(RNS) — The majority of state ballot initiatives that appeared on ballots on Election Day (Nov. 5) were approved by voters even in red states, but abortion nonetheless seems to still have a future as a hotly contested issue.
Abortion was on the ballot in 10 states this year, most of them requiring a “yes” vote to enshrine abortion rights. As of Wednesday morning, seven states — Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Missouri, Maryland and New York — are projected to have passed measures protecting or expanding those rights, according to CNN.
But in Missouri, abortion opponents say their state’s referendum, which reverses a near-total ban on the procedure, is not the last word. “Missourians have been tragically deceived by a dazzling misinformation campaign funded by out-of-state millionaires and other mega-corporations that will profit from giving abortions and gender ‘care’ to Missouri women and children,” said Mary Catherine Martin, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Catholic group that launched an unsuccessful legal effort to stop the Missouri ballot initiative, in a statement.
The group pledged to continue to fight abortion in the state, saying it stands “ready to help defend the rights of Missouri’s parents, women, children, and babies.”
Florida was a significant exception to abortion-rights advocates’ good night, as voters there failed by just 3 percentage points to clear the required 60% majority to vote the referendum into law. The measure would have allowed women to undergo abortion until 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Stephanie Hanson-Quintana, director of organizing and movement building at Catholics for Choice, celebrated the other referendums’ successes. “In at least 7 of 10 states, our efforts to turn out the pro-choice majority proved successful, even though in Florida, a 57% majority was not enough to overcome their partisan and extreme abortion ban.” Hanson-Quintana noted that polls have long shown the majority of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Jenny Bagg, center, a midwife, wears scrubs as she spends some of her on-call time manning a booth in support of Amendment 4, which would enshrine abortion rights in Florida, on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, outside a polling place in downtown St. Petersburg, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
In a statement, Jeanné Lewis, CEO of the liberal-leaning group Faith in Public Life Action, called the result in Florida “a setback for the agency and freedom of Floridians” and argued the 60% threshold “undermines democracy and sets an unrealistic standard for representing the people’s voice in the state legislature.”
Campaigns backing the abortion access measures were well-funded, often raising millions more than efforts to defeat the measures. Religious groups favoring abortion rights lent practical support as well: The group Catholics for Choice offered trainings for activists in Florida and elsewhere.
The American Catholic bishops, one of the largest funders of anti-abortion efforts since Roe was overturned, spent far less this year, with the exception of Florida, where the state’s bishops donated about $1 million to groups fighting the ballot initiative, making them one of the largest anti-abortion donors in that state.
In South Dakota, where an abortion-rights effort also failed, the Sioux Falls Diocese donated $340,000 to two anti-abortion PACs in the final days before the election, a substantial sum in the sparsely populated state.
In Nebraska, voters cast ballots on two contradictory initiatives: one that would enshrine abortion rights, and one prohibiting abortion after after the first trimester, with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the pregnant person. As of Wednesday morning, the anti-abortion initiative is projected to win, while the abortion rights effort appears to have fallen just short.
But while abortion-rights activists mostly succeeded on Tuesday, exit polls found that 47% of voters who backed abortion rights nonetheless voted for Republicans who opposed abortion, including former President Donald Trump, who appointed three Supreme Court justices who subsequently voted to overturn Roe. The split votes spoiled a Harris campaign’s strategy of linking Trump and Republicans in general to the erosion of abortion rights.
Voters in Montana and Missouri backed Trump by substantial margins while also approving their abortion initiatives; Nevada and Arizona appear likely to follow suit, as Trump leads in ongoing vote counts. The trend appears at the national level as well: According to Edison Research’s national exit poll, 47% of voters who believe abortion should be legal backed Trump at the polls.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, one of the outside groups the Trump campaign relied on this year to run get-out-the-vote efforts, argued the Harris campaign’s strategy had a counterintuitive effect.
“It may have actually backfired,” Reed said, suggesting the measure seemed to have little impact on Democratic turnout and may have even inspired some Trump voters to show up to the polls. It’s a dynamic he has predicted since at least this summer, when he mentioned the prospect in an interview with Religion News Service.
“Obviously, from a public policy standpoint, we don’t agree with them,” Reed said on Wednesday, referring to abortion rights ballot initiatives. “But as a raw political and analytical matter, we have never really considered them to be the liability for the party that I think the media and the Democrats have argued that they were.”
He added: “It wasn’t a weapon that harmed Trump at all.”
Reed was also dismissive of warnings by Democrats that Trump and his allies may attempt to pass a national abortion ban upon taking office. Trump declined to support the idea during his campaign, but also offered a vague response when asked during a debate whether he would veto a ban as president. Reed, for his part, argued any such ban is unlikely to make it through Congress in the first place, noting Republicans in the House of Representatives “haven’t even brought a late term abortion ban to the floor to be voted on.”
As for the future of the anti-abortion movement, Reed argued fights over state-level abortion-related ballot initiatives will likely continue “for a while,” even though they are not a “strength” of the anti-abortion movement, saying, “we found out the hard way that Roe v. Wade being overturned isn’t everything we hoped it would be.”
Even so, Reed added that anti-abortion activists do hold significant power in state legislatures, which, he predicted, would soon begin “chipping away” at abortion rights in red states.
“At some point fairly soon, they’re going to run out of states where they can do this,” he said. “Then it’s going to be our turn.”