Reproductive Rights, Reframed: Federalism and Vote Choice in the 2024 Election

ABSTRACT

The overturning of Roe v. Wade sent shockwaves through the American political system. Running on women’s reproductive health care rights, Democrats vastly outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections. The 2024 US presidential election provided a test of whether broad public support for reproductive health care access would continue to translate into electoral gains for Democrats. Using a novel set of survey questions, this article examines attitudes toward abortion and the abortion pill (i.e., mifepristone) as well as preferences over whether policy should be decided federally or by individual states (i.e., locus of authority). Our findings provide partial support for the expectation that locus-of-authority preferences shape vote choice. Whereas support for a constitutional protection for abortion remained strongly associated with voting against Trump regardless of locus-of-authority preferences, the pattern for mifepristone access more closely matched our expectations. Among voters who supported mifepristone access, those who were comfortable leaving the issue to the states were significantly more likely to support Donald Trump. His emphasis on state control may have functioned as strategic ambiguity, especially on a less-polarized reproductive health issue such as mifepristone access.