Here’s Why Abortion Largely Won on Election Day—But Not on the Top of the Ticket

Here’s Why Abortion Largely Won on Election Day—But Not on the Top of the Ticket

By Kelly Baden

For supporters of reproductive health care, a glaring contradiction stands at the center of the 2024 election. Most pro-abortion ballot initiatives passed, and the American people reelected the president who was responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade through his Supreme Court appointments.

How to reconcile this contradiction? In many ways the results reflect the complicated dynamics of a post-Roe America.

In the two and a half years since the loss of our federal constitutional right to abortion with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the legal landscape has been upended, with 13 states currently banning abortion completely and many others banning abortion at different points throughout pregnancy that would have been unconstitutional under Roe. The consequences have been nothing short of disastrous, as the scientific evidence foretold. They include the documented tragic deaths of at least four women, the denial of care for women experiencing pregnancy complications, and the increased criminalization and surveillance of pregnant people. At the same time, the number of abortions has risen. That’s likely a result of monumental efforts by clinics, abortion funds and practical support organizations to expand access to care and reduce stigma, as well as broader availability of telehealth for medication abortion and new supportive policies in protective states like shield laws that offer protection for abortion providers treating patients in other states via telemedicine and the removal of public insurance coverage restrictions that make abortion care more affordable.

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No quick fix offers escape from this complicated legal and policy landscape. No one election can fully restore our rights or—as we needed even while Roe stood—bring us closer to true abortion access for all. There is only the steady, ongoing organizing work necessary, state by state, to deliver deep and lasting change. Ballot measures have become a key tool: between the June 2022 Dobbs decision and November 2023, voters in all seven states where measures on abortion were on the ballot came down decisively in favor of retaining or expanding abortion rights. While in November’s voting, the post-Dobbs winning streak of ballot measures on abortion was ultimately broken, seven new proabortion ballot measures passed while three failed. In sum then, voters in 13 states (Montana had measures in 2022 and 2024) have used direct democracy to declare their desire for legal abortion, in frank opposition to the Dobbs decision.

Those results show voters are clearly comfortable splitting tickets, both in terms of candidates (for example, Wisconsin voters returned Trump to Washington alongside Senator Tammy Baldwin, an abortion rights champion) but also when it comes to abortion rights ballot measures. In Missouri, about 52 percent of voters supported establishing a constitutional right to abortion, making Missouri the first to clear the way for overturning a total ban. With their same votes, over 58 percent of voters supported Donald Trump. Similarly, 57.8 percent of voters approved Montana’s abortion rights ballot measure, while 58.4 percent of them supported Trump.

This isn’t new. People often vote for or against an issue when it is presented to them directly on a stand-alone ballot measure, while also voting for a candidate with conflicting views and policies. In 2011, voters in Mississippi soundly rejected an antiabortion “personhood” ballot measure that would have legally defined human life as beginning at fertilization, banning abortion and threatening access to in-vitro fertilization and some forms of birth control. The same election yielded wins of antiabortion Republicans in nearly all statewide races as well as voter ID requirements, echoing contradictory trends in voting behavior we still see today.

These results clearly signal that people support abortion, even in places where their lawmakers don’t. If the goal is for abortion to be de-siloed from partisan politics, we are making progress. But if our goal is bigger—and it should be—we should do much more. Support for reproductive rights can be a gateway for voters into understanding and ultimately embracing a broader social justice framework, centering freedom and bodily autonomy in their politics. While split ticket voting on ballots may continue, it also tells us we need to focus on reaching the Americans who need to take their support for reproductive freedom farther and connect the dots between abortion and other issues like economic justice and democracy.

Of course, rampant misinformation, disinformation and our highly fragmented media landscape—where individualized algorithms lead us all to largely consume news and viewpoints that echo our own views—provide the challenging context in which we each vote. Failures of basic civic education meant that Trump’s claims that he just wanted to “give abortion back to the states” were either accepted as truth or had a veneer of truth for enough voters to give themselves a pass to endorse his outright racism and sexism, despite their support for abortion. Trump himself used this to his advantage, intentionally distancing himself from the failure of his own moves, once their unpopularity became clear.

Make no mistake—abortion opponents aim to further decimate reproductive rights and access, regardless of the clear public support for legal abortion.

These abortion bans are inextricably linked to unequal treatment under the law because of race. Modern-day abortion bans continue the anti-Indigenous and pro-slavery themes of our nation’s founding by enshrining the idea that the state should exert control over our bodies and reproduction, especially for people of color and other marginalized communities. And abortion opponents continue stoking fears of declining white birth rates while targeting Black people especially for criminalization of pregnancy outcomes. Our work to make that clear must escalate, especially for the 53 percent of white women voters who voted for Trump. We cannot applaud abortion ballot wins and ignore that they are coupled with the explicit endorsement of racist candidates and policies.

Untangling the many lessons of the 2024 elections may take time, but time is not on our side: despite abortion rights being supported by most Americans, we stand on the precipice of even more devastating sexual and reproductive rights policies in the U.S. and around the world. The next Trump presidency will likely further decimate reproductive rights and access—he can direct federal agencies to restrict use of the safe and legal abortion drug mifepristone, for instance—even for states that have protected and expanded abortion rights. We must remain vigilant to counter all attempts to worsen the abortion access crisis, while articulating abortion rights support as only one stop on the path to freedom for everyone.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.