Abortion: Kamala Harris' downfall

This article was published in The Oxford Student as part of my 'Womansplaining' column on 17 Nov 2024.

Despite all the talk about election results taking days, even weeks to determine, it was already clear which way the election was swinging a few hours after polls closed. It became increasingly evident that Kamala Harris was set to lose all seven swing states. The final electoral college results were a crushing defeat — Donald Trump’s 312 to Harris’ 226. Biden won 306 back in 2020.

One of the most surprising parts of the landslide Trump victory was how little abortion rights ended up affecting the presidential race. Abortion was projected to be one of the key winning issues for the Democrats. With the latest research showing that 63% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and Trump famously taking credit for the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Democrats were hopeful that the issue of abortion access would swing the election in their direction. Harris made abortion rights a focal point of her campaign, and explicitly called abortion restrictions “Trump abortion bans”. 

The Democrats were right that most voters supported abortion, with seven states, including Missouri, Colorado, and Montana, voting to protect the right. However, they did not expect the split-ticket voting—where voters vote for candidates from different political parties in the same election—that ended up happening. Most of those who voted “yes” on abortion-related measures in Arizona and Nevada also voted for Harris, but about a quarter of these voters backed Donald Trump. One stark example is the voting choices of Republican women in Nevada, where a third voted for the right to abortion, but only 5% supported Harris. 

Why did this happen? One possible explanation is just that there were more important issues that voters cared about. A CBS exit poll showed that among those in Nevada who voted for Trump but also to expand abortion access, more than half said that the economy was the most important issue. With high inflation and a persistent cost of living crisis, it is no wonder that the anti-incumbent candidate had an advantage. Nate Silver, who rose to fame after his FiveThirtyEight was the closest to predicting a shock Trump win in 2016, tweeted that “each additional $100 of inflation in a state since January 2021 predicts a further 1.6 swing against Harris”. The salience of economic issues thus overshadowed the salience of abortion rights.

Another explanation is that voters did indeed support abortion access, but disagreed that Trump was anti-abortion. In the presidential debate, Harris accused Trump of planning to authorise a national ban on abortion if he were to be re-elected, and consistently repeated this claim during her campaign. Trump vehemently denied this, saying that the decision should be left up to individual states. Ultimately, Trump was more convincing to the electorate. Harris’ campaign argument that Trump would try to put a national abortion ban in place failed to resonate with most voters outside the Democratic Party. 

It is also possible that the ability to vote on abortion-related measures, including Proposition 139 in Arizona and Question 6 in Nevada, paradoxically led to decreased support for Harris. If voters felt that they could protect their right to abortion by directly voting on the issue itself, they may have less incentive to vote for Harris. 

In the end, focusing this election on abortion rights was a gamble that the Democrats and Harris lost. It was an issue that many Americans cared about a lot, but not enough to sway them away from Trump. Perhaps the big takeaway here is that the Left ought to place heavier emphasis on economic and labour issues and focus on presenting a positive vision for the workers they have so clearly alienated.