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In every state where it was on the ballot on Tuesday, protecting abortion care received more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris. This was true regardless of whether the state ultimately went for Harris or for President-elect Donald Trump, and even in the three out of 10 states in which the abortion-related measure did not pass.
Voters in seven states approved measures that would uphold or expand abortion rights: Arizona, Colorado, New York, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada. Similar measures fell short in Florida, South Dakota, and Nebraska; the latter had two opposing abortion-related ballot measures: one to establish a right to abortion before viability, which failed, and one to ban abortion after the first-trimester, which passed.
The stark contrast between support for measures to protect bodily autonomy and support for Harris comes even as the vice president had made abortion a key part of her platform. In the final weeks of her campaign, she leaned even further into messaging around abortion, highlighting the cases of two Georgia women who died as a result of the state’s abortion ban and heavily spending on ad buys on the issue.
Nina Smith, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Stacey Abrams, argued that Republicans were able to effectively message to voters that the issue of abortion was being left to the states. In other words, it would be enough to vote to protect abortion rights within their own states, regardless of their vote for president, because Republicans weren’t going to ban it nationally.
“I think a lot of people voted with a false sense of security,” said Smith. “Folks were betting that if they voted to enshrine abortion protections, Donald Trump wouldn’t actually co-sign a national abortion ban. I think the GOP managed to convince a lot of women that security and economy are issues that are much more important and pertinent to them, and that they wouldn’t dare pass a national ban.”
State After State
In Montana, voters overwhelmingly moved to enshrine “the right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion,” into the state constitution. The amendment passed with over 57 percent of the vote. Trump won the state by similar margins, while Harris took 38 percent of the vote. Republicans also made inroads in the Senate in Montana last night, flipping Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s seat in favor of his Republican opponent, Tim Sheehy, who is staunchly anti-abortion.
Keegan Nashan, a volunteer who worked with Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, which campaigned for the amendment, said that Democrats have really struggled to connect with rural voters in the state, even if they might agree with them on issues like abortion.
“The Democrats in Montana have not done a good job engaging rural voters,” said Nashan. “It’s not surprising to me at all that a lot of people voted for Trump because they feel entirely disenfranchised by the Democratic Party whether it’s rational or not.”
Nashan said she heard from voters who supported Republicans up and down the ballot and also voted in favor of the amendment that their choice came down to priorities. When it came to their presidential pick, Nashan recounted, voters ranked issues like the economy, immigration, and other social issues higher on their priority list. “A lot of people were saying that groceries were cheaper under Trump, the economy was better under Trump,” she said. “And that abortion just isn’t as important as some of the other issues that Trump has promised to have an answer to.”
The state ballot measure on abortion gave those Montanans a chance to protect reproductive rights and also back the candidates they felt spoke to the other issues that matter to them.
Montana is far from an anomaly. In Missouri, which became the first state to overturn a total abortion ban, nearly 52 percent of voters backed a constitutional amendment enshrining reproductive rights, while only 40 percent gave their vote to Harris.
Nevada, which voted to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution, remains too close to call. However, the abortion measure garnered 63 percent of the vote, while Harris has 46 percent to Trump’s 51 percent, with 93 percent of the vote counted by Wednesday afternoon.
Even in New York, which Harris won with 55 percent of the vote, she underperformed in comparison to the abortion-related amendment, which got 62 percent support. (Harris also significantly underperformed recent Democratic presidential candidates in the state.) The New York measure added language to the state Bill of Rights prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, including “sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.” (The right to an abortion already exists in the state constitution.)
Harris also got fewer votes than the abortion rights ballot amendments in two other states she carried: Colorado and Maryland. In Colorado, she won 54 percent of the vote, while the ballot measure won 61 percent. And in Maryland, she won nearly 60 percent of the vote, while the measure passed with 74 percent support.
In Arizona, Trump was ahead with nearly 52 percent of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon, with Harris at 47 percent, with only 63 percent of the vote counted. Arizona’s abortion ballot measure enshrining the “fundamental right to abortion” in the state’s constitution, on the other hand, passed handily with 61 percent of the vote.
Even in states where the abortion rights measures failed to pass, they still outperformed Harris. In Florida, a ballot measure on abortion was backed by a majority of voters (57 percent) but still didn’t pass because of the state’s 60-percent threshold for constitutional amendments. The measure significantly outperformed Harris, who earned 42.9 percent of the vote. In South Dakota, Harris won roughly 34 percent of the vote, while a ballot measure on abortion received 41 percent. And in Nebraska, Harris received 38 percent of the vote, while the pro-abortion rights ballot measure received nearly 49 percent.
For Nashan, the Montana volunteer, Democrats need to work harder to reach voters the party hasn’t traditionally courted if it hopes to see its candidates get the same level of support as the issues they are running on. “All I can hope is that the Democratic Party becomes a bit better at communicating and consistently communicating with rural voters,” she said, “meet them at their table where they’re at and have some conversations because we have way more in common values-wise. We are much more aligned than we are different.”
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