American voters this week chose to reelect a man who has repeatedly bragged about handcrafting the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, consistently spreads disinformation about pregnant people aborting their fetuses “after birth,” said there ought to be “some form of punishment” for women who end their pregnancies, and held that it’s up to the states if they want to monitor individual pregnancies to see whether women get abortions.
At the same time, Americans in Missouri, Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Montana, New York, and Nevada voted to approve ballot measures that would secure abortion rights through their state constitutions. Abortion became legal again in Arizona and Missouri. Both states now ensure access up until viability, a sometimes misleading term that tends to mean around 24 weeks, or later to protect the physical or mental health of the pregnant person. Missouri’s total ban was one of the strictest in the nation, and its winning ballot measure is the first time since Dobbs that voters have had to repeal its abortion ban by popular vote.
Several states where these ballot initiatives received majority support also handily elected Donald Trump. That voters would opt for both Trump and the pro-reproductive freedom measures is staggering—and confounding. It’s a reality that aligns with another fact, that people, regardless of how they vote, may one day need an abortion or other reproductive healthcare to save their lives.
On Tuesday—this dissonance was evident. In Montana, more than 57% of voters moved to maintain access to abortion in the state. Yet, about 58% of voters wanted Trump to win the presidency. Arizonans passed Proposition 139, and while the state hasn’t been officially called into the presidential race, Trump is currently leading. In Missouri, the first state to officially outlaw abortion after the Dobbs decision, nearly 52% of voters enshrined reproductive rights into the state constitution, while 58% of voters elected Trump. And in Florida, where more than 57% of voters said yes on Amendment 4, the initiative that would have reversed the state’s six-week abortion ban (but because Florida requires 60% approval on ballot measures, it did not pass), 56% of voters elected Trump.
Exit polls suggest that, while more women voted for Kamala Harris than Trump, white women—like in 2016 and 2020—were more likely to vote for Trump than the Democrat. While it’s unclear how many white women, or other voters, chose to enshrine abortion protections and vote for the man who has taken credit for creating the environment to roll them back, there is a post-election clarity that these split voters clearly exist.
The 2024 election, as with the midterms before it, will be remembered as being, in part, defined by abortion. Harris, who spoke about reproductive freedom in unprecedentedly stark terms during her campaign, is the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion provider while in office. Her campaign highlighted the stories of people who were denied access to abortion, who were survivors of sexual violence, and who were on the frontlines in medical facilities across the country. For millions of voters this week, abortion was reportedly the number one issue on their minds. Four in ten women voters under 30 said abortion was the most important issue to their vote. And this was true in swing states, too. A New York Times/Siena College set of polls of registered voters in seven battleground states from August found that for women younger than 45, abortion had overtaken the economy as the single most critical issue to their vote.
Plan C, an organization that provides resources for how to self-manage an abortion at home with pills, released a statement after Trump’s win: “Donald Trump’s second administration is an incoming disaster for reproductive justice. While we can expect the worst for abortion rights, we also know that no matter what, abortion is here to stay.”
Trump, his running mate JD Vance, and his cohort of mouthpieces ran a coordinated campaign to rewrite and misrepresent the former president’s impact on decimating access to reproductive healthcare for millions of women across the country. Still, his legacy is evident, as is the right’s disdain for abortion and those who attempt to broaden access to it.