“Harris falls short with female voters, stunning Democrats,” reads the election postmortem in the Hill. Truth be told, Democrats weren’t the only ones stunned by the scope of the resounding win for President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. Consultants and pundits on both sides of the political aisle expected a massive gender gap, driven particularly by the 18-29-year-old demographic and motivated by the issue of access to abortion for young women.
The perception that a strong backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade would manifest itself in a huge turnout of that demographic for Vice President Kamala Harris was widely shared, and perhaps for good reason. After all, the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision did contribute to the GOP’s underperformance in 2022, and to the resounding defeat of pro-life initiatives even in red states.
But the election didn’t work out that way. Trump not only won white women for the third straight cycle, but he also made significant gains with Hispanic women and young women overall, improving his margins by 8 points and 11 points, respectively, compared with 2020.
The results have left Democrats looking for answers on how abortion fizzled as an election issue and why it backfired so badly on a Democratic ticket that made it such a central focus.
One explanation that you won’t hear from the usual sources is that, for the first time in the era of widely legalized abortion, a Republican ticket has succeeded in reframing the vexed “pro-life” issue from the old debate about government restrictions on abortion into a broader discussion about how to encourage the economy and our social institutions to better support family formation and the decision to have children.
Additionally, unlike both pro- and anti-abortion activists, the Trump-Vance ticket leaned into the court’s decision to return the matter of abortion to the states instead of trying to renationalize it. Harris and Democratic candidates made it clear they wanted to pass a new federal law to enshrine Roe’s blanket legalization of abortion. Many pro-lifers, on the other hand, have advocated new legislation that would impose a ban on abortions after 20 weeks in all 50 states.
Just a few years ago, for example, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), never previously regarded as a steadfast pro-lifer, fed into the fearmongering narrative of militant pro-choicers by introducing new legislation to ban abortion nationally after 15 weeks, giving Democratic candidates for federal office a big fat target to shoot at immediately before the midterm elections in 2022. Unsurprisingly, this proved to be a massive electoral motivation for pro-choice women, who turned out in droves to foil the predicted red wave.
In this election, the Trump-Vance ticket deftly avoided that trap. Not only did Trump explicitly disavow the Harris-Walz accusation that he secretly favored a national ban, but Vance used the occasion of the vice presidential debate to defuse and contextualize the issue successfully. Vance insisted that the Republican Party “should be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word … to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies [and] easier for young families to afford a home so they can have a place to raise that family.”
And while acknowledging his continuing belief in the goal of “protecting innocent [unborn] life in this country,” Vance pointed to the individual states as the place where that cultural consensus will need to be formed since “California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia.”
In effect, Vance rightly pointed out that abortion is not just a moral and religious issue but also an economic one. Matters such as housing affordability, tax and corporate policies aimed at giving parents more options, and a national economy oriented toward the creation of higher-wage jobs and social stability for its own citizens are essential if we are going to turn the cultural tide.
Republicans, Vance implied, have been indifferent at best to these dynamics. While the pro-family economic policies of the baby boom era, such as a GI Bill of Rights that encouraged home ownership and family formation, a remarkably pro-marriage and pro-parent tax code, and an industrial-based family-wage economy, reflected a post-World War II bipartisan consensus, the GOP largely sacrificed those ideas on the altar of free trade in the post-Reagan era.
Vance’s position not only adeptly avoids the electoral backlash that comes with getting into a debate about restrictions and legal sanctions in a culture that has lost any sense of national consensus on the issue, but it also turns the tables on “pro-choicers” by arguing that government needs to do everything possible to enable the one choice that most voters say that they favor: to get married, buy a home, have children, and have the financial flexibility and security for one parent to stay at home with those children at least through the preschool years. He is advocating what the late Pope John Paul II termed a “culture of life.”
It’s a winning message, and it is one that must be embraced by self-styled “cultural conservatives” who seem to be more concerned with philosophical purity than they are with pro-family public policy.
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Brian Robertson served for over a decade in the Senate as a senior policy advisor and worked for the Trump administration at both HHS and the Department of State.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
