Sarah Isgur, host of The Dispatch's Advisory Opinions podcast, makes the point at Politico that abortion has lost a fair amount of its status as a hot-potato issue due to the fact that opinions are pretty firmly formed and there's not much of an unconvinced populace to persuade.
Let me do some long excerpting here:
At its most basic level, there are two ways a political issue can affect an election. Either it causes a meaningful number of voters to switch from one candidate to another or it increases turnout by motivating people disproportionately on one side of an issue to vote who otherwise would have stayed home.
On the first point, the question is whether there are any voters left who would change their votes based on the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. After decades of abortion litmus tests for candidates, what if the vast majority of voters already changed parties at some point to align with their beliefs on abortion or aligned their beliefs with their party’s increasingly firm ideological stand on the issue?
In the 50 years since Roe was decided, the two political parties have shifted to become almost synonymous with their positions on this singular issue.
At the 1972 Democratic Convention, 59 percent of delegates voted against an abortion-rights plank for the platform. Even as recently as 2009, 64 Democrats voted for an amendment to the Affordable Care Act restricting federal funding for abortions. In 2019, Kirsten Gillibrand campaigned on the idea that the Democratic Party should “be 100 percent pro-choice, and it should be non-negotiable.” As John Murdock wrote in National Affairs, Gillibrand “eventually left the presidential race not because her abortion absolutism was too radical but because it was too common.” Today, only two Democrats in the House identify as “pro-life” and the number may well be zero by 2023.
She then goes on to make the interesting point that the GOP used to quite diverse when it came to this issue:
The Republican Party wasn’t always uniformly anti-abortion. As California governor, Reagan signed into law a liberal abortion bill. Future Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, writes Murdock, had “turned New York City into an abortion destination” as the first state in the country to legalize abortion without a residency requirement. George H.W. Bush’s father was the treasurer of Planned Parenthood, and Bush as a member of Congress “earned the nickname ‘Rubbers’ for his support for contraceptive access.” In the 90s, Republican Majority for Choice had chapters in nearly 20 states, an annual budget of a million dollars, and plenty of incumbents in both houses to support. Today, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins are the last two pro-abortion rights Republicans in the Senate. Republican Majority for Choice closed down in 2018.
Dems' whole ally-of-people-of-color schtick probably won't help them here:
we do see data showing certain voting demographics within the Democratic base — young people, Latinos and Black voters — increasingly dissatisfied with President Biden, which is presumed to hurt Democratic turnout in down-ballot races in the fall. And while a reversal on Roe might motivate some younger voters, Democrats may be wary of campaigning on an issue that could further put off some Latino and Black Democratic voters, who are already more conservative than white Democrats on many social issues, including abortion.
Let us also remember that, comparatively speaking, folks ain't getting so many abortions lately:
At the same time, abortion has become less salient as a political issue. There are fewer abortions in the US than there were when Roe was decided in 1973 — at a time when abortion was illegal in the majority of states. Perhaps this explains why abortion has been steadily falling on the list of issues that voters mention as being the most important issue facing the country while other cultural issues — most notably, immigration — have ticked up. In fact, abortion didn’t even register at 1percent in any of the last four Gallup issue polls.
And outspoken lawmakers can huff and puff a lot, because they're covered by the fact that no one's presently pressing them to get into policy specifics:
The real political fight may be within the parties. Thanks to the Supreme Court, both Democrats and Republicans have been able to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to abortions, talking a big game but avoiding specifics on when abortions should be banned because Roe stood in the way of any real political accountability.
In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Elizabeth Warren refused to name “any limits on abortion” that she would support. But most Americans are unlikely to support elective abortions at 39 weeks. In the meantime, Republican state legislators have passed sloppily drafted laws that they knew wouldn’t go into effect under Roe, including laws that could criminalize the removal of an ectopic pregnancy — a tragic and common complication that will never result in a live birth and could kill the mother in the meantime.
Both parties are about to learn that legislative cosplay is all fun and games until the courts return the issue to voters and their elected representatives have to actually govern.
So placard-carrying activist types might want to consider whether their time is best spent trying to move the needle by such tactics on this.
It's fairly clear that it's going to play out in such a way that it will come down to where one lives.
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