| Donald Trump has recaptured the White House in one of the biggest political comebacks in US history.
This was the first US presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, a decision that ended a constitutional right to an abortion that had been in place since 1973.
Abortion access has been a political flashpoint ever since and played a large role in the campaign Trump fought against Vice President Kamala Harris. Ten states had abortion-related ballot measures on the ballot yesterday, giving local voters a direct say on access rights. This was the most on record for a single year, according to Ballotpedia. Seven of those states — Arizona, Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana, Nevada and Missouri — voted in favor of expanding abortion access. The win in Arizona came even though the state was considered among the most restrictive for reproductive rights in the US. The measure in Florida, where the Trump campaign huddled overnight as election results rolled in, failed. It just missed the 60% threshold for approval.
"It's hard to take away rights that people have had for a long period of time," says Diana Mutz, a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the 2024 election, some 25 million women ages 15 to 44 are living in states where there are more restrictions on abortion than before the Supreme Court ruling.
Bloomberg News/Morning Consult polls of voters in seven swing states, where Trump dominated, showed that the number of people saying abortion was the most important factor in deciding how to vote doubled from 6% in October 2023 to 12% one year later.  Yet Trump's approach to abortion has been complicated. He spent much of last year taking credit for the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe. To win over more abortion-rights supporters, in August he posted on Truth Social: "My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights." The pivot angered some abortion opponents who had previously backed his campaigns. Then last month he said he would veto a federal abortion ban.
Harris leaned into the issue, betting that a majority of Americans supported abortion rights, and warned that if Trump was elected president again "he will ban abortion nationwide."
A study of midterm voters in the 2022 election had found that views on abortion were more of a decisive factor than the economy, even as inflation was spiking.
"Americans who favored legal abortions were more likely to shift from voting for Republican candidates in 2020 to Democratic candidates in 2022," the study, which was co-authored by Mutz, said. Polling data from Iowa over the weekend had appeared to show increased support for Harris with voters seeming eager to rally against the state's six-week abortion ban. Yet Trump's victory showed that this time around, immigration and the economy appeared to turn more people out to vote than abortion rights. — Antonia Mufarech | 
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