A good portion of the presidential campaign was framed around the issue of access to reproductive care. The claims made by the two campaigns were vastly different on the topic—as expected.
Trump repeatedly said that he was proud to get Roe overturned claiming that “everybody” wanted abortion returned to the states. That claim didn’t feel like it had much evidence behind it for two reasons: first, ever since the Dobbs decision abortion advocates all over the nation performed better than expected in the 2022 midterms and I’m ever special election with any abortion access component at play and second, because as soon Roe was overturned the most vocal opponents of Roe went right to work repeatedly proposing various national abortion bans—very much NOT trying to leave it to the states.
On the other side, the Harris campaign leaned into the Aaron that basically everyone agreed that the government shouldn’t interfere with women making their own reproductive choices. That claim did seem to be grounded in reality based on the midterms and special elections since Dobbs along with all the medical horror stories coming out of states with restrictive bans.
After Trump won the election with a surprisingly strong showing it got me questioning if Trump might have been right that voters in aggregate are content to handle abortion policy at the state level. It’s clear that many people are rightly appalled at the results of the more restrictive abortion policies but while activists want to enshrine the protections of Roe nationally the presidential results suggest that either 1) the issue is not as important to voters as the Harris campaign believed, 2) voters might be skeptical about the prospect of passing legislation through Congress (that would be well warranted skepticism), or 3) voters overall are satisfied with (or resigned to) trying to correct the more restrictive abortion bans at the state level even if they are horrified by some of the traffic results of those bans. (I suppose in this era of widespread disinformation that there is a fourth option of voters either being unaware of those traffic stories or of believing that they are exaggerated or fabricated.)
