Abortion Is a Convenient Scapegoat for MAGA’s Political Weaknesses

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

 

If there’s one thing on which Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans alike can agree, it’s that the GOP’s spate of electoral failures is attributable to one factor above all: abortion.

 

“Support for abortion cuts across party lines, performing significantly better at the ballot box than Biden and other Democrats,” Politico’s reporters observed in the wake of a disappointing showing for the GOP in 2023’s off-year elections. With Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his down-ballot coattails being the notable exception, the Republican Party’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms was written off as blowback from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. “Nationally, nearly half (47%) of all voters say the Court’s decision had a major impact on which candidates they supported in this election, including almost two-thirds (64%) of those who voted for Democratic House candidates,” a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis reported. The issue of abortion access has even been credited with delivering to Democrats a variety of victories in special elections across the country.

 

It’s not especially surprising to hear operatives loyal to the president’s party attribute the GOP’s shortcomings to the Supreme Court ruling that overturned judicial precedents in Roe and Casey. Interestingly enough, some on the MAGA right eagerly concur with their Democratic counterparts.

 

“Trump is the only Republican with the sense and the courage to say what many conservatives do not want to hear: their moral agenda is unpopular,” Matthew Boose wrote in a November piece for American Greatness titled “Abortion, Not Trump, is the GOP’s Albatross.” Trump himself leaned into this narrative in his effort to evade responsibility for the GOP’s failure to capitalize on the historically inopportune conditions Democrats faced in 2022’s midterms. “It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms,” the former president wrote. “It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters.”

 

Without question, abortion in the post-Dobbs environment is a powerful fundraising vehicle for Democrats and a turnout-generating machine. When abortion is on the ballot directly, such as in state referenda, the pro-life side of the issue has consistently come up short. The picture is a more muddled one when popular Republican politicians are returned to their offices despite their support for, among other controversial initiatives, “heartbeat bills” and the like. And yet, the narrative peddled by Trump and his courtiers conveniently presupposes that Republicans didn’t start losing big at the ballot box until the summer of 2022. This is nonsense.

 

When Donald Trump descended the escalator in 2015, the GOP was at the top of its game. In January of that year, the GOP occupied 247 seats in the House and 54 seats in the Senate. Republicans occupied 31 governor’s mansions and controlled 62 of the country’s 99 state-level legislative chambers. The GOP lost six House seats and two senate seats the year Trump won the White House, but the former president’s surprising victory scrambled political calculations. Perhaps Trump’s unorthodox brand of politics would remake the landscape in the Republican Party’s favor, some speculated. In the end, Trump did remake the landscape, but not in ways that helped the GOP.

 

As early as 2017, Republicans committed themselves to a quixotic quest to nominate the most unpalatable candidates possible to high office — an enterprise that reliably culminated in electoral disaster. That year, the GOP lost a race for U.S. Senate in, of all places, Alabama. The off-year elections saw Democrats retake control of legislative chambers in Washington state, New Jersey, and Virginia. The Democrats increased their margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Hampshire. They captured two seats in Georgia’s House of Representatives that they hadn’t even bothered to contest in 2016. And they won mayoralties in municipalities from St. Petersburg to New York City.

 

That reaction to the GOP’s dominance could have been written off as voters’ predictable buyer’s remorse after they’ve given one party total control of all the levers of power in Washington. But the party’s losing streak was just getting started.

 

The GOP performed shockingly poorly in special elections throughout 2018, a trend culminating in a historic drubbing for the party in that year’s midterm elections. Democrats needed 23 seats to retake the House of Representatives. They won 41 seats. The GOP lost six governorships. The party lost seats in 63 state legislative chambers and lost control of five such chambers. The Senate GOP actually increased its majority by defeating incumbent Democrats in places such as Indiana, Missouri, Florida, and North Dakota, demonstrating that the Republican brand could still compete with that of conservative Democrats in critical swing states. But the GOP failed to make the most of that opportunity.

 

In their wisdom, voters sought to extirpate Donald Trump from the White House in 2020 with surgical precision while leaving much of the Republican Party around him intact. Joe Biden won, but Republicans still had plenty to celebrate. With the exception of races in Colorado and Arizona, the GOP retained control of all seven of the seats in the U.S. Senate where Republican candidates were believed to be vulnerable. Republicans were expected to lose ten to 20 House seats, but they ended election night with a net gain in the lower chamber of Congress. Republicans had lost two governorships in Kentucky and Louisiana to Democrats in 2019, but the party partially recovered its losses in 2020 by taking control in Montana. Voters sent a clear signal to Washington: While Republican governance is not wholly undesirable, Trump is.

 

But then came the election denial.

 

In the interim between Election Day and January 5, 2021 — the day when Georgians went back to the polls to participate in two runoff elections for U.S. Senate — Trump ceaselessly hectored the party into believing that voting was a fool’s game and the Peach State’s GOP was hopelessly corrupt. “I won’t [vote] next time,” said one representative Trump fan. “I’m not doing Dominion machines.” That wasn’t just sour grapes. “Georgia runoff elections were very favorable for Republicans until very recently,” the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observed in the wake of the GOP’s losses in both of those contests. “Turnout everywhere was very high for a runoff,” he continued. “But it was higher in blue counties, and it dropped the most in the most conservative part of the state, north Georgia.”

 

In the months that followed, election denial became the price of admission into Republican politics at the national level. Despite pronounced shifts toward the GOP in America’s dark-blue strongholds — places like California, New York, New Jersey, and South Florida — the Republicans who underperformed in 2022 tended to share Trump’s hostility toward the electoral process. “Nearly every single candidate in battleground state races who denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election was defeated for positions that oversee, defend and certify elections,” NBC News reported. Many incumbent Republicans and statewide candidates in dark-red states won their races, regardless of their views on election integrity. “But in races rated as competitive,” the Washington Post reported, election deniers’ “results have generally been poor.”

 

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the legally dubious precedents in Roe and Casey created new headwinds for Republicans, particularly those who didn’t seem at all prepared for an outcome the GOP had sought for the better part of a half century. And yet, abortion alone cannot explain the GOP’s losing streak, which is a phenomenon that long predates the Dobbs ruling. If Trump wins his party’s nomination for a third time and GOP losses mount, Republicans are likely to lean heavily into the escapist narrative that their political problems have little to do with the deeply unpopular figure at the top of their ticket — and abortion will serve as a convenient scapegoat.