For Democrats and the Harris campaign, the path to victory in 2024 seemed clear: Make abortion rights the centerpiece of the campaign. If voters were to put the first woman in the Oval Office, strategists suggested it would be largely because of this issue.
Campaign advertising data tells the story – “women’s rights” and “abortion” dominated Harris’ messaging, appearing in 71% of her television ads during the second to last week of the campaign. While Republicans focused their airwaves on taxes (97% of ads) and immigration (82%), Democrats bet heavily that abortion rights would mobilize their base and swing crucial voters.
Election night revealed a more complex reality. Voters passed abortion protection measures in seven out of the ten states with these measures on the ballot, showing clear and continued support for reproductive rights. Yet many of these same voters did not vote for Kamala Harris, a candidate who made abortion rights her defining issue.
How could abortion measures win, yet Harris lose so decisively? The short answer is that abortion attitudes were no more predictive of turnout or vote choice in 2024 than they were in the past several presidential elections.
Support for abortion rights didn’t translate into a vote for Harris
Our analysis of preliminary data from the Cooperative Election Study reveals a surprising pattern: People who supported abortion rights were not more likely to vote for the Democratic ticket than they had been in previous cycles. The graph below plots the Democratic share of the vote for president among three groups – those who think abortion should always be legal, those who think it should be legal with some restrictions, and those who think it should always be prohibited.
Democrats were hoping to produce an uptick in support among the first two groups in 2024, the first presidential election since the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. But the graph shows that this effort fell short.
Voters who support fully legal abortion typically provide strong support for Democratic presidential nominees. That support apparently peaked at 81% for Joe Biden in 2020. In 2024, this group’s support for Harris appeared to drop slightly to 74%, closer to the support level in 2016 for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Voters who support abortion with some restrictions are much less supportive of Democratic presidential candidates, never breaking the 40% support mark during the past four presidential cycles. In 2024, this group’s support for Harris was, if anything, slightly lower than it had been for Biden in 2020 or Clinton in 2016. This suggests that Harris’ focus on abortion was not particularly effective in persuading voters to support her in 2024.
It is also worth noting an increase in the percentage of independents and Republicans who shifted to supporting abortion being legal in some circumstances after the Dobbs ruling. Thus, one reason that Harris’ support among voters who support abortion with some restrictions may have stalled is because more Republican voters had adopted that position by 2024.
Abortion rights drove voters to the polls in 2022 – but less so in 2024
In the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, abortion rights was a powerful force for getting voters to the polls. In the 2022 midterm elections, voters responded to the Roe v. Wade reversal by turning out in unexpectedly high numbers for a midterm election. This helped Democrats defy the usual pattern of presidential parties suffering big losses two years into their term. The success of this abortion-focused strategy in 2022 may have led Democrats to overestimate the issue’s staying power. Democrats might have bet their 2024 campaign on an issue that had already lost its power to get out the vote.
While we do not yet have final data on which CES respondents actually voted in 2024, we can look at whether people say they intended to vote. If there was a surge in mobilization among those supporting abortion rights, it should be evident in more of these individuals expressing that they planned to vote. We see very little evidence for this. As the figure above shows, people who supported abortion rights were no more likely to say they planned to vote in 2024 than they were in 2020, pre-Dobbs.
Even as voters remained broadly supportive of abortion rights – passing ballot measures in state after state – the issue no longer served as the powerful mobilizing force it had been in 2022.
Where abortion rights mattered: 2024 House races
While abortion rights failed to drive voter turnout, voters increasingly backed Democratic House candidates who promised to protect those rights. The link between supporting abortion rights and voting for Democratic representatives has grown stronger since 2016 and is now a significant predictor of House vote choice. As the figure below shows, 84% of voters who support unrestricted access to abortion voted for a Democratic House candidate in 2024, an 8% increase from 2022, and up 14% from 2016. Meanwhile, the polling data show little change in the voting behavior of the “always prohibit” and “support with some restrictions” groups over the past several election cycles.
This pattern helps explain the inconsistencies with the 2024 election results: Voters engaged in ticket-splitting to protect abortion rights at home, while supporting Trump nationally. In Arizona, for example, 61.2% of voters supported protecting abortion rights in their state constitution, and many backed Democratic representatives who promised to defend those rights in Congress. Yet only 48.2% of Americans voted for Harris, according to the latest national vote count.
In other words, this striking double-digit gap suggests many voters saw different stakes in different races. They voted to secure abortion rights in their own backyard through ballot measures and congressional representation – but felt comfortable supporting Trump at the national level, risking the rights of others across the country.
This distinction – between local protection and national leadership – may have been Democrats’ strategic blind spot in 2024. While American voters wanted to protect abortion rights, they didn’t necessarily see the presidential race as the critical venue for doing so. Harris’ campaign ads focused heavily on the abortion rights issue, but failed to shift this thinking.
So, what happened?
The 2024 election revealed the true role of reproductive rights in American politics: Abortion rights won decisively at the ballot box yet the presidential candidate who championed these rights lost. Democrats, encouraged by their success in 2022, bet big on abortion rights as their winning issue. But they misread the electorate in two crucial ways.
First, they assumed the mobilizing power of abortion rights would carry forward from 2022. It didn’t. While the Dobbs decision sparked an immediate surge in political engagement in an election held a few months after the decision, the issue did not appear to mobilize abortion rights supporters in 2024 any more than it had in presidential elections held before the Dobbs decision.
Second, they underestimated voters’ willingness to split their tickets. Some voters who showed up to protect abortion rights in their states and send pro-choice representatives to Congress didn’t see a contradiction in backing Trump for president. Trump’s efforts to defuse the issue by saying he did not support a national abortion ban – and that policy should be left to the states – may have worked in neutralizing the issue. It allowed voters to vote for ballot questions that protected access to abortion in their own states without worrying that a Trump presidency would produce a national abortion ban.
For Democrats, this outcome should prompt a serious rethinking of how abortion rights, and specific policies in general, factor into national campaigns. The issue clearly still matters to voters – but not in the straightforward way many assumed after the Dobbs decision. Voters in 2024 showed they’re perfectly capable of compartmentalizing their support for abortion rights from their presidential vote choice, even if that means backing a candidate committed to appointing judges who put those rights at risk.
Caroline Soler is a senior at Tufts University majoring in political science and mathematics and is a research associate for the Cooperative Election Study.
Brian Schaffner is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies in the Department of Political Science and Tisch College at Tufts University. He also serves as a co-director for the Cooperative Election Study.
