Georgia Race Challenges Democrats’ Abortion-Politics Assumptions

D emocrats continue to say that their support for abortion rights will be a major plus in the election. The recent vote for Georgia supreme court justice, however, is further evidence that it may not be the silver bullet they think it is.

Former Democratic congressman John Barrow was expected to put up a strong challenge to Andrew Pinson, a justice appointed by Republican governor Brian Kemp. Barrow argued that the state constitution guaranteed a right to abortion, attracting national attention as a result. The challenge was taken seriously enough that Kemp spent $500,000 of his own campaign’s money to support Pinson.

The result wasn’t close. Democrats have won statewide races in Georgia recently, but Barrow lost by ten points. He fared worse than Stacey Abrams did when Kemp beat her in 2022, and Barrow’s was an even larger margin of defeat than those that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama endured in the state in the 2016 and 2012 presidential elections. This is not a sign that support for abortion rights will swing red voters over to Team Blue.

The election also suffered from low turnout, with only 1.17 million people casting ballots. Abortion-rights referenda since the Dobbs decision have typically garnered high turnouts, but not here. The turnout was about 30 percent of the 2022 general election’s and only a bit more than 23 percent of the 2020 presidential election’s. Clearly, electing a pro-abortion-rights justice did not excite even most Democrats.

This type of outcome is rather typical when abortion is used in an individual contest. It’s one thing when abortion itself is on the ballot. In those cases, pro-choice Republicans vote their beliefs rather than their party. But it’s frequently a different matter when they are asked to switch parties.

Kemp himself is an example of that. He signed Georgia’s six-week abortion-ban law, one of the strictest in the country. Abrams was considered a strong challenger and spent tens of millions of dollars on her campaign. Yet Kemp turned her back easily, running ahead of Senate nominee Herschel Walker in the same wealthy Atlanta suburbs where the issue of abortion rights was supposed to flip votes. Clearly, suburban moderate independents and Republicans who voted against Trump and Walker found Kemp acceptable despite his pro-life stance.

The same thing happened last year in Wisconsin. Democrats argued that progressive jurist Janet Protasiewicz’s eleven-point win was proof that abortion was a winning issue. But they failed to note that her opponent, Dan Kelly, had lost by a nearly identical margin in 2020, two years before Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade. They also failed to capture a GOP-held state-senate seat in a highly educated suburb of Milwaukee in an election held the same day, despite the Democratic candidate’s significant spending advantage and trumpeting the abortion issue. Voters clearly care about things other than abortion.

Indeed, it’s hard to point to any specific partisan race in 2022 in which Democrats’ support for abortion rights made the difference. Democrats might point to Michigan, where an abortion-rights constitutional amendment passed handily while the party swept to victory at all levels. But the Michigan GOP ticket was also burdened by a weak gubernatorial candidate, radio personality Tudor Dixon, and party infighting. Abortion clearly motivated Democrats to back their party, but it’s far from clear that it motivated others to switch.

This might explain why Biden remains behind Trump in national and in swing-state polls. Democrats and their media klaxons have tried to make abortion rights into a national crusade since Dobbs. Yet polls regularly show that inflation, the economy, and immigration remain of greater import to voters, especially independent voters. The most recent Emerson College poll found that only 6 percent of voters said abortion was their most important issue. After two years of constant effort to place abortion at the center of American politics, that’s a pathetic finding.

This does not mean that pro-life Republicans can be complacent. Candidates still need to think carefully about how to explain their views. Seasoned politicians like Kemp and Florida senator Marco Rubio know this and explain their pro-life views without alienating the pro-choice voters they need. GOP candidates need to avoid off-the-cuff statements and snappy one-liners if they want to successfully navigate the abortion minefield.

The GOP motto on abortion should be, “Keep calm and carry on.” If Republicans do that, the evidence increasingly shows that they can weather the Democrats’ effort to bury them in an abortion-rights ad blizzard.