Fall of Roe V. Wade upends U.S. midterm campaigns as elections draw near

As a political issue, abortion is back on the front burner, and will likely stay there well beyond this November's elections, one expert said.

What a difference a day makes – especially a day like June 24, 2022.

With the stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court repealed nearly 50 years of abortion rights in the United States. Three months later, that decision appears to be reshaping the trajectory of the 2022 midterm elections.

“I’m a young woman – one of the few women of reproductive age in Congress – and so for me, this decision is very personal,” Rep. Sara Jacobs said amid a roiling crowd of protesters in an interview that day.

Five conservative justices took a distant, abstract worry and made it urgent and tangible, the California Democrat said, triggering a sea change sure to have lasting political and social repercussions across the country.

“Now it’s very real and we’re seeing very clearly what the Supreme Court just did – we’ll be able to change some minds and get some things done.”

Maybe, as it turns out, more than she knew at the time: Democrats, once braced for a November bloodletting, have found new life in the weeks and months that followed the court’s seismic reversal.

Even after a draft of the decision was leaked in May, there were few signs that abortion rights would be much of an election issue, said Alesha Doan, a professor of public affairs and gender studies at the University of Kansas.

But all that changed late last month when voters in conservative Kansas roundly rejected a ballot measure designed to toughen abortion laws in the state, the first such referendum since June 24.