The abortion albatross?

Kansas Republicans entered the 2022 midterms confident they could oust Democratic U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, the only Democrat among the state’s congressional delegation. During previous redistricting, GOP legislators had taken part of urban Wyandotte County—home of deep blue Kansas City—out of Davids’ 3rd District and replaced it with three rural, red counties. Yet on election night, Davids defied expectations, increasing her support by more than a percentage point over her victory in the previous election.

The Kansas Third was emblematic of the GOP’s dashed hopes for the 2022 midterms, when the much-anticipated “red wave” barely made a ripple. Analysts blamed the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which reversed Roe v. Wade’s mandate of legal abortion throughout the country.

Dobbs energized angry pro-abortion voters and put wind in the sails of Democrats like Davids. This year’s ­candidates are hoping for a repeat performance.

Vice President Kamala Harris has made unfettered abortion access a key plank in her campaign platform, as have congressional candidates in tight races. But even as Republicans continue to run scared on abortion, polling data show that Dobbs in 2024 may no longer be the albatross that it was for Republicans in 2022.

It’s not that Americans in general were particularly animated about Dobbs two years ago. A Pew Research Center survey found that, among all registered voters, abortion was only the ninth-most-­important issue that year. But as is typical in a midterm election, a lot of those registered voters didn’t actually vote. (Turnout was 46 percent, compared with 66 percent in 2020, the last year with a presidential race at the top of the ballot.) An NBC News exit poll on Election Day found that those who did vote in 2022 rated abortion as the second-­most-­important issue after inflation.

Pro-abortion voters, with the Dobbs decision fresh in their minds, clearly had more motivation than many others to get to the polls, and that muted the GOP’s cyclical midterm advantages.

This year, the outlook among registered voters is similar to 2022. A lot of evidence indicates that while abortion is an important issue to Americans, it simply isn’t in the top tier. Pew, in a September survey, found results similar to its 2022 poll of registered voters. This time abortion came in eighth on this list of most important issues. In a late August poll by The Economist/YouGov, abortion ranked No. 14 out of 15 issues, topping only climate change/environment. Only 8 percent of respondents ranked abortion as the most important issue, and only 5 percent of independents did so.

Another, more unusual, data point also suggests Americans have other issues on their minds: Since early this year, the Associated Press and Google Trends have partnered to track searches of election-related topics on Google. Abortion ranks seventh after Social Security, crime, healthcare, unemployment, the economy, and immigration.

SO WHAT’S CHANGED? This year is a presidential election year, and the relative unimportance of the abortion issue will likely carry through to Election Day when more of those registered voters actually vote. A Data for Progress poll surveyed likely voters early this year, and found that only 5 percent ranked abortion as their most important issue. Even when respondents (all of them likely voters) could pick three top issues, abortion finished 10th out of 11, topping only climate change and “other.”

Of course, some of the voters who picked abortion as a top issue are pro-­lifers, and evidence shows they are more motivated to get to the polls this year. In May, Georgia Democrats ran a former member of Congress, John Barrow, against conservative state Supreme Court Justice Andrew Pinson. Barrow made legal abortion a centerpiece of his campaign. But in the purple swing state, Pinson won the race with 56 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, a June poll from KFF, which conducts surveys on health issues, found that 53 percent of Republican women said they were more motivated than usual to vote this year (compared with 44 percent of Democratic women and 29 percent of independent women). Among Republican women who describe themselves as pro-life, 65 percent said they were motivated to vote. The poll was taken before Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president, a move likely to increase Democratic motivation across the board. But it still suggests pro-life Americans will make a strong showing at the polls this year.

The upshot of all this: Highly motivated pro-abortion voters can always affect some close races at the margins and can have an outsize effect in a low-­turnout election. But they almost certainly reached their peak influence in 2022, and their numbers aren’t big enough to have a major effect in a year with a high-turnout presidential election.

Like the 2022 midterms, the 2024 races for president and Congress are expected to be decided by razor-thin margins. Either party could come out on top. But Dobbs probably won’t be the deciding factor.

Read other stories in this issue’s 2024 election package: “Election Guide: Competing visions for America” and “Voting with their feet.”