The Florida Supreme Court's decision Monday to greenlight an abortion referendum in November begins the most important race on the issue since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Florida will decide whether to amend its constitution to overturn the Legislature's six-week abortion ban upheld by the court and allow for free abortions up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
One poll late last year found support for pro-choice measures in the state at 62 percent. The Biden campaign is elated at the chance to push abortion rights to the forefront in a state that Donald Trump won by less than 4 percentage points in 2020. The smart money still lies in Trump winning Florida, without which his path to the presidency would collapse, but keeping his policies in place. The state, with a population of about 23 million people in the red column, will almost certainly rely on hundreds of thousands of Floridians voting pro-Trump and pro-choice.
As this contest gets into full swing, it's worth considering how badly the Republican Party and the pro-life movement have lost since the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. First, Dobbs contributed to the Democratic Party's historic performance in the 2022 midterm elections. Careful academic research shows that abortion increased Republican support among independent voters by 4.5 percentage points in 2020. In 2022, this issue led to a 13% increase in Democratic voters.
The authors explain: “For decades, partisan voters have had clear positions on abortion, but Roe v. Wade generally established a constitutional right to abortion, and elected officials have held clear positions on the issue. It didn't seem like they had much of a say.'' In other words, abortion policy was separated from the electoral process. Mr. Dobbs restored connections, leading to a “realignment of priorities” among key constituencies. The result was a boost to Democratic candidates and denied Republicans a politically stable majority in the House.
Meanwhile, since Dobbs, pro-choice advocates have won state-by-state referendums. They won in blue states like California (67 percent to 33 percent) and purple states like Michigan (57 to 43), as well as red states like Kansas. (59-41), Ohio State (57-43), Montana State (53-47) and Kentucky (52-48). The arena of direct democracy has become an immense disaster for anti-abortion opponents. If Florida's six-week ban survives, it will likely be because the state requires a 60 percent supermajority to amend its constitution.
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Parties may also pay temporary electoral costs while securing lasting policy victories. Consider that Democrats passed Obamacare. They lost power in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, but expanded health care subsidies remain in place seven election cycles later. Republican Congresses have succeeded in banning abortion in more than a dozen of the nation's reddest states. But a report last month from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights advocacy group, found that the number of legal abortions in the United States will increase by 10% between 2020 and 2023, topping 1 million for the first time since 2012. Ta.
Guttmacher attributes some of this increase to interstate migration. States bordering states with abortion bans saw 37% more abortions than in 2020. The group also cited subsidies from the “abortion fund” that followed Dobbs and the increased availability of chemical abortions. It's unclear how Dobbs will bend America's abortion curve in the long run, but so far the curve hasn't bent in the direction desired by the pro-life movement, which has worked for years to overturn Roe.
One response is to accuse Republicans of lacking a politically salable way to talk about abortion. But for Republican politicians, there's no way around the fact that the median voter appears to be wary of abortion restrictions. There is also no evidence that that sense of caution is easing. In fact, it has been on the rise over the past decade. Trump's rivals in the 2024 primaries argued that he was unelectable, but the debate over his stance on abortion (a 15-week ban that would only make about 4% of abortions illegal) This puts him closer to representing voters' opinions than his own party.
As history may show, the country's polarizing debate over Roe was secondarily about abortion and primarily about the old question of sources of political authority. “What the law says about marriage doesn't particularly matter to me,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a dissenting opinion in a 2015 case establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Today's decision says that my rulers, and the rulers of 320 million Americans across the nation, are the majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. There is.”
The Supreme Court in Dobbs declared an end to the justices' half-century reign when it came to abortion. But for now, it appears that the new American people will sanction an abortion system that is generally similarly permissive, albeit geographically different. The real test of Dobbs' opinion is whether abortion policy determined by the majority has more legitimacy than policy determined by the Supreme Court, and whether the process of greater democratic give and take strengthens political institutions. The question is whether to strengthen it or weaken it.
Mr. Roe helped Mr. Trump take the White House in 2016 by increasing conservative turnout in an election that immediately changed the landscape of the U.S. Supreme Court. But with Roe gone, the Republican Party has become a victim of its own success. If the populist president who plotted to overthrow Roe is to return to power in 2024, he will need to overcome the disorienting democratic forces unleashed by his plan.