Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer via AP
Sign-holders encourage voters to vote yes on Article 22, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, during the midterm elections, November 8, 2022, in Brattleboro, Vermont.
“Suddenly, Democrats had found an issue to rally their base around.” —Blake Hounshell, The New York Times
I went to bed early Tuesday night, the night of the midterm elections, fearing the worst. I even missed the celebration for Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment, the first in U.S. history explicitly enshrining abortion access and other freedoms in a state constitution. I was sure the amendment had won; like most of the big races in my state, it was called early. But I feared the margin even in what appears to be the bluest state in the union wouldn’t be big enough to make the kind of statement to national politicos that reproductive freedom advocates were so eager to make. Even more, thinking about the national elections, I couldn’t face being in a room full of Democrats as the wins came in for a rogues’ gallery of election deniers, haters of transgender high school students, believers in the human rights of small collections of embryonic cells, and toadies to America’s would-be Mussolini. My PTSD from 2016 was just too strong.
Well, 2022 isn’t the same as 2016. Nor did this year’s races resemble earlier midterm election years when national and state Democratic apparatuses were lackluster, and many voters stayed home. Democrats and progressives have gotten tougher, stronger, and savvier; have worked harder, asked more of their grassroots, and fielded more volunteers—including virtually, so people can get out the vote without having to fly or drive to the “field” to make a difference in tight races. They’ve spent a ton of money and trained a generation of lawyers who know the minutiae of state and federal election laws, and who are ready to confront the seemingly inexhaustible challenges Republicans and far-right conservatives regularly mount to fairly conducted elections. Dems have renewed their respect for organizers, people whose expertise is motivating others to take the risks that are always involved in collective action. This skill set is crucially important at a time when some Republican-affiliated vigilantes and would-be elected officials are literally threatening voters with violence, as in Arizona, or arrest by “voting crimes” police, as in Ron DeSantis’s Florida.
And then there’s abortion. I was wrong about Vermont. According to the secretary of state’s office , we won 72 percent to 22 percent, with 5.5 percent expressing no opinion. That should be lopsided enough to serve as a shot across the bow to politicians who are in doubt about how seriously people take their ability to make the most intimate decisions about their sexual, familial, and parental lives.
Abortion rights also won handily in California and Michigan. The latter is an especially sweet win, since abortion access has been deeply imperiled in the Midwest since Dobbs v. Jackson. It was Michigan where the momentum of state efforts to decriminalize abortion before Roe v. Wade had met a decisive defeat—in a state referendum.
Even more strikingly, abortion rights won comfortably in red states as well. In Kentucky, voters rejected an effort to supersede the judgment of state courts and make it impossible for them ever to find any basis for abortion rights in the state constitution. Kentucky is represented in the U.S. Senate by Rand Paul, who describes himself as “100% pro-life” and claims that, if states were allowed to outlaw abortion, “many—including Kentucky—would do so tomorrow.” That’s explicitly not what Kentucky voters did yesterday.
Political pros and volunteers alike seem to have been moved by Dobbs and its terrible aftermath.
And in Montana, voters rejected the “born-alive infants” measure, which would have placed criminal penalties on any provider who discovered that a fetus being aborted was in fact alive, and replicated federal law in ascribing rights to any fetus “born alive.” Icky stuff, inflammatory, extremely rare, and of course a naked attempt to drive conservatives on women’s and reproductive rights to the polls. The majority wasn’t having it.
Beyond these discrete contests, it seems clear that questions about abortion access drove Democratic turnout. They were prominent among the issues that made voters on the blue side feel like voting this year could not be missed. Political pros and volunteers alike seem to have been moved by Dobbs and its terrible aftermath to ensure maximum pro-choice turnout.
In coming days, we’ll likely see analyses that reveal a pattern nationally, and especially in the abortion-referendum states, that echoes what happened in Kansas back in August: Women overall and young women especially registered in historic numbers and came out to vote.
What do we learn from this and where do we go next? Three quick takes:
First, reproductive and women’s rights really matter. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to leading Dems that the majority of the country agrees with them on these issues or that their most loyal voters (women and others with the ability to get pregnant; people of color) care about them a lot. Abortion access has been receding since the first Hyde Amendment in 1976, and more precipitously in the years before Dobbs. We always cared! The pro-autonomy majority was always ready to be mobilized and always ready for politicians to fight for us to get our rights back. If this took Democratic officials unawares, then shame on them! The chastened politicos who implored young women and others devastated by the Supreme Court’s decision last June to vote need to keep mobilizing, and they need to fight with everything they have for the voters who showed up for them.
Second, reproductive liberty is about women’s rights and it’s about the rights of everyone in this country. In Vermont, the opposition underlined that the amendment protects the reproductive rights of men as well as of women. What creepy unexpected scenarios might develop, they warned darkly, if men got such rights? This was cynical; anti-abortion activists would happily argue for “men’s rights” if they thought it would help bar people from getting abortions. Maybe they were dog-whistling an anti-trans message by suggesting that people who identify as male shouldn’t have rights. In any case, the feint failed. People seem to believe that men, like women and nonbinary people, have reproductive-liberty interests that they don’t want the government to trample on. These issues are urgent in our lives whether we or our partners want to get pregnant, or to avoid pregnancy through contraception (I hear men use that sometimes) or vasectomy, or to end a pregnancy through abortion. It’s time to widen the tent and the conversation.
Third, liberty isn’t enough. I’m guessing that my senator, Bernie Senders, will take a lot of guff from people like me because he argued that Democrats “shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms.” But Bernie wasn’t all wrong. He was wrong to forget that abortion access is an economic issue, just as wages and gas prices are economic issues. And he was wrong to suggest that the Dems had to choose between branding themselves with one or with the other. We don’t have to choose. This once-and-maybe-future party of the people needs to forward a vision of the world it’s fighting to create, and that vision has to include making people’s daily lives better.
One way that Democrats get from here to a decent outcome in 2024 is precisely to fight for reproductive rights as economic rights. Contraception and abortion enable people to plan their families in ways that work economically. Moreover, a true reproductive rights agenda is one that promises to create a government we can count on to pay for all of the health care we and our children may need, to mandate sick and caregiving leave if we or our partners have difficult pregnancies (or if we need to take care of the parents who birthed and raised us), to secure our income while we are raising children, and to provide for safe, affordable child care when our kids are young and we are at work.
Time to get to work.
