President Donald Trump‘s decision to deprioritize abortion as a key issue for the Republican Party during his second administration may have given the GOP a long-term political advantage, strategists and experts say.
Abortion dominated the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Yet two years later, it has mostly faded from the discussion during this year’s midterm elections, with a few caveats.
Missouri, Idaho, Nevada, and Virginia all have statewide ballot measures related to abortion this November. In the marquee Maine Senate race, Democrat Troy Jackson has attacked Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) for her vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who helped the high court overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Although Trump has infuriated anti-abortion allies by not pushing his administration to limit access to abortion medication like mifepristone, he has kept the issue from tangling up Republicans in a hard-fought quest to keep Democrats from flipping control of the House and the Senate this November.
“This has been a big rallying point for the Democrats to motivate their base and obviously to get some sympathy from independent voters. And Trump has effectively taken that arrow out of their arsenal,” said Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist.
“What he did, which was really smart, is he flipped the script on Democrats,” O’Connell continued. “He made it that their position was extreme, and he would focus on late-term abortions. Late-term abortions are an 80-20 issue that favors Republicans.”
A Gallup poll conducted in May showed 48% of people preferred abortion to be legal in all (33%) or most (15%) circumstances, while 49% prefer it to be illegal (17%) or legal in only a few circumstances (32%). A May 2023 Gallup poll showed that 69% said abortion should be legal in the first trimester. Support dropped to 37% for the second trimester and 22% for the third.
According to a KFF Health tracking poll in June, 65% of the public opposes banning the use of mifepristone or medication abortion nationwide, while 33% support a nationwide ban. Similarly, 64% oppose making it a crime for healthcare providers to mail abortion pills to patients in states where abortion is banned.
Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, reportedly pushed Attorney General Todd Blanche to move slowly on abortion-related matters before the midterm elections out of fear the issue could jeopardize independent voters from backing Republican candidates. Congress has not taken any meaningful action to once again strip Planned Parenthood of Medicaid reimbursements after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s provision banning federal reimbursements to the group expired in July.
The strategy has been well-received by political operators, and Republicans championed the White House’s strategic moves and pointed to state ballots on abortion as beneficial to the GOP.
“They’re basically taking the issue out of campaigns,” said Virginia Republican strategist Brian Kirwin. “They are handing every Republican in a district that might favor abortion to say, ‘Look, it’s out of our hands now. It’s in the Constitution. It doesn’t matter what my position on abortion is anymore because it’s out of our hands.’”
Seven states voted to affirm that their constitution protects the right to abortion in 2024 after Roe was struck down: Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York. Three states struck down a constitutional right to abortion: Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota.
The midterm elections have been largely focused on affordability issues as the public grows frustrated over high gas and diesel costs stemming from the Iran war. “I see polling every election cycle, and [abortion] is nowhere near the top of the list of voter concerns because they don’t think it’s in danger,” Kirwin said.
Democrats have largely retreated from abortion and instead have hammered Republicans on the economy.
“Democrats only talk about abortion strategically when they think they can convince voters that they will be somehow consequential and different from Republicans,” said Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor who studies the politics of reproduction at the University of California, Davis. “There are no major events in the news at the moment. Whereas, if you had, for example, the Trump administration rolling out big new national restrictions on abortion, I’m pretty confident Democrats would talk about it all the time.”
The fall of Roe arguably helped Democrats stave off dire losses during the 2022 midterm elections but abortion access failed to help Harris defeat Trump in 2024. In 2026, there are a few wild cards that could affect access to abortion. The Food and Drug Administration said it would complete a review of mifepristone in March, the Justice Department said in court documents this week. A federal appeals court in Louisiana is also still hearing a case on whether patients can continue to access mifepristone by mail.
Where does the anti-abortion movement go from here?
Anti-abortion groups are working to make opposition to late-term abortions an electoral issue this cycle despite the lack of engagement from campaigns.
“Our message testing in swing races this cycle shows that going on offense to call out Democrats’ extremism on late-term abortion moves the margin 4-5 points towards the pro-life candidate,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser wrote in an August memo. “Pro-life candidates should be relentlessly pressing their opponents over their support for these barbaric, late procedures.”
Some groups have warned that without action, social conservatives will sit out the midterm elections, but Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, appeared skeptical of that argument.
“Most pro-life voters are going to be voting for a Republican candidate or whoever President Trump endorses because of all those other issues,” said Brown. “People rank their top 10 issues, and abortion is routinely toward the bottom of the list.”
Anti-abortion groups acknowledge that Trump’s appointment of the three Supreme Court justices who helped strike down Roe has insulated him from too much criticism in the anti-abortion community.
“The pro-life movement would tell you that Donald Trump is the greatest president that they’ve ever had, and over the course of his almost two terms now, he’s won tremendous trust from the movement through hard-fought battles,” said Gregg Keller, a Missouri-based GOP strategist.
Some say abortion has taken a back seat to other social and cultural issues in the current political climate.
Keller said that Trump’s efforts to block transgender surgeries among children are an issue that has broader support among the public compared to abortion. “The hot-button issues that are really firing up social conservatives and pro-lifers and social conservatives more broadly are the gender issues,” he said. “Things like child genital mutilation surgeries, puberty blockers, and men in women’s dressing rooms, and Trump has taken those issues head-on aggressively in a way that the movement really likes.”
The administration has reportedly claimed it will focus on abortion after the elections yet many are not sure much, if anything, will be done. “I think [that] speaks to the fact that Trump’s played this really well,” said Ziegler, the law professor. “And people genuinely don’t know what he’s thinking or what he’s going to do.”
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The anti-abortion movement will still need to work out how to move forward with the Republican presidential nominee in 2028, which will be the first time in a decade the race won’t feature Trump.
“The challenge for pro-lifers is going to be that the conventional wisdom among sort of GOP consultant-class-type folks is look, Trump showed that you can be extremely transactional with the social conservative pro-life groups and not pay a price and get away with it essentially,” said Brown. “So I think you’re going to see pro-life groups, including SBA [Pro-Life America] and others, really try to put abortion front and center for potential GOP candidates.”