GOP presidential nomination, “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”
The former president said he opposes abortion bans that do not include exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.
“In order to win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to talk about Abortion,” Mr. Trump said in a September post on Truth Social.
Asked by NBC News how he would navigate the abortion issue if elected president, Mr. Trump predicted he’d come up with a successful solution that would allow the GOP to finally put the issue behind it. “I’m going to come together with all groups,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re going to have something that’s acceptable.”