Why Dobbs Didn't Deliver a Win for Democrats

Running against GOP abortion bans had been the Dems secret weapon

Democrats have won every major election since Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Justices overturned Roe v. Wade. With Kamala Harris running against the person most responsible for overturning Roe, there was every reason to believe that Dobbs would once again deliver a victory for Democrats.

Throughout the campaign, Trump bragged about overturning Roe. He adopted a “state’s rights” position suggesting that he supported the most severe bans in the nation, including the one in Florida, which he presumably voted for on Tuesday.

When Biden was the candidate, 90% of his campaign’s ads mentioned abortion. Harris was, perhaps, the party’s best messenger on the issue. The portion of her convention speech covering abortion tested through the roof. Her campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on powerful ads like this one.

When the exit polls were released Tuesday evening, they showed that 65% of voters thought that abortion should be legal, and only 31% said it should be illegal. This had to be great news for Kamala Harris, right? Were 15% of pro-choice voters really going to vote for the guy who made abortion illegal in large swaths of the country AND promised to restrict access further if he won?

As it turns out, yes. Trump did better across the board than four years ago before Dobbs.

What the hell happened? I am still parsing through the results but here are some thoughts.

1. Was There a Post-Dobbs Surge?

I want to start with the important and oft-repeated caveat that the exit polls are notoriously imprecise. To understand the election results, we need to wait months for reports from Pew Research and Catalist. However, the exits can give us directionally correct information for today's purposes.

One of the big questions was whether Dobbs would lead to a surge in support for Harris among women. Before the election, many believed this campaign would lead to a historic gender gap. Well, according to the exits, Harris won women 53-45. In 2020, according to Pew, Biden won women by more — 55-44.

Now, we should wait for better data before making a final conclusion that a male candidate did better with women before Dobbs. But as Ron Brownstein pointed out in The Atlantic:

The exit polls showed Harris winning women (of all races) by eight percentage points and losing men by 13 points. The VoteCast study similarly showed Harris winning women by seven points and Trump winning men by 10 percentage points. At that level, Harris’s lead with women was much smaller than Biden’s in 2020, and even smaller than Clinton’s advantage in 2016.

There was not a post-Dobbs surge in support for Harris and down-ballot Democrats.

2. Why Was 2024 Different From 2022?

In 2022, Democrats bucked history and the political winds to pick up seats in the midterms. This was the first election after Dobbs. Backlash to abortion bans fueled substantial Democratic victories in the very same battleground states that voted for Donald Trump this time around.

In 2022, according to the exits, voters who said abortion should be legal voted for Democrats over Republicans 73-25. However, in 2024, they voted for Harris over Trump 68-39. Now, comparing generic candidates to specific ones is imperfect; these findings (and the election results) show that in 2024, more voters who believed abortion should be legal voted for Trump.

No, Trump did not nullify the issue. No, Kamala Harris didn’t somehow fumble her message or talk about it too much or not enough. The answer is pretty simple.

The electorate on Tuesday was much larger than in 2022. According to estimates from the New York Times, approximately 157 million people voted in the 2024 election, compared to a little more than 107 million who voted in 2022. Those additional 50 million voters are no less choice than the midterm electorate, but abortion is less critical to their vote.

In 2022, 27% of voters said that abortion was their top issue, barely trailing inflation at 31%. In 2024, only 14% said abortion was their top issue, while 32% said the economy. Voters who only vote in presidential elections are much more economically focused than those who vote in every election. They are also less likely to have gone to college and more likely to be working class. These voters preferred what Trump and the Republicans were offering on the economy.

Another factor is that voters in several battleground states had ways to vote for abortion access and Donald Trump. In Nevada and Arizona, there were initiatives on the ballot to protect abortion access. In the other battleground states, pro-choice Democratic senators were running in opposition to a federal abortion ban. Voters generally don’t think senators play a vital role in the state of the economy, but as evidenced by the 2022 results, they do believe that they can influence abortion access.

3. Where Do We Go From Here?

Democrats absolutely should not shy away from talking about abortion — especially as part of a larger Freedom Agenda. The most likely scenario is that Trump has control of the House and Senate. Republicans will push a national abortion ban. Following the plans in Project 2025, the Trump Administration will use its executive authority to restrict access to abortion, particularly by targeting mifepristone. Democrats must use our limited power and our voices to fight back. We have to call out the Republicans and make sure every voter knows what’s happening. One effective way to do that is to talk about how Trump and the Republicans are focused on taking away abortion access instead of lowering prices and raising wages. The voters who swung the election to Trump are cross-pressured on abortion and the economy. Going forward, we should exploit that tension to win them back.