Republicans learn the hard way: Voters are still angry about overturning Roe

"Is the Dobbs effect fading?" blared a headline from October 10 at Politico Playbook, the nerve center for the smug centrist take on Beltway politics.

The story helped kick off a month of hand-wringing in the press about how abortion was fading from voters' minds. Over the summer, there had been a massive national backlash to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Over the past few weeks, however, pundits insisted, fears about reproductive rights were replaced with concerns about inflation. (Even though, as the talking heads carefully avoided noting, Republicans are a serious threat to the economy as well.) Mid-October, MSNBC pundit Mike Barnicle summed up the argument by arguing that "while abortion is an issue, it nowhere reaches the level of interest of voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that." "Democrats' Reliance on Abortion for Midterms May Not Be Enough," read a USA Today headline, ignoring that the mythical Democrat who only campaigns on abortion is a strawman. In a classic of the circular-firing-squad genre, the New York Times ran a piece elevating those who "say there has been too much focus on abortion rights and too little attention on worries about crime or the cost of living."

The results of Tuesday's midterm, as these things often go, are a mixed bag. It's hard to discern definitive answers about much, since voters broke every which way all over the country. But one conclusion can be drawn without caveat: Abortion rights are wildly popular. And Americans are still ready to step up and vote to protect them where they can.

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First and foremost, everywhere abortion was put directly on the ballot, abortion won. Not just in California, where voters, as expected, backed a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion as a right by a healthy margin. In Michigan, voters approved a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights. In Kentucky, an amendment to explicitly deny abortion rights in the constitution was voted down. Voters in Vermont, as expected, amended their constitution to protect abortion rights. Even in Montana, an anti-abortion law appears to be voted down. The law was misleadingly packaged as protection for infants "born alive," based on a particularly nasty anti-choice lie. In reality, the law was about prosecuting doctors, potentially criminalizing palliative care for newborns with fatal conditions.

None of these votes are particularly surprising. Over the summer, anti-choice activists in Kansas put a constitutional amendment to ban abortion on the ballot and lost. And they did everything in their power to tilt the playing field. They put it up for a vote in the summer's primary election when few Democrats were expected to turn out. They ran misleading ads that implied a "yes" vote was pro-choice, when it was the opposite. Voters turned out in record numbers anyway. Abortion remains a constitutional right in Kansas.

Still, Tuesday was a test of whether reproductive rights matter not just when voters are asked directly about the issue, but when they are choosing candidates. On that front, things are a little hazier, as candidates run on complex platforms and voters have to decide on many issues. But the results so far suggest that putting abortion front and center in a campaign mattered.

In Pennsylvania, the abortion issue was especially prominent, as the GOP-controlled legislature has been expected to pass a draconian ban the second they had a Republican governor who will sign it. Indeed, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, was on the record saying he would like to charge women who get abortions with murder, a position he unconvincingly backed down from during the later parts of the campaign. The Democratic candidate, Josh Shapiro, made protecting abortion rights a central part of his campaign, building on a career of strong support for reproductive health care. Mastriano was a poor candidate in many ways — he participated in the January 6 insurrection — but his stance on abortion rights helped underscore the threats of Republican extremism to voters.

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Even more telling, however, may be the Pennsylvania Senate race. Even though it's unlikely to have an immediate impact on abortion rights, the issues stayed at the forefront of the race. For much of the summer, the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, had a comfortable lead over the Donald Trump-picked Republican candidate, TV snake oil peddler Dr. Mehmet Oz. The race tightened up in the last month, as the Oz campaign, with a big assist from the mainstream media, successfully stigmatized Fetterman for his halting speech post-stroke, even as doctors assured voters he is expected to recover. Fetterman, however, leaned hard on his pro-choice stance. His campaign heavily highlighted Oz's remark about how he wanted to enlist "local politicians" to make the abortion choice for women. The strategy no doubt helped Fetterman land a victory in one of the biggest nail-biters of the midterms. Exit polls suggest that abortion was a top-of-mind issue for Pennsylvania voters.

A similar race played out in Michigan, where Democratic incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer forefronted her pro-choice views in a race against Trump-picked Republican candidate Tudor Dixon. Whitmer has always been outspoken on the subject, tying her experiences as a rape survivor to her support for abortion rights, giving her a moral gravitas on this issue that's hard to assail. Meanwhile, Dixon was out there claiming that a 14-year-old incest victim is a "perfect example" of someone who should be forced into childbirth. She also argued that forcing a rape victim to give birth to her attacker's child is a "healing" experience.

Make no mistake: Republicans are still winning in significant numbers and will likely end up controlling one or both houses of Congress. The fundamentals in this race predicted a Republican win: The party that has the White House usually loses the midterms. That's made worse by the inflation problem and general voter disapproval of President Joe Biden as a result. With Trump out of headlines, it's been hard to get low-information swing voters to take seriously the Republican threat to democracy.

Still, as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., griped to NBC News Tuesday night, "Definitely not a Republican wave, that's for darn sure."

Of course, Graham only has himself to blame. He's the one who floated a national abortion ban bill in September that largely targets abortions performed due to fetal anomalies. Forcing women to give birth to babies who are destined to die within hours is not popular with voters! But Graham, like much of the punditry and many of his fellow Republicans, seemed to feel voters would not care enough to punish Republicans for laws that serve no other purpose but sadism and misogyny. Tuesday, they were proven wrong.