Why Democrats’ abortion messaging failed to resonate in Texas, despite unpopular bans
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On a Friday night in late October, a vision in a black pantsuit walked onstage in downtown Houston and bestowed her support upon Vice President Kamala Harris. Beyoncé didn’t endorse Harris as a musician, an influencer, a Democrat or even Texas’ most famous daughter.
She endorsed as a mother — “a mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in,” she said. “A world where we have the freedom to control our bodies.”
This rally, in which Texas OB/GYNs and women denied medically necessary abortions shared the same stage as Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, was the climax of a national presidential campaign focused on abortion access, women’s health and reproductive choice after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Texas, where abortion has been restricted longer than any other state, was “ground zero” for this issue, Harris said to a crowd of 20,000 screaming fans.
Ten days later, Republicans routed Democrats in Texas and across the nation. President Donald Trump easily won the state by 14 points, increasing his support across almost all demographic groups, including women, exit polls indicate. Sen. Ted Cruz defeated Colin Allred by 9 points. Down ballot, Republicans swept the Texas Supreme Court races that Democrats tried to frame as the state’s best shot at an abortion referendum.
It was a devastating loss for Democrats who’d believed this was the “Roevember” where they’d see a wave of voter registration, increased turnout and silent defections from women who previously supported Trump. More than 70% of Texans want more exceptions in the state’s abortion laws, including for rape, incest and birth defects, polls show.
But wishing the laws were different doesn’t mean people will automatically vote for the party they see as less responsible for creating them, said Jim Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There was just no indication that abortion was going to be the motivating issue that Democrats thought it was going to be,” he said. “I think that the big question to ask is why, based on the available data, did the campaigns assume something would happen that would make all that data wrong.”
Home economics
In Texas, women split almost exactly down the middle for Trump and Harris, exit polling shows, a slight shift rightward from previous presidential elections. While this broadly reflects the Republican victory across many demographic groups, it also shows Democrats failed to mobilize independent and undecided voters they hoped would be outraged by the abortion bans, Henson said.
Texas voters may disagree with the abortion laws, but they continue to prioritize economic issues, polling has shown consistently over the last few years. Just a month before the election, both men and women said their greatest concern was the economy, followed by immigration and inflation. Only about 10% of women said abortion was the most important issue, along with 2% of men.
It’s rare for a “social issue” to win out over an economic one, said Laura Merrifield Wilson, a political science professor at the University of Indianapolis who studies gender issues in politics.
“When things are going well, then people are concerned about social issues and reproductive health and questions of bodily autonomy and government regulation,” she said. “When people feel like the price of eggs has gotten too expensive and they're unsure about the future of gas costs, then they care less about some of those other social issues.”
Republicans ran hard at the economy, tying Harris to Biden’s low approval numbers and stoking fears of a recession. Democrats, meanwhile, failed to fully connect Trump to the state’s new abortion laws. While Trump has bragged about appointing the three Supreme Court justices who ruled with the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to set their own abortion laws, he muddied the waters by also saying he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban.
“Trump and Cruz and all of them ran a campaign on, ‘we're not going to do anything, so don't worry about it,’” said Mary Ziegler, a reproductive health legal expert at the University of California Davis.
That left Democrats responsible for messaging what they feared Republicans would do to further limit abortion, as well as what they themselves were promising to do to expand access. Neither is an easy path, requiring Democrats to explain complicated legal theories like the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act and the Comstock Act, a long-dormant 1800s law that prohibits mailing abortion-related items.
Many voters may have thought, “I don't think the federal government can do anything about abortion, and I do think the federal government can do something about inflation,” Ziegler said.
“It's not picking between two things I really care about, it's picking between something that isn't going to matter and something that is.”
This was evidenced in states like Arizona, Missouri and Montana, where voters overwhelmingly supported ballot measures to protect abortion access, while also voting for Trump and Republicans down ballot. In Amarillo, voters soundly rejected an anti-abortion “travel ban,” even as the counties the city sits in voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
“Voters are saying they support abortion rights, but they’re just not worried about Trump and Republicans in Congress,” Ziegler said. “Essentially, ‘I can have my abortion rights position, and I can have Republicans, too,’ and I don't think Harris or Biden did a particularly good job explaining why that might not be true.”
In August, Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who almost died from an infection after doctors delayed treating her pregnancy loss, spoke from the stage at the Democratic National Convention about the impact of Texas’ abortion laws. Texas women put forward their similar stories in ads and campaign stops for Democratic candidates.
Despite these devastating stories, it’s still hard to make voters understand that this is something that can happen to them, said Wendy Davis, a former state senator and gubernatorial candidate who now works with Planned Parenthood Texas Votes.
“Especially for a lot of low-information voters, what they were feeling in their day-to-day lives, their kitchen table, pocketbook issues is what really resonated with them,” she said. “But I don't think it's a correct narrative to say that it was a mistake for Democrats to run on that issue. I think that we should have had a situation of both/and.”
Henson said there may have been a way to frame abortion as an economic issue, focused on women’s involvement in the workforce. But based on Biden’s approval ratings and people’s assessment of the economy, trying to slightly refocus the framing of the abortion issue is like “moving the deck chairs to get a better view of the iceberg,” he said.
The state and national Republican sweep means Texas’ abortion laws, at least, are not going anywhere anytime soon. The state does not have a mechanism that allows citizens to directly put a ballot measure before voters, meaning unless the makeup of the Texas Legislature changes, the laws will remain in place as-is.
Come 2026, Democrats will likely have more stories of delayed or denied medical care to tell from Texas, and may be able to point more clearly to the threat Trump poses on the issue, Ziegler said.
How either party messages on abortion going forward will depend a lot on what Trump does in the next two years, as well as what happens on the myriad other issues voters say motivate them.
“I think the danger for Republicans is that they interpret this as a mandate to take stringent positions on abortion when the election wasn't really about abortion for most voters,” Ziegler said. “And for Democrats, that they interpret it as a sign that they shouldn't talk about abortion, which is one of their stronger issues, because it wasn't enough to overcome their weaker issues.”
Disclosure: Planned Parenthood and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.