Three years after Dobbs leak, abortion no longer dominates politics

Most Democrats still view abortion rights as a cornerstone of party orthodoxy, embraced by the majority of voters, but they also consider it essential for the party to expand beyond that cultural issue — and believe that the first months of Trump’s second term have opened doors to other issues.

The shift in emphasis can already be seen in campaign-style speeches and on television.

During a more than 25-minute speech Wednesday, designed to look like a campaign rally, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) never once mentioned abortion rights or President Donald Trump’s role in nominating key Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.

In New Hampshire last weekend, Gov. JB Pritzker (D-Illinois) tested the 2028 presidential waters with a rallying cry that began by touting how “we enshrined reproductive rights in state law” and then never returned to the topic in a nearly 30-minute stump speech.

And in Michigan late last month, Rep. Haley Stevens (D) and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) launched bids for the U.S. Senate with highly professional two-minute video addresses. Only McMorrow, in a passing reference toward the end of her video, mentioned abortion rights.

Supporters of abortion rights understand the repositioning of priorities, given what Trump’s actions have done in terms of tariffs, the federal workforce and legal battles over deportations.

“Right now people are just looking at what Trump is doing on the economy and immigration,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colorado), the longtime leader on abortion rights in her caucus.

Democrats also find themselves desperate to win back voters’ trust on kitchen-table matters, as Trump won voters who chose the economy as their No. 1 issue by more than 60 points in November. So they have repeatedly gone after Trump for ignoring inflation and drawn attention to potential GOP cuts to health programs such as Medicaid.

The Dobbs leak — broken by Politico in early May 2022 — set off a furious battle over abortion rights, heightened after the actual ruling came out two months later. The initial political fallout was brutal for Republicans, with the first sign coming in a surprise win for Rep. Pat Ryan (D-New York) in a Hudson Valley special election in August 2022.

Those midterms turned out better for Democrats, who even gained a Senate seat, and then in April 2023 won a heavily contested Wisconsin state Supreme Court race that tilted the 4-3 majority to liberal justices.

In that race, nearly 40 percent of all TV ads run by the liberal candidate and supportive outside groups mentioned abortion, according to AdImpact, an independent firm that analyzes political elections.

That set the template for the rest of the 2024 campaign cycle. According to AdImpact, House Democrats and their allies spent more than $232 million on abortion-related ads, while Senate Democrats and their allies spent $212 million on the same theme.

All told, Democratic candidates and allies ran almost 620 different ads on the abortion issue.

Democrats poured $153 million into 56 different ads in the presidential campaign, for Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, related to abortion.

Compared with 2022, Democrats did not have as much success painting Trump and some Republicans as extremist.

Despite Trump’s boasting about overturning Roe v. Wade on his own — he picked three justices who provided the 6-3 margin in the ruling — voters in 2024 did not hold him accountable the way they did other Republicans on the issue.

Harris won, by a 3-1 margin, the voters who considered reproductive rights their most important issue. But they represented just 14 percent of those casting ballots, according to exit polls.

Among all voters who support abortion rights, Harris only won by a 49 percent to 45 percent edge over Trump, as voters in several states voted in favor of abortion rights referendums while also backing Trump.

Enough voters believed Trump when he said he would not push for a national ban on abortion and de-emphasized the issue at the GOP convention in July. And since getting sworn in Jan. 20, Trump has barely mentioned the issue.

“Trump has not focused on it. He, smartly, essentially lied or misled about it in the campaign, which I do think defused concerns from swing voters and independents,” Ryan contended.

Yet while some voters believed Trump would not try to ban abortion, they saw GOP candidates downballot as willing to take that step.

That’s why, according to some Democrats, their party gained a seat in the House and won statewide Senate or gubernatorial races in five swing states in which Trump won.

“Abortion won us several jump-ball races in 2024, and I think it will do the same in 2025 and 2026,” said Ben Ray, a senior executive at Emily’s List, an organization that works to elect women who support abortion rights.

The New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races this November will serve as the next big test of whether abortion returns to the forefront of political issues.

But in the few campaigns run this year, abortion rights have not been as dominant.

The Wisconsin state Supreme Court race in early April, reaffirming a 4-3 liberal majority, had plenty of ads related to abortion, almost 15,000 airings from the liberal candidate and her outside allies, according to AdImpact.

But that was down almost 1,400 from the race two years ago, and this year’s campaign saw the liberal side focus on Elon Musk’s role in slashing federal agencies and heavily supporting the conservative candidate in Wisconsin.

In two special elections for House seats in Florida, Democratic candidates and their allies spent more than $2.1 million on advertisements — but not a single dollar went toward a theme related to protecting abortion rights.

Those districts skewed quite conservative, but the Democratic candidates staked out liberal positions and accepted endorsements from figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

That’s a stark contrast to a February 2024 special election in New York, where liberal outside groups poured nearly $4 million into ads related to abortion to help Rep. Tom Suozzi (D) win.

Ryan said he understands the shift away from abortion rights, because Trump and Musk have overwhelmed media coverage by their unilateral elimination of agencies providing U.S. foreign aid and consumer protections from financial institutions.

“The chaos and the harm of Trump, and Elon too, is so dominant on people’s minds,” he said.

Ryan’s success on abortion rights three years ago came with an important shift in tone, in which the U.S. Military Academy graduate rapped his patriotic service in the Army into protecting freedom at home.

“Freedom includes a woman’s right to choose,” he said in an ad that went viral, helping raise money.

In January, after years under the banner of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, the group renamed itself the Reproductive Freedom Caucus, embracing that concept as a more appealing political goal.

Republicans on Capitol Hill remain overwhelmingly antiabortion. At least 73 House Republicans have signed onto the Life at Conception Act.

With Trump and GOP leaders in Congress steering clear of the issue, the abortion battles are happening in state legislatures and with local prosecutors.

A doctor in Ryan’s district is facing charges for prescribing an abortion pill and selling it online to women in Louisiana, while also facing a civil case brought in Texas.

DeGette said that Colorado, with legal rights for abortion, continues to see a large number of women arriving from antiabortion states to obtain the procedure.

The issue is not going to disappear from the legal and political world, she said. “Americans still feel just as strongly about abortion rights.”

She understands that Trump is obscuring the issue — for now.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be a potent issue in the next election,” DeGette said.