Split Ticket

Media coverage of elections has presented theories of how abortion-focused messaging has allowed Democrats to beat expectations. From June 2022 and beyond, this has largely been true — with the voters of states such as Ohio and Michigan recently electing to protect abortion rights in their states. Despite the position’s general popularity, there are communities where Democrats are seeing backlash to this stance — whether due to strong religiosity or high antipathy to social libertarianism, these areas do exist. 

2022 and 2023’s recent elections where abortion loomed large demonstrate good test cases to gauge the scope of these pro-life areas.  

Looking at the 2022 referendum in Michigan, the map (produced by Michigan-based political analyst Jackson Franks) was indeed very similar to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s blowout victory that year. Analysis by Jesse Richardson shows that support for the pro-choice position was highly correlated with improved support for Whitmer, but also that the pro-life position was correlated with decreased support for Whitmer. 

This correlation has sparked much commentary on how the reactions to the Dobbs decision have saved Democratic fortunes of late — but as with all wedge issues, there are exceptions where this is not the case. In the map above, two notable areas stick out here. 

First is West Michigan (Allegan, Ottawa, and Kent counties specifically), colored above as dark yellow (against Proposal 3) and home to a great number of Dutch Reformed Church adherents. This area has long been the bedrock of the Michigan GOP but has shifted left lately. Pro-Democratic swings here have been significantly muted, or even turned back, in the wake of the hard merger between Democratic and pro-choice politics.

As an example, Overisel Township in Allegan County is already extremely Republican; Donald Trump got 83% of the vote there in 2020. Only 23% of residents have a college degree, and 94% of residents are white. Even accounting for that low college education rate, the 83% Trump share is much higher than what one would predict. There are many similarly low-education townships in Michigan that did not give Trump even 70% of the vote. But the difference between education/race and partisanship is likely attributable to  religion — in this case, the strong influence of the Dutch Reformed Church’s conservative attitudes on voter behavior. 

In 2022, Republican Tudor Dixon matched Trump’s 83%, and the pro-life position on the amendment did even better, clocking in at 84%, despite underperforming the former president statewide. Many other heavily religious areas saw significantly muted pro-choice swings relative to more secular areas. 

The second major example of this effect in Michigan is Dearborn in Wayne County. This city, close to Detroit, is home to one of the largest Arab-American and Muslim communities in the country. Dearborn is heavily Democratic, with Biden earning 69% of the vote. In 2022, the city shifted right. For governor, Gretchen Whitmer only got 64%, and the abortion referendum only got 59%. In East Dearborn, where the concentration of Arab voters is the highest, Whitmer got 66% of the vote, down from Biden’s 81% in 2020. The abortion referendum did even worse, only getting 52%. 

Just like in Overisel, there was a sizable religiosity delta explaining the distance between partisanship and ideology preference — except that in the Arab-American community, there are many conservative Muslims who still vote for Democrats. Dearborn also had other polarizing culture war fights on education and religious affairs that contributed to this shift, but in such a religious area the Democrats’ emphasis on their pro-choice politics was undoubtedly not popular.

Looking at Ohio’s Issue 1, which was framed in broadly similar terms to Michigan’s proposed ballot initiative, the pro-choice side did better than Joe Biden’s vote share virtually everywhere except a few predictable areas: deep-red German Catholic counties in far-western Ohio such as Putnam, Mercer, and Darke. These areas have long been Republican, but even still the increased salience of abortion has shown the potential for these areas to get redder. 

As an example, take Gibson Township in Mercer County. At 98% white and 22% college educated, it is facially similar to most of rural Ohio. But whereas townships further east typically give Republicans between 75 and 85 percent of the vote, in Gibson, Donald Trump got 95% of the vote in 2020. And in November 2023’s issue 1 vote, the pro-life position got a whopping 96%.

In November’s Issue 1 vote which codified abortion rights into law, Putnam County had the smallest pro-choice overperformance in the entire state. Biden got 16% in Putnam, and pro-choicers earned 18% a year later. The lack of change compared to other communities across the state is due to the strong religiosity present in that electorate. 

Although these hyper-religious areas in Michigan and Ohio tend to be wholly unrepresentative of the general electorate, in the South, it is entirely a different story. 

One month ago in Louisiana, Democrats had their worst result in living memory, being fully shut out of power for the first time in modern history, condemned to languish in a superminority. This was driven by the blowout governor’s race at the top of the ticket, which Republicans combined to win by 37 points, fully twice what Donald Trump won the state by three years ago. 

Louisiana is in the heart of the Deep South and has strong competing strains of Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism among its electorate — both of which are undeniably conservative. When Split Ticket did its first assessment of the abortion attitude landscape in the wake of the Dobbs decision, Louisiana was consistently one of the most pro-life states. It is not a state where abortion-focused messaging would be expected to help Democrats. For example, the state’s outgoing former Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, is avowedly anti-abortion. 

The re-election of State Senator Katrina Jackson, who represents a majority-black seat in Monroe and in the Mississippi River parishes provides a strong contrast to the Republican blowout at the top of the ticket. A strong anti-abortion advocate, Jackson has helped author prominent anti-choice legislation in Baton Rouge. 

Jackson’s seat’s voting-age population is 64% black — normally ensuring that it is safely Democratic. Biden won the seat by 30 points, but in 2022 with low minority turnout the Democratic nominees for Senate only won it by 8. Despite even worse turnout in 2023, the black share of the electorate actually increased marginally, from 57% in 2022 to 58% in 2023. 

Despite this on paper making the electorate better for Democrats, they crashed here, winning the seat by 0.6 points in the gubernatorial race. Jackson, by contrast, won re-election by 42 points, even winning some heavily Republican rural white precincts as the following map from Drew Savicki shows. Undoubtedly, her anti-abortion views help her remain popular in deeply conservative Northeast Louisiana. 

Much of the South is deeply conservative, religious, and has similar politics on the issue. Mississippi has been in the news lately due to Democrat Brandon Presley’s remarkable overperformance in what has recently been an intractably Republican state. As much as people will mention his familiar last name, or the failings of his Republican opponent, it is highly likely that his pro-life positions significantly eased psychological pressure on otherwise-Republican voters who were considering voting for him. By matching the policy preferences of a conservative state like Mississippi, Presley effectively took abortion off the table as an issue that he could be attacked on. 

Most recently serving as an example of the dichotomy between secular and religious voters’ different reactions to Dobbs is the just-completed Utah 2nd district special congressional election. Republican Celeste Maloy easily won by over 20 and widely beat conventional wisdom as to her victory margin. Her Democratic opponent, Kathleen Riebe, ran with emphasized opposition to aggressive anti-abortion legislation. 

This did in fact work in the liberal Salt Lake County portion of the seat, where Riebe outperformed Biden. Biden won the Salt Lake County portion of the 2nd with 65%, and with votes still being counted, Riebe is at 66%. But the gerrymandered composition of this district means the majority of the vote is cast in red rurals and exurbs. These areas, both due to Maloy’s ties to southern Utah as well as strong rural Mormon conservatism gave Riebe historically low shares. Iron County gave Biden 19% — this November Riebe got 14%. Similarly, in Garfield County, Biden earned 19%, while Riebe got 16%. In Millard County, Biden got 10% in 2020. With votes still being counted, Riebe is currently at 8%. 

All these data points in aggregate go to show that there is indeed a flipside of the Dobbs effect that Democrats have made frequent use of in 2022 and 2023. While secular voters have broadly become more open to supporting Democrats due to the increasing linkage between pro-choice attitudes and blue voting habits, the opposite is also true. Highly religious voters have become even more turbocharged for Republicans. In 2022, Republican gubernatorial candidates across the South put up their best rural numbers in modern history, likely driven in part by a renewed emphasis on pro-life abortion views. 

Luckily for the Democrats, most of the country does not behave like the religious enclaves mentioned in this article. The states that will likely decide the 2024 Presidential Election are all relatively pro-choice, and Democrats are fighting the messaging battle over abortion on very favorable terrain, as the 2022 and 2023 elections suggest. But this advantage is not universal: pro-life voters understand now more than ever which party shares their values.