This is the first election since the MAGA Supreme Court ended Roe—why are we talking about anything else?
If dozens of states were allowed to ban guns, you'd never hear the end of it
My first inkling of the backlash to the end of Roe that I hoped to see in the world came in July 2022 in my home state of Michigan.
That’s when activists turned in a record number of signatures—more than double what was needed to qualify—to get an abortion rights proposal on the ballot. Said proposal won that November with nearly 57% of the vote and—along with Republicans nominating the bumbling Tudor Dixon, who couldn’t even pretend to support some exceptions to any abortion ban—undoubtedly helped turn out more older Democratic women voters in the state than in 2020. And that likely helped us win a trifecta by a swing of just 340 votes.
Several inklings followed, including one of the biggest poll misses in modern American history, as Kansas overwhelmingly voted for bodily autonomy.
The inklings kept coming. Even those red X-es you see here were victories for abortion rights.
But the next big inkling, the inkling I’d been waiting for, came in July of 2024.
That’s when Arizona for Abortion Access turned in a record number of signatures to get abortion rights on the ballot, duplicating Michigan’s activists’ feat of more than doubling the number of signatures necessary. This followed the debacle in May of Arizona’s Supreme Court, packed with Republicans by the previous governor, resurrecting a zombie complete abortion ban from 1864. The outrage this generated resulted in a repeal of that Slavery-era law, which even got a few Republican votes after even Donald Trump and Kari Lake recognized the horrible “optics” of that law.
Two things are abundantly clear:
- Republicans don’t want this election to be about abortion rights.
- This election is about abortion rights.
This election is about how our nation will respond to a Republican majority on the Supreme Court, four of which were appointed by candidates who lost the popular vote when they were first elected, ending Roe v. Wade at their first opportunity to do so after generations of lying about their intention to do so.
When Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, it seemed like Republicans would get away with their plot to make this election about anything other than abortion rights. President Biden famously doesn’t even like to say the word abortion. That opened the door for Trump to pick JD Vance and make this election all about enchanting America’s incels.
Vice President Harris, on the other hand, doesn’t mind the word at all.
She—along with a few other women politicians, including my governor Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Elizabeth Warren—represent a new breed of Democrats unshackled by a half-century spent being mostly embarrassed that we were arguing that even women should be able to control their bodies.
The full-throated defense of abortion rights we’ve seen from VP Harris is echoed by her identity—which contains multitudes and is unique in American history in so many ways that people mostly don’t even bother mentioning it because you have to start listing things. But let’s do it. She’d be the first woman president. First suburban president, unless you count Queens. First Asian-American president. First step-mother president. And she’d be the first president without a biological child in a century, though she’d be the first president who could give birth.
Donald Trump, in contrast, would be the first president having ever been adjudicated in a court of law to have committed rape.
When Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban zombied back into an upright position last spring, a lot was made about the ‘pursuer of nubile young females’ behind it. And yet we hear minimal discussion about what it means that Donald Trump is the man singularly responsible for making sure girls born today have fewer rights than their grandmothers did. When he was the best friend of serial child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, he bought a teenage beauty pageant mostly, it seems, to walk in on the contestants changing. In addition to E. Jean Carroll, who had her assault claims validated by a jury, he has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women. Now, thanks to him, rapists in 13 states have more rights to control a woman’s body than women do.
How often do you hear that?
Unless you come across an ad from Harris/Walz or a Democratic-aligned group, you probably don’t hear very much about abortion rights in the media. Jessica Valenti, in her new book Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win and her irreplaceable newsletter Abortion, Every Day, makes a daily study of all the lies Republicans tell, like the Republicans who have been appointed to the Supreme Court, to cloak the obvious Republican agenda to put “life begins at conception” into law in all 50 states as soon as inhumanly possible. And they don’t care how many people they have to kill to do it.
Jessica told me that she took on this task (which would be herculean for a man but just the kind of thing we expect from a woman) to put “some order to the chaos.” But clearly, she also does it because no one will.
As much as this election is about the future of democracy and whether we have future elections that count, this election is about Roe and Dobbs and the future of abortion rights. And these issues, where the literal control of one’s body meets ideology, remain inexorably entwined.
Yet, have you ever heard of a single TV focus group devoted to abortion rights? Do you ever hear the media talk about the polling related to abortion rights and the huge misses we’ve seen? It’s even tough to find any polling aggregates for the measures in TEN STATES this November, including Arizona, where voters will be allowed to say again they don’t want the government—and the Christian Nationalists who rig control of it—to control their bodies.
Now imagine a liberal court that ruled that the Second Amendment only protects the right to bear arms for purposes of a militia, you know, as the amendment actually reads, and thus guns can be banned by any state. Now imagine 13 states banned all guns, and another more than a dozen came pretty close. Would you hear about anything else?
Yes, part of that would be how Republicans—and thus their news channels—would be screeching about the issue because they’re sure it’s an electoral winner. But the “mainstream media” would certainly reflect them in large part. That’s because men, who still primarily turn the dials that decide what we’ll be talking about, get guns and what they represent and what it means, psychologically, to try to take them away.
The New Yorker sent the country's best (male) interviewer to talk to one of the best (male) election analysts about how Kamala Harris changed the race. It’s 3256 words long. They did not mention “abortion,” “Roe,” or “Dobbs” once.
I believe we will look back at this election and wonder, “How did we miss the single biggest issue of this election?” And the answer will be embarrassingly simple.
