When the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe V. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, progressives had a hissy fit. Suddenly, abortion was no longer a constitutional right! America had entered the alternate universe of The Handmaid’s Tale! And yes, certainly, their outrage was genuine enough. Roe v. Wade and the body of law emanating from it was in a sense progressivism’s Maga Carta. Of all issues on the progressive agenda, the “right to choose” was the one that generated the most passion.
But in their heart of hearts, progressives were delighted as well. For it seemed to them that the Supreme Court had handed Democrats a sure-fire midterm election issue. Salvia filled their mouths as they contemplated the harvest of birthing person votes suddenly ripe for the reaping in suburban America. And for a moment it looked as though they might be right. The gathering red wave, generated by dissatisfaction with the worrisome state of the country and the Biden Administration’s ineptitude, suddenly lost its mojo. Perhaps the red wave would prove to be a ripple. Perhaps, even, the Democrats would hold both their House and Senate majorities. It was the brief summer of their content.
Then came the chill gusts of autumn.
Dobbs was handed down on June 22, 2022. Today, four months later, the hot-button issue of the summer has faded away. Recent polling shows that just 5% of voters rate abortion as a top issue. For most Americans, their top three concerns are the economy, law and order, and the border crisis. Of this trinity, economic concerns, headlined by out-of-control inflation, lead the way by a considerable stretch. Democrats placed a big bet on abortion-as-issue. It hasn’t paid off.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see why this happened. Portentous Dobbs certainly was, but it didn’t overturn the table and smash all the china. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, many Americans assumed that the Supreme Court had “outlawed abortion”—a false impression that pro-choice activists were more than happy to encourage. But in reality, Dobbs left the corpus of state laws bearing on abortion untouched; Nothing changed except on the initiative of state governments. In Indiana, for example, the legislature passed and the governor signed a bill banning abortion in the state, with health, fetal viability, rape and incest exceptions. Subsequently a state court blocked implementation of the new law pending review by the Indiana Supreme Court, which will take up the case in January 2023. In California and Oregon, meanwhile, laws that effectively legalize abortion throughout pregnancy remain in place.
So as time passed and the sky failed to fall, “the right to choose,” lost ground to issues of more immediate concern. Without doubt the most pressing of these was and is inflation. Rising prices at the supermarket and the gas pump are constant, worrying concerns, which abortion is not. Inflation hits everybody, every day, whereas Dobbs affects a relatively small number of people. Stacey Abrams, running for governor in Georgia, tried to link these issues recently, intimating that abortion is an especially effective inflation-fighting tool—a creepy suggestion that seems unlikely to win over many voters.
The general creepiness of their position on abortion is a big problem for Democratic candidates. They can’t be honest about it because there’s a wide gap between the no-limits position of pro-abortion activists and the consensus view of the American people. In general, the latter support abortion rights, but with restrictions. The federal abortion law proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham, which would ban the procedure after the fifteenth week of pregnancy with the usual health, rape and incest exceptions, fairly represents the majority view. But it was excoriated by the pro-abortion side as a barbaric return to the pre-Roe coat-hander era—out once more came the Handmaid costumes. That’s fine for the activists, but it puts Democratic candidates in a tight corner.
During the Georgia senatorial debate between Republican challenger Herschel Walker and Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, the incumbent tried to dodge around this problem by deploying the old argument that abortion is a private matter to be decided between a woman and her doctor. From one of the journalists on the panel came this question: “We are asking you to take a clear position right now. Do you believe there should be any limitations on abortion set by the government?” Warnock’s reply was that the exam room is too small to accommodate the government as well as the doctor and the pregnant woman. Walker’s retort to this drew some blood: He reminded his opponent that there was also a baby in the room, then went on to note that Warnock does in fact want the government present, checkbook in hand, to cover the cost of the abortion. And it was obvious to all that Warnock—a pastor, be it noted—was unwilling to say what he really thinks: that no restrictions at all on abortion should be imposed. He knew that Georgia voters wouldn’t like it.
Thus to the surprise of many, the abortion issue has become more of an electoral liability for Democrats than it is for Republicans. Eagerly seizing on that issue in hopes that it would distract voters from their concerns about the economy, crime and border security, the Democrats took what they thought was the easy way out. But they invested in what turned out to be the political equivalent of zinc futures. And the return on that investment now seems likely to prove nugatory.