A week out from a momentous pro-abortion rights victory in Wisconsin, abortion continues to make headlines and roil the nation—and send a clear signal about what this issue means for elections. The good news: Last Tuesday, Judge Janet Protasiewicz stormed to victory in the special state Supreme Court election, beating her conservative rival, former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, by 11 percentage points.
Separately, Brandon Johnson’s surprise victory in Chicago was an upset that came on the heels of controversy surrounding his more conservative oppoent’s abortion stance.
These wins are great news for women, Democrats, and abortion rights, with implications for the 2024 election cycle and beyond. But only a few days after those momentous victories, an extremist federal judge in Texas dealt another blow, releasing an opinion that could outlaw medication abortion nationwide.
Here’s a quick dive beneath the headlines into some key points and trends we’re keeping an eye on—and what they could mean for Democrats and women heading into 2024.
Abortion Is a Winning Issue
Last Tuesday’s results were another piece of evidence that abortion rights continue to help Democrats to victory. Though Judge Protasiewicz made no explicit promises on how she would rule should abortion come before the court, she was explicit about her personal belief in abortion rights.
And while municipal policies have little bearing on abortion rights, an endorsement from a local abortion rights PAC may have helped put Johnson over the top in Chicago. The PAC noted that Paul Vallas is personally opposed to abortion, and would not commit to maintaining the levels of City funding Chicago abortion clinics receive.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, abortion has helped Democrats win nationwide, especially in the South and Midwest where abortion rights are most threatened. The decision from Texas, while devastating, will only continue to inflame women and independent voters.
The issue is especially resonant with voters in Wisconsin, where the removal of federal protections allowed a complete abortion ban passed in 1849 to take effect. Wisconsin’s attorney general has sued, arguing that the 1849 law is unconstitutional; that suit is expected to reach the state Supreme Court in the next year or two.
A Democratic Overperformance?
We’re seeing a lot of headlines that this victory signals a Democratic overperformance, and there’s some evidence that’s true. Historical statewide election data is quite mixed, but shows that Democrats can win big when candidates and conditions are favorable. In another wave year, 2018, Sen. Tammy Baldwin won re-election by 10.9 percentage points.
But it seems like Kelly, who spent his campaign vowing to restrict abortion rights and attacking transgender kids, mostly helped drag down Republicans by just being a poor candidate.
Let’s look at the last Wisconsin Supreme Court election held in 2020. Kelly was a sitting justice at the time, appointed in 2016 by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. His re-election bid was thwarted by liberal candidate Jill Karofsky, who won by nearly 11 percentage points.
The race did, however, break turnout records for non-primary spring elections in Wisconsin, at 36 percent. That’s still far below the 58 percent turnout from the 2022 midterms, which itself was below 2018’s 59 percent.
Six is Not Enough
Fun fact: Six of the seven justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court are women, a stat that will hold when Judge Protasiewicz is sworn in to replace retiring Justice Patience Roggensack.
Although the Court is nominally non-partisan, three women—including Protasiewicz—are considered liberal, while the other three women are considered conservative. The Court’s lone man, Justice Brian Hagedorn, is considered a swing vote, though he has frequently sided with the liberal wing since his re-election in 2019.
We’re reminded of the late, great Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who once said, “When I’m sometimes asked ‘When will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)?’ and my answer is: ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
The Legislative Threat Still Lurking
While most people were celebrating Judge Protasiewicz’s victory on Tuesday, we were still worriedly watching the special state senate election, where a Republican supermajority was at stake.
Unfortunately, Republicans will retain that supermajority, which gives them the power to remove statewide elected officials, including, potentially, Judge Protasiewicz. Wisconsin requires only a bare majority in the Assembly to impeach, which Republicans have. It would be hard replace her with a conservative, however, since Gov. Tony Evers would make an appointment.
Thankfully, a Senate supermajority alone doesn’t give them the ability to override gubernatorial vetoes; they’d need a supermajority in the Assembly too, which they don’t have.
The federal court wrangling over mifepristone (one of two components in the abortion pill, RU-486) also has implications for state legislatures. On Friday, a judge in Texas invalidated the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of the medication. If its nationwide distribution is limited while the appeals process plays out, state lawmakers will need to work to maintain access to in-clinic abortions.
The Bottom Line for 2024
Democrats are facing a tough 2024 cycle, with the brunt of the threat falling on women candidates.
More than half of the candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of ‘frontline’ incumbents for 2024—seats that are at the highest risk of flipping Republican—are women. On the National Republican Congressional Committee’s target list, just under half the target seats are women-held.
Altogether, out of these 38 incumbent Democratic seats targeted by both the DCCC and NRCC, fully half—19—are currently held by women. The House as a whole is a little over 28 percent women. Three out of the eight most at-risk Democrat-held Senate seats, according to the Cook Political Report, are being contested by women, even though only 29 percent of the Democratic Senate caucus is women.
Continuing to press the abortion issue is one clear way we can reclaim an advantage for Democratic candidates, especially women candidates, in this environment. It’s well-documented at this point that the issue has driven an electoral surge toward Democratic candidates and a widening of the gender gap in voting, trends distilled in this must-read piece from Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine.
There is also some evidence abortion politics is specifically helping women candidates, as we broke records for representation in Congress, state executive offices, and state legislatures last year. It’s an advantage we sorely need, as government institutions continue to make decisions affecting women’s bodies and lives, even as we make up less than a third of members elected at most levels of government.