Abortion failed to capture voter spirit

Trump, meanwhile, saw smooth victory as he led in every swing state and safe red states, and made serious gains in commonly Democratic states such as Virginia and New Hampshire. His campaign focused on immigration and inflation talking points, while on-the-ground efforts mobilized low-propensity voters, many of them members of Generation Z.

Harris’s strategy gave almost everything to abortion. She campaigned on being the candidate of “reproductive rights,” courting single women who were already secure votes. Her choice of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as running mate continued on the ticket’s leftward skew and put even more emphasis on abortion and similar issues.

Truly, the Harris campaign presented abortion as the sole source of freedom for women — and Trump did not have to say much to counter that narrative in every way. Reality spoke for itself in the plain costs and crime rates millions of voters associate with the incumbent vice president. Harris’s short-sighted (to pro-lifers, malevolent) vision for the country is surely not the only component of her loss, but it is one of the more obvious.

Proposition results illustrate the effect. Ten states, from Florida to New York to Nevada, included abortion initiatives on their ballots. Some in predictably Republican states, such as Nebraska and South Dakota, protected the right to life and went for Trump. But others, in a move surprising to Democrats, approved abortion allowances and still declined Harris. It seems that abortion is not the cultural force she relied on it to be.

Colorado, Maryland, and New York introduced no-limit abortion laws and easily went to Harris. Missouri and Montana, on the other hand, passed similarly expansive abortion laws and elected Trump each by at least 18 percentage-point margins.

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Even so, abortion advocates insist on the dramatic weight they assign to the issue. In Florida, where voters rejected extreme abortion Amendment 4, supporters of the proposition are indignant at the process requiring 60% of votes to pass: The amendment saw defeat after gaining 57% of votes. It is easy to see that the 60% threshold is a smart defense against frequent changes to the state’s constitution, and Democrats would assent were the outcome in their favor.

Trump’s “light on abortion” stance might have something to do with his success among pro-abortion voters. He has at least gained reasonable doubt with them, at the cost of hurting his reputation with the pro-life constituency. What is more, Trump’s election has provided some hope against an otherwise hopelessly single-minded electorate. Abortion hysteria has not made it to the White House, and may be even further from it.