Donald Trump May Have Won the Presidential Election, but His Abortion Policies Didn’t

This year’s election was a gut-punch loss for top-of-the-ticket Democrats. But it wasn’t for abortion rights.

Given his electoral college numbers, his popular vote win, and his dominance in swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona — a turn of events that makes 2016 look good by comparison — it would be easy to call Donald Trump the election’s biggest winner. But the election results suggest something very different to me: Americans may not have turned out for the Harris-Walz ticket, but they did show up for abortion rights, even in states where Trump won.

In Arizona, Proposition 139 passed and will enshrine abortion rights into state law. So will successful voter initiatives in Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, New York, and Montana. In Missouri, home to a proposed abortion-related travel ban, voters reinstated abortion rights.

Abortion rights measures didn’t succeed everywhere: Nebraska affirmed its 12-week ban on abortion, and initiatives to expand abortion rights failed in South Dakota and Florida.

But let’s take a closer look at what happened in Florida. In Florida, constitutional amendments must hit a threshold of 60% of the vote to pass. That’s an unusually high number, and the initiative came close, with 57% of the vote. In many other states, that would’ve been enough for the initiative to pass, and plenty of elections have been determined by much thinner margins. In Florida, Trump so far has 56.1% of the vote. By that metric, abortion is actually more popular in the state than he is.

At a time when we’re constantly reminded of how polarized our politics have gotten, is it possible that abortion, long thought to be a contentious issue, is actually where we can find the most common ground?

Maybe it’s time to just say the quiet part out loud: Abortion rights aren’t controversial. Abortion access is a winning issue, one that wins even when Democrats don’t. It splits tickets and triumphs in deep-red states like Missouri and Montana.

When the Supreme Court revoked national abortion protections in Roe v. Wade, it forced states to reckon with the horrific reality of banning abortion, with what it actually means to deny standard uncomplicated health care to resolve miscarriages or keep minors from having to carry an abuser’s baby to term. It’s not an extreme position to support abortion rights. Polling suggested it never was. Now we know for sure.

So while Democrats process their loss of the presidency and Washington welcomes a governor who sued Trump 1.0 more times than I can count and who has specifically challenged restrictions on abortion pills, where does that leave us?

I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that question, though I predict we’ll be subjected to numerous self-righteous postmortems and Spiderman-meme finger-pointing over the next few months.

But I can say this. The election’s unpredictable, chaotic results leave me with an odd, misshapen, murky sense of hope, or at least curiosity about what abortion’s newly public normalization will bring to bear in the years to come. Because if Trump has a mandate, so does abortion, and that could be very bad news for the president-elect, who has spoken proudly about being “able to kill Roe v. Wade.” Amid increasing electoral evidence that Americans broadly support abortion access, that braggadocio may prove to be a political liability for him, even among Americans who voted for him.

In the coming months and years, he will have to answer for it.

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