Abortion: Still a winning issue for Democrats?

“No sitting president or vice president had ever visited an abortion clinic before Kamala Harris did so last week,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. That fact tells you “pretty much everything you need to know” about how the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Donald Trump– stacked Supreme Court has transformed the political landscape. Speaking at a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minn., Vice President Harris praised staff there for “providing health care in a safe place” and decried anti-abortion “extremists.” It’s a long way from the not-so-distant days when Democrats worried about alienating moderates with abortion talk, saying only that the procedure should be “safe, legal, and rare.” But with Republicans rushing to fill the post-Roe vacuum with “draconian restrictions on reproductive rights,” and voters even in red states consistently passing ballot measures to protect abortion access, the Biden-Harris campaign knows it can only benefit by reminding Americans how Trump took away “women’s freedom to control their own bodies.”

“It’s one thing to talk about reproductive rights,” said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. It’s another to pose with abortionists and celebrate “the ending of a human life’s beginning,” turning tragedy into “gross” campaign fodder. If the Biden administration thinks it can “whip independents and moderates into a frenzy” on this issue, it hasn’t been paying attention, said Kaitlyn Buss in The Detroit News. The share of voters who rated abortion as their top issue dropped from about 1 in 4 in 2022 to 1 in 8 this month. Voters—men and women— are instead more focused on inflation and the border, areas where Biden gets low marks. The “extreme abortion activism” he has farmed out to Harris stinks of desperation.

Abortion could be an election-deciding issue, said Julie Rodin Zebrak in Washington Monthly, but only if less-engaged voters are told exactly what’s at stake in November. President Biden avoided saying “abortion” in his recent State of the Union, yet working-class women and others outside the Democratic bubble won’t be moved by vague talk of “reproductive health” or the “right to choose.” They need to know that the GOP plan for a second Trump term includes a de facto ban on abortion pills, a push to “surveil providers and recipients of abortion,” and a rollback of Biden administration guidance requiring hospitals to perform lifesaving abortions. “In 2024, the word ‘abortion,’ for better or worse, will help Democrats win.”

With the November elections looming, Democrats face a “massive vulnerability,” said Russell Contreras in Axios: “They’re losing Black and Hispanic voters.” For decades, non-white voters have been “one of the most loyal parts of the Democratic coalition,” but that’s rapidly changing. A recent New York Times poll found that non-white Americans, who backed President Biden by a margin of nearly 50 percentage points in 2020, now favor him over Donald Trump by just 12 points—56 percent to 44 percent. Among Hispanic voters, Trump now actually leads, 46-40. In Gallup polling, the share of Latinos who consider themselves Democrats dropped from 57 percent to 47 percent from 2020 to 2023. It’s a foreboding shift for Democrats, who until recently had reason to believe rising numbers of Hispanic voters would give them a solid majority for decades.

This shift may mystify progressives consumed with identity politics, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, but it’s not surprising. The Biden economy has benefited white professionals with stock portfolios, but minorities have been battered by the highest food prices in 30 years and skyrocketing rents and mortgages. Many Black voters favor tough crime policies, and many Latino citizens competing for jobs want a secure border, not Biden’s “catch-and-release disaster.” Party identities have changed, said John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. The GOP has become the home of working-class voters of all races rather than “the party of wealthy country-club elites.” And many Blacks and Hispanics are churchgoers with traditional values on gender, sex, and religion.

The shift among Latino voters “defies a simple explanation,” said Jennifer Medina and Ruth Igielnik in The New York Times. Latinos are a large and diverse group, and “differences across regions, generations, and economics all play a role.” Trump has gained support among evangelical Latinos, and among young, second-generation Latinos inclined to “vote like their white peers.” Many upwardly mobile Latinos see Trump as a blunt businessman, and don’t consider themselves the target of his “incendiary rhetoric” about migrants. Some strategists believe that polls are missing Latino citizens with limited English, and that in the end, Trump will drive Hispanic voters back to Biden. But with Latinos now accounting for 15 percent of eligible U.S. voters, their votes may be pivotal. In November and beyond, “neither party can win with white voters alone.”