An optimistic and a pessimistic perspective on the politics of overturning Roe v. Wade
An optimistic and a pessimistic perspective on the politics of overturning Roe v. Wade
The net effect on American politics is high-stakes and hard to predict
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last Friday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the potential ripple effects and implications for American politics. I don’t know what will happen, but I’ve found myself returning most often to two scenarios, one optimistic and one pessimistic. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but which one predominates could significantly shape the course of America’s coming years.
Let’s start with the optimistic scenario.
A friend of mine has this interesting idea: He wants to set-up half of U.S. counties to be governed by Democratic policies, and the other half to be governed by Republican policies.
In Republican counties, as we would expect:
Taxes would be low.
Government programs and the social safety net would be minimal.
Regulations and protections against discrimination would be light.
By the same logic, in Democratic counties:
Taxes would be higher.
Government programs and the social safety net would be robust.
Regulations and protection against discrimination would be more forceful.
In this hypothetical scenario, there would be full freedom of movement across county borders and people would get to choose whether to live in a place organized by a conservative policy regime, or one structured by a liberal policy regime. The result would be a real world test of Democratic and Republican visions for society.
My friend, who’s a Democrat, believes most people, including many Republicans, would end up preferring Democratic governance. In fact, the idea grew out of his view that to a large degree Republicans are protected from the real world consequences of their ideology by Democratic programs they oppose. As he sees it, Republicans can get away with bad-mouthing social spending in part because of the economic support Social Security and other liberal programs provide to those who need it. Similarly, Republicans can rail against taxes because voters take for granted the clean water, Medicare, beautiful national parks, and working infrastructure those taxes pay for. If taxes were as low as Republicans want, life would be considerably less pleasant and they would have to reform their platform and message to avoid political obsolescence.
My friend’s idea is a great thought experiment, but it isn’t workable in real life. There’s no legal, political, or practical mechanism through which to set up half of counties under a Democratic policy regime and the other half under a Republican policy regime. Alas, Republicans will probably remain protected from the full consequences of their ideology for the foreseeable future.
Or will they?
One way to view the reversal of Roe v. Wade is as a test of what happens when one Republican policy position – opposition to abortion in all or nearly all cases – becomes the law of the land in many states. What political impact will this sudden shift have? It’s possible it will net out close to zero. Perhaps too few people will care or, more plausibly, people will care but not quite enough to change voting behavior at scale. Or perhaps misogyny is sufficiently pervasive that Republicans won’t pay a large political price for intruding into women’s private lives. There are lots of ways the end of Roe could wind up being a mere blip politically.
Then again, maybe this will prove to be a wake-up call to the supermajority of American voters who don’t follow politics closely, didn’t realize Roe v. Wade was on the verge of elimination, and would prefer not to be governed based on the holdings of one particular religion.
It’s one thing for a not-very-religious middle-aged voter in a red state to vote Republican to keep his taxes down when in the back of his mind he knows his daughters will be able to access abortion services if they need them; it may be something different to cast the same vote knowing it creates fear and risk for people he loves.
It’s one thing for a 20-something woman in a Republican-run purple state to try to remember to vote in midterm elections when abortion is legal; it’s different after a potential abortion ban infuses her life with an ever present level of fear.
What’s unarguable is that the aggressive, dramatic step of overturning Roe v. Wade took the abortion issue out of the distant realm of politics, which most Americans hate, and slammed it down smack in the middle of daily life. We saw during the pandemic Americans’ inclination toward individual liberty. How many Americans will now embrace state intervention in one of the most intimate decisions a person can face? More to the point, how many will recoil and rebel?
It’s very possible the reversal of Roe will influence people’s vote choice (Democratic or Republican), motivate unreliable Democratic voters, and tar the Republican Party as intolerant and bullying.1 If those things happen, our politics could be in for yet another epochal change, one that advantages the Democratic Party in the years ahead.
That’s the optimistic scenario.
Here’s the pessimistic scenario.
After their gains in the 2010 midterms, swing state Republicans drew gerrymandered district maps that make it challenging (Arizona) to all-but-impossible (Wisconsin) for Democrats to win state legislative majorities.2 As a result, the five critical 2020 swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – all have Republican controlled legislatures. Nearly permanent control of state legislatures means Republicans either already enjoy governing trifectas (Arizona, Georgia) or are always one gubernatorial election away from having one (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania). With a trifecta, any swing state that doesn’t yet have an abortion ban in place (a number of them already do) can enact one into law, and because of the gerrymandered district lines, it will be very difficult for pro-choice voters to successfully fight back through the electoral process. As purple state abortion bans take effect, the response of each state’s residents could create an unmitigated second order effects disaster.
How will Democrats, younger women in particular, react to suddenly living in a place where, if they get pregnant, they’d have to leave the state to legally terminate the pregnancy? (Even then, they could potentially be in legal jeopardy for doing so, depending on the details of the statute.) Some may personally face the cruel reality of these laws and have to spend time and energy figuring out what to do. Others may have close friends who find themselves in that situation. Still others may have the jarring experience of suddenly feeling their state, their home, is culturally hostile toward them. Some of these folks may decide to move somewhere that women’s bodily autonomy is still protected by law, and where they feel more welcome and accepted.
Such individual choices to move will be completely understandable. However, if too many Democrats leave purple states where abortion is criminalized, it would shift them toward Republicans. And “too many” doesn’t have to be a lot. Biden won Arizona with 1,672,143 votes to Trump’s 1,661,686, a margin of less than 11,000 votes. If Arizona passes an abortion ban and, in response, just one percent of Democrats decide to move to a blue state, that would be 16,721 Dem votes, enough to flip the 2020 outcome. The same is true in Georgia. In Wisconsin, it would take just 1.3 percent of Democrats leaving to reverse the 2020 outcome.
In 2020, if Trump rather than Biden had won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the electoral college would have been tied at 269 apiece, throwing the election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where Trump would likely have won. In other words, it wouldn’t take many Democrats leaving in the next couple years for Republicans to flip three or four of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, handing the White House to Trump or DeSantis or whichever other authoritarian bully wins their primary in 2024.
How likely is it that 1-2 percent of Democrats will leave purple states that enact abortion bans? There are about 600,000 abortions in the U.S. annually, and around 23 percent of all women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Many more will have pregnancy scares. A subsection of those women (and girls) will have male partners who know, and some of those will care. So access to abortion services is a widespread, mainstream concern, and it’s plausible people would move when that access is banned.
People moving in response to Roe v. Wade being overturned is more than speculation. The New York Times interviewed dozens of women in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling and reported that many were reconsidering major choices, including:
[T]heir own plans and those of their children: whether they should live, work or attend colleges in states where abortion has been banned.
Again, it will be entirely understandable if people choose to move away from states that criminalize abortion. Nevertheless, we should promote a norm among Democrats that the productive and best choice, for those who can afford to make it, is to stay in purple states and fight for the future. I recognize there are real risks and this is all very easy for me to say as a man living in a blue state, but it is also true that if a modest Democratic exodus from purple states hands the White House and Congress to Republicans in 2024, the results may very well be a national abortion ban and the accelerated erosion of American democracy.
If those two things occur, there may be nowhere safe left to go.
Notes
https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2017/abortion-common-experience-us-women-despite-dramatic-declines-rates
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/vote-margin-of-victory/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/us/women-abortion-roe-wade.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/abortion-stands-state-state-state-breakdown-abortion-laws/story?id=85390463
I will note here that I personally know several Republicans who are lovely people.
This aggressive gerrymandering was possible because of the Supreme Court’s refusal to rule antidemocratic extreme gerrymandering unconstitutional.