For Kamala Harris and the Democrats, it was a $500 million losing bet.
They felt that the threat that Donald Trump posed to abortion rights was worth that enormous expense on a national campaign of ads and warnings on television, streaming and social media.
But based on Tuesday’s results, the $500 million bet now looks like a waste of money.
Americans gave Trump and many Republicans in Congress decisive victories Tuesday despite Democrats’ belief that abortion would be the galvanizing issue for people heading to the polls.
Protecting reproductive freedom has been a rallying cry for Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
It ended the national right to abortion and returned the issue to the states.
It was a major issue in some key states in the 2022 midterms and helped Democrats avoid a red wave, but it produced widely mixed results this year.
Protesters marching in Arizona after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. A majority of the state’s voters elected Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, while the state also passed an amendment to protect abortion.
In the end, exit polls show it was the third most important issue behind “democracy” and “the economy,” and only 14 percent of respondents rated it as the most important issue.
While Kamala Harris was seen as having a better handle on the issue and 65 percent of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, that did not translate into votes and victories for Democrats in key races. .
The vice president campaigned intensely on the issue throughout the country. Her promise to protect reproductive freedom received some of the biggest applause at her events.
She promised she would sign a law to protect abortion as president if Congress passed one and warned that Trump would support a national abortion ban if elected, even though he denies he would do so.
Trump, while he had previously expressed support for a national ban, said he would leave the issue in the hands of the states if he won a second term.
“It’s very clear that Donald Trump tried to confuse his message on abortion and did not suffer the same branding problem on that issue that perhaps other Republicans suffered in the past,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne.
“Voters don’t trust and don’t like Republicans on the abortion period,” Payne said. “Furthermore, voters have shown that they will continue to vote Republican regardless.”
There were several cases where this was fully manifested on Tuesday.
Donald Trump officially flipped Arizona on Saturday to sweep all seven swing states in the 2024 presidential election.
Arizona voters also approved an amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution with more than 60 percent support.
Arizona was one of 10 states where abortion rights were directly on the ballot Tuesday.
In seven out of 10 of those states, voters chose to protect abortion rights, indicating that large swaths of voters generally support abortion access.
Even in deeply red states like Missouri and Montana, where Trump and the Republicans won, voters acted to protect abortion rights. The Missouri ballot measure passed with more than 51 percent support. In Montana, a ballot initiative received more than 57 percent.
Even in Florida, where the amendment to protect abortion failed to reach the necessary threshold of 60 percent of the state, about 57 percent of voters supported it and still elected Trump by a double-digit margin at 56 percent. hundred.
Since then, some strategists have suggested that the ballot initiatives could, perhaps, even have given voters a permission structure to feel comfortable voting for Republicans who might oppose abortion access because they could also vote directly on the issue.
Anti-abortion activists saw it differently. They argued that Democrats’ scaremongering on the issue didn’t work as well as it wasn’t the galvanizing issue Democrats thought it was.
“This election shows that abortion was not the silver bullet Democrats thought it would be,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
“Even after Democrats spent half a billion dollars on television ads on abortion in this election, they lost the presidency, the Senate and potentially the House of Representatives,” he said. ‘The reason? “His extreme agenda on abortion is out of step with that of Americans.”
He stated that “most Americans support early and reasonable limits on abortion.”
But even as voters opted to protect abortion rights with ballot measures in seven out of 10 states this cycle and in multiple elections since the fall of Roe, advocates are sounding alarms about the impending Trump administration.
The Center for Reproductive Rights warned that the Trump White House could move to block the mailing of abortion pills, making access difficult even in states where abortion is legal.
The group vowed to fight any efforts to pass a national abortion ban and efforts to prevent women from crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.
“We will examine every action by the White House and federal agencies, build factual and legal precedents to counter agency actions, and work to prevent harmful policies from taking effect,” said President and CEO Nancy Northup.
“If they do, we will take them to court,” he added.