Anti-abortion advocates are looking to one goal to combat abortion-rights amendments at the state level in the 2026 elections: recruit high-profile Republican officeholders who are willing to spend political capital and risk their own reputations, as did Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
During the 2024 elections, anti-abortion advocates successfully defeated measures in three states: Florida, South Dakota, and Nebraska. All three campaigns feature Republican officials who actively campaigned against mid-term and later-term abortion through public outreach and fundraising.
The GOP leaders in those states were an exception to the trend of Republicans largely shying away from the issue under the leadership of President-elect Donald Trump.
Now, anti-abortion advocates are saying that direct campaigning by top Republicans is a key asset for any amendment battles in the next election cycle. They will look to enlist the help of GOP officeholders who are willing to campaign for anti-abortion measures, raise funds to pay for ads and organization, and directly appeal to voters to keep protections for unborn children.
“The key to winning just comes back down to Republicans,” Kelsey Pritchard, state policy director for SBA Pro-Life America, told the Washington Examiner.
Vice President Kamala Harris and down-ticket Democrats made their 2024 campaign about abortion, even in states without abortion-rights amendments on the ballot, borrowing the same playbook from the 2022 midterm elections that brought victories for Democrats in the immediate aftermath of overturning Roe v. Wade.
Since overturning Roe, every abortion-rights amendment put forward in state referenda passed, until 2024. Although seven other states passed abortion-rights amendments during this election cycle, anti-abortion advocates predict that the three victories will hold the secret for winning more state-level abortion fights in 2026.
In the largest anti-abortion victory since the overturning of Roe, the six-week abortion ban in Florida, the near-total abortion ban in South Dakota, and the 12-week abortion ban in Nebraska all withstood the attempts of abortion-rights advocates to overturn them at the ballot box, thanks to Republican elected officials.
“We really need GOP leadership, people who will lend their platforms, lend their voices to the fight, and also get in there to fundraise and raise as much money as possible so we can go on offense on ballot measure fights and not just be on defense,” Pritchard said.
SBA is the leading politically active anti-abortion group in the United States, with wide influence at the state and federal levels. Although the organization’s immediate goal in the aftermath of the election is to influence the policy decisions of Trump, Pritchard said that gaining the support of Republicans at the state level will be vital moving into 2026.
Aggressive tactics from anti-abortion Republicans
Pritchard praised the extensive involvement of DeSantis, who threw the weight of his prominent political team behind the campaign against Amendment 4, which would have enshrined a fundamental right to abortion before viability into the state constitution.
DeSantis campaigned with anti-abortion doctors across the state to tell voters that Amendment 4 would essentially allow abortion throughout pregnancy. He also used his state’s healthcare apparatus to explain the state’s six-week gestational age limit to Floridians.
Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration launched a public awareness campaign in May rebutting claims from abortion-rights proponents, who claimed that the state’s law created risks for women with problem pregnancies. The administration told residents that existing state law does not prohibit doctors from intervening in medical emergencies, including ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage.
But as the election grew closer, the DeSantis administration grew increasingly assertive in its campaign against Amendment 4, culminating in the administration threatening television stations that aired misleading advertisements saying that doctors could not treat pregnancy emergencies. The DeSantis administration was censured in October by a federal district court for freedom of speech violations.
Only 57% of voters supported Amendment 4 on Election Day, short of the 60% threshold necessary to change the state constitution.
DeSantis garnered the most attention for his anti-abortion campaigning this election season, but other Republicans in Nebraska and South Dakota were essential for anti-abortion wins in those states.
Pritchard also highlighted the support from Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) and Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE) as well as Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), all of whom did a combination of fundraising and public education efforts about their respective states’ abortion laws.
Pillen met with leaders from SBA in August, for example, touting the popularity of the 12-week gestational age limit on abortion, which was passed by the legislature in May 2023, and campaigning for voters to enshrine the same age limit into the state constitution.
“We have to have our GOP step up and inform people of what they’re voting on,” Pritchard said. “And we have to do it because the big institutions of our society are now pro-abortion, the media, higher education, Hollywood. Way too many C-suites are now pro-abortion, and so we have to have a force to counter that.”
Republicans out of the closet on abortion
With both a GOP trifecta in Washington and the success of the ballot initiatives, anti-abortion leaders hope that more state-level Republicans will embrace a DeSantis-like approach to abortion politics.
Jon Schweppe, policy director for the pro-family advocacy group the American Principles Project, told the Washington Examiner that perhaps the biggest lesson from 2024 is that the public outrage about the overturning of Roe has dwindled enough that Republicans may be more comfortable to express anti-abortion positions again.
“They’re going to feel a little bit on guard now, like, ‘OK, we can go back. We can be a little bit more pro-life now, or at least we can say it,’” Schweppe said. “I think they were afraid of their shadow a little bit on that issue for a while, really the whole cycle.”
President of March for Life Jeanne Mancini told the Washington Examiner in a statement that the three victories over the abortion-rights amendments “serve as a powerful reminder that when pro-life advocates expose the truth of what such Amendments allow, the American people reject them.”
“More importantly, these victories show that strong, pro-life elected officials will be successful in enacting commonsense pro-life policies when they lean into the beauty and truth of life,” Mancini added.
Money wins the game
Even with the active support of Republican leaders, anti-abortion campaigns require significant capital to wage a successful fight against abortion-rights constitutional amendments.
Michael New, a political economy professor at the Catholic University of America, told the Washington Examiner that the fundraising capacity of anti-abortion advocates was essential to the three victories in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Florida.
“It’s very tough to win any ballot proposition when you’re outspent by a 10-1 or 20-1 margin,” New said. “And in the two states we got more than a majority support, South Dakota and Nebraska, pro-lifers did succeed in outraising our opponents.”
Campaign resources were evenly matched between the abortion-rights and anti-abortion campaigns in Nebraska. And in South Dakota, anti-abortion resources actually surpassed those of the abortion-rights camp, a rare occurrence.
Pritchard said the fundraising efforts of Ricketts and Noem in their respective states were essential to building the war chest necessary to be successful on Election Day.
New also noted that although the Florida anti-Amendment 4 campaign did not outraise the abortion-rights side, the anti-abortion advocates were able to run “a visible enough campaign that we were able to stop the other side from reaching that 60% threshold.”
A well-funded campaign is perhaps even more important when trying to get an amendment into the state constitution, similar to the success of the 12-week amendment in Nebraska.
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Schweppe said that the cost to gather enough signatures even to get an amendment on the ballot can be upward of $6 million, and that is before the campaign to garner voter support even starts.
“This is something you can’t just do willy-nilly,” Schweppe said. “And then you also have to recognize that if you do that, you are going to have the Left, with its seemingly infinite resources, coming down on your state.”
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
