Donald Trump has now decisively won the presidency. I have a big collection of ideas for him on things to do once he takes office. So far, I’ve been holding off on writing about those ideas, not wanting to get ahead of myself only to then have him lose the election. Now, the gates can open.
But for today, I have another topic to consider: the relatively tiny shift in party control of seats in the House of Representatives. Indeed, the shift is so small that it is not even completely clear at this writing that the Republicans will control the House. (Current betting odds are around 91% that Republicans will retain control.). Why didn’t Trump have any meaningful coattails in the House? The answer to that question can give some insights into how the respective parties’ odds might change the next time out.
Before the election, Republicans were running ahead by a small but consistent margin in the generic ballot for the House. (The so-called “generic ballot” records the response to the question, “If the election for the House were held today, would you vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate in your district?”). In other recent elections, even a slight advantage in the generic ballot has been sufficient to give the Republicans a meaningful House majority. (The reason for this phenomenon is that there is a “natural” gerrymander resulting from the greater concentration of Democrats in heavily one-party districts, mainly in big cities.). So the question is, why were the Republicans unable to capitalize on their generic ballot advantage?
From what I could observe in my own region, a big part of the answer to the question lies in the issue of abortion. In this cycle, the Democrats used that issue to their advantage, apparently to good effect. The question is whether that issue will continue to be effective for the Democrats in federal races going forward.
Here in New York, we had something unusual this year, which was a collection of competitive House races in our area. The group of competitive elections did not include the race for President, nor the race for Senator from New York (won easily by incumbent Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand.). However, there were no fewer than seven competitive House seats in the New York City suburbs — four to our East on Long Island, and three more to our North in the Hudson Valley. All of those are within the New York City television market.
In the last month or so, both parties invested heavily in trying to win these seven races. The result was that the airwaves were flooded with commercials supporting or opposing one or another of these candidates, almost to the exclusion of all other advertising. By contrast, there were hardly any ads for either Trump or Harris, and a bare handful for Gillibrand. I never saw a single ad for Gillibrand’s opponent (a guy named Sapraicone, who got a relatively respectable 41% of the vote, which is not bad considering that he didn’t spend a dime).
If you had watched some of the hundreds of ads run on behalf of the Democratic candidates for these seats, you would have concluded that the only important issue in these races was abortion. One after the other, the ads accused the Republican candidates of trying to “take away women’s reproductive freedom,” or of trying to “eliminate the right to choose,” or of wanting to “ban abortion,” or of being “extremists” on the abortion issue, and so forth.
I can’t say that I blame the Democrats for their emphasis on this issue. Undoubtedly, their polling implied that emphasizing this issue gave them the greatest shot to change votes in their favor.
And there is good reason to think that this “abortion abortion abortion” strategy worked, at least to some degree and at least in this market. In 2022, after a very good year in newly-districted seats, the Republicans had come away with five of these seven. One of those five was then flipped when a guy named George Santos was charged with wire fraud in late 2023, and was forced to resign. Democrat Tom Suozzi won a special election for that seat in February 2024, leaving the Republicans with four of the seven swing seats. Now, according to the latest returns, Suozzi and the two other incumbent Democrats have been re-elected, two incumbent Republicans have been re-elected, and the final two seats, both now in Republican hands, are in the yet-to-be-called category.. In both those latter cases the Democrat is leading by a small margin, with few votes left to count. It could be that the Republicans will hold as few as two of these seven suburban swing seats when the counts conclude.
But here’s the problem for the Democrats: Their current success turned on abortion being a key issue in races in New York for seats in the federal Congress; but it is likely that going forward abortion will diminish rapidly in its significance as an issue for House races in these districts.
Even this year, the significance of abortion as an issue in these federal races appeared relatively small to me. After all, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Dobbs case made the issue of abortion rights one for the states, rather than the federal government. In New York, the right to abortion is at essentially no risk. The state legislature is controlled by the Democrats by huge majorities, and the Republicans in the state legislature also have no interest in taking on the abortion issue.
Granted, I can’t say that the abortion issue was completely irrelevant to an election for the federal Congress this year. For example, there have been suggestions for introducing into the federal Congress a bill calling for a nationwide ban on abortions; and there have also been suggestions (endorsed at one point by Vice President Harris) for introducing into Congress a bill that would enshrine into a federal statute the prior right to abortion that the Supreme Court had found in the Constitution under Roe v. Wade. My view is that neither of these bills will have any chance of making headway in the federal Congress, no matter which party controls it. In the case of the nationwide ban, Trump has said that if Congress passed such a thing, he would veto it. Equally important, there is every reason to think that, if either of those bills ever got enacted, the Supreme Court would strike it down as beyond the powers conferred on Congress under the Constitution.
Still, I do recognize that at the current moment there is at least a theoretical possibility for a bill along either of these lines to make it into federal law. And therefore I cannot blame a woman for being concerned about this subject as a potential threat to women’s freedoms.
But consider where we will be on this issue in two years, or four, or eight. In all likelihood, there will have been no significant action of any kind in Congress on abortion. Even if some extremists on either side of the issue act to introduce one or more bills, they will have no ability to move such bills forward, let alone to force a vote to be used against opponents in campaign advertising. The issue will simply not be before the Congress in any meaningful way. Over time, it will inevitably fade in significance, as it becomes clear that the abortion rules have been made by the states, and the only way to change them is through state legislatures or referenda at the state level.
And meanwhile, only two years after Dobbs, the states are settling into their own regimes of abortion restrictions, or lack thereof. After rounds of post-Dobbs statutes, followed by referenda in many states, the new rules have in most cases been set. Only a few states have rules that are still in flux. New York is definitely not one of them.
With abortion as a lead example, the fundamental strategy of Democrats in Congressional elections has been to attempt to frighten the electorate about what the opposition will do. I can’t see how abortion maintains its status as a big fear generator for federal elections as years pass without the federal government being involved in the issue in any way.
Meanwhile, in a very similar category is “climate change,” used now for decades by Democrats to stir up voter-motivating fear. This year, in hundreds of political ads, I saw barely a mention of the issue. The Nazi/Hitler/”threat to democracy” meme also seems to be rapidly losing its bite.
So where do the Democrats go from here? I have no doubt that there will be some issue out there that can be conjured up for the next round of voter scare tactics. But it’s hard to see how anything new could be the equal of abortion, or for that matter of climate change. Perhaps the benefits of proposed policies can make it into the discussion. If so, that would favor the Republicans.
