Republicans were largely silent in the wake of a court ruling that called into question the future of a major abortion drug. It's pretty clear why.
Allen G. Breed/File/AP
Abortion is quickly becoming an albatross for Republicans, turning a once-reliable way to drive voter turnout into a major problem for the GOP.
A new poll on Tuesday illustrates how a post-Roe v. Wade world is set to dish out more headaches for conservatives. Conducted from March 27 to April 2, the poll comes in the wake of a Texas federal judge's ruling that would suspend FDA approval of one of the two major drugs used to induce an abortion, mifepristone, which can be prescribed in the first ten weeks of pregnancy.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk's stayed his ruling on mifepristone for seven days, and the Biden administration moved swiftly to get it overturned.
Nonetheless, Kacsmaryk's decision has brought renewed focus to the future of medicated abortions, now the most common method of abortion. According to Pew's poll, only 22% of Americans say that medicated abortions should be illegal in their states, with 53% saying they should be legal and 24% unsure.
This robust majority is even more substantial among a few specific demographic groups vital to the GOP's future.
Among younger Americans, large majorities support keeping the practice legal. Pew found that 71% of women aged 18 to 29 and 60% of men in the same age bracket support legality. Among those 30 to 49, 52% of women and 54% of men want abortion pills to remain legal.
The even more worrying problem for conservatives is that millennials are staying more liberal as they age, a Financial Times study found last year. Unless this trend reverses, abortion rights and other culture war issues could doom GOP candidates in general elections for decades.
White evangelicals, a major core of the modern GOP, are the only demographic group Pew found that has a majority supporting making pills illegal. Among that group, 50% would like to see the pills outlawed, and 23% would like them to remain legal.
Republicans have generally advocated for policies that have restricted abortion access, but Axios noted that many top lawmakers were silent in the wake of Kacsmaryk's ruling. But in recent years, conservatives have moved to restrict access to medicated abortions.
The bad news for the GOP is that while white evangelicals are major parts of party contests such as the Iowa Republican caucuses, there are not nearly enough of them to make up for the losses elsewhere. In the 2022 midterms, exit polls show Democrats almost ran up a nearly 2-to-1 margin among voters aged 18 to 29, while Republicans held more than a 5-to-1 advantage among white evangelicals. But in the end, Democrats held onto the US Senate, and Republicans retook the House with an extremely thin majority.
To see the impact of abortion in key swing states, one can only look to early April's contest in Wisconsin. State Supreme Court Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz won a double-digit victory on a platform that was explicitly built on abortion rights. Protasiewicz flipped a court majority in a state that less than a decade ago had a Republican governor in Scott Walker, who grew so powerful in taking on public sector unions that he was briefly considered a presidential frontrunner.
Protasiewicz ran up the board so much that she nearly won the historically red county of Ozaukee, a suburb of Milwaukee. As for the party base, The Washington Post reported Protasiewicz's campaign produced record-level turnout on Wisconsin college campuses.
It's not just Wisconsin, either.
The first signs that midterms would be upended by abortion came in Nebraska and Kansas, the latter of which was the first state to vote on abortion rights after Dobbs. Kansas voters ended up rejecting an amendment that would have eliminated the right to abortion from the state constitution.
By the end of November, abortion rights advocates went six for six in ballot measures that either enshrined protections into law or stopped further limitations — an incredible streak that reversed years of losses.
