The Conservative Justices Bet Dobbs Wouldn't Hurt Republicans Forever. They Were Right [View all]

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes

When the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, the five Republican justices in the majority had a sense of how dangerous their decision could be to their party’s electoral future. For as intensely as the conservative legal movement despised Roe, that decision’s compromise framework remained broadly popular among normal people: In May 2022, shortly after a draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked to the press, a CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans did not want the justices to overturn Roe. Over the preceding three decades of polling the question, the percentage of respondents who supported overturning Roe had never risen above 36 percent.

Near the end of his opinion, Alito sort of gestured at the burden he’d placed on his fellow Republicans, but just as quickly appealed to his solemn responsibility not to think about it. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision,” he wrote. “And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.” The Court’s job, he continued, was to return “the issue of abortion to the people and their elected representatives,” and let the chips fall where they may.

I am guessing that, at least at first, Alito did not like where those chips ended up falling. In the two years after Dobbs, many Republican-controlled state legislatures passed draconian abortion bans, but where voters had the opportunity to decide the issue for themselves, the result was different. Every time abortion access was on the ballot, it won—not just in blue states like California and Vermont, but also in purplish states like Michigan and Ohio, and in red states like Kansas and Kentucky, where GOP-leaning electorates nonetheless repudiated their elected officials’ efforts to restrict abortion access.

The backlash to Dobbs also buoyed Democratic politicians in tight races, and helped the party outperform expectations and even expand its narrow Senate majority in the 2022 midterm elections. Exit polling in swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania revealed that 27 percent of voters said that abortion was the most important factor in their decision, trailing only inflation (31 percent), and by only a few points.