The early summer months were filled with loud pro-choice protesters left inconsolable after the ruling that abortion was never an actual constitutional right. Many pledged to exact their revenge in the form of legions of galvanized voters with two goals—to elect more Democrats at the state level to tilt the various playing fields where the matter will now be settled, and to punish Republicans on the national scene who had paved the path to Roe’s extinction.
Republicans responded by speculating that their voters would be motivated as well—by gratitude. Conservatives had fought through nine presidencies to build a Supreme Court majority that would expose the fiction of a constitutional right to abortion, and to have it happen was an all-too-rare judicial success made possible by the installation, at long last, of a sufficient number of constitutionalist Supreme Court Justices. One might expect a subsequent burst of activism designed to continue such successes across a wide range of issues.
And that may well happen. November 8 still looks to be a good day for Republicans, but probably for different reasons. GOP voters remain pleased by the end of the Roe era, but their more pressing inducement to vote is the potential elevation of elected officials who can begin to dig America out of the bitter Biden pit of misfortune, with its crushing inflation, rising crime, open borders, and poisonous indoctrination in schools.
In difficult times, unhappy voters often outnumber happy ones. Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter because Americans wanted to send the incumbent president home. Donald Trump would be president today if 2020 hadn’t lured out so many unhappy Democrats.
So won’t those still-smarting abortion rights advocates show up for the midterms? They will. But not as many as it once seemed, for multiple reasons.
First is the simple passage of time. The death of Roe was a dire shock to liberals and a burst of joy to conservatives. Both subsided as new realities have come to bear on our daily lives. It’s not that the Left is over its anger and the Right has grown nonchalant; the focus has changed. We tend to look forward, not backward. And we tend to look at issues that confront us every day in real time.
That’s where post-Roe anger loses most of its steam. Radical activists are still aggrieved. But spread out across the American landscape, it’s getting harder to find Democrats willing to walk through fire to punish the scoundrels who stole their precious abortion rights. Those who remain motivated to exact backlash are outnumbered in the latest polls by voters seeking to correct a rotten economy, spiraling crime, illegal immigration, and broken schools. A debate over abortion rights remains abstract until an actual pregnancy comes along. Inflation, dangerous cities, and an education system poisoned by wokeness are sights and sounds cast before millions every day.
The last reason for the flattening of the abortion wave is what millions of Americans witnessed in the weeks following the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that unraveled Roe. For decades, constitutional illiteracy had gripped the land on the issue of abortion. Any room full of pro-choicers was as likely as not to believe that a Supreme Court reversal of Roe would usher in a nationwide abortion ban. Whether through ignorance or a conscious intent to deceive, the Left for years poured energy into a false narrative warning of an instantly abortion-free America where the opposite of a federal abortion right was a federal abortion ban.
The most cursory constitutional review would have quickly revealed that the extinction of Roe simply returned the matter of abortion rights to the individual states. In the months following the Supreme Court’s action, anyone bamboozled by that scare tactic was surely surprised to see abortion clinics on as many California street corners as the market would bear.
To be sure, abortion has been restricted to the point of near-impossibility in states filled with voters seeking to protect life. But the pro-choice lie is busted. Abortion rights are alive and well in any state that seeks to maintain them. The wisdom and practicality of the Founders have pulled the rug out from under those who insisted that Roe was an indispensable element of a decent society.
Pro-choice voters still lament that day in June when the Supreme Court dismantled a half-century-old contrived right. But as the election draws near, that dismay does not appear likely to rain on expected Republican parades.
Mark Davis is a talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
