Voter Fatigue, Not Abortion Enthusiasm, May Explain This Year’s GOP Election Debacle

Voters fill out their ballots on Election Day in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 7, 2023. Megan Jelinger/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

As we all know, Election Year 2023 has been as dismal for the Republicans as Election Year 2022.

A year ago in November the vaunted “red wave”—the predicted massive voter backlash against the soaring inflation and crime rates that have marked Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency—never washed ashore. The GOP barely took back the House it was predicted to sweep, and the Democrats gained a seat in the Senate.

The reason offered by every outlet of conventional wisdom was simple and the same: abortion. A Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority had overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2024, striking fear in the hearts of political moderates, especially suburban women, that GOP-dominated legislative majorities would severely restrict access to the procedure via “heartbeat” laws and similar measures. A Democratic sweep followed at both national and state levels.

This year it seemed more of the same in key state elections. Three states ranging from red to purple in political composition—Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia—gave Republicans a drubbing on abortion and other “social” (translation: moral) issues.

Ohio voters, who had gone 53 percent for Republican Donald Trump in 2020, approved by a 56 percent margin a ballot measure enshrining abortion access until fetal viability (with a broad “health” exception) in the state constitution. Just for good measure, they also voted to legalize marijuana.

Kentucky, which gave President Trump 62 percent of its votes in 2020, rejected Trump-backed GOP candidate Daniel Cameron’s challenge to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s bid for reelection. Mr. Beshear had won his first term in 2019 by only 5,000 votes, but Mr. Cameron, the state’s attorney general, had supported Kentucky’s current strict ban on nearly all abortions.

Virginia’s races were a referendum on Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, swept into office in 2021 on a wave of parental discontent with public schools’ pushing trans rights and LGBT identity-flaunting onto young children in classrooms. Mr. Youngkin’s stance on abortion was moderate—he would allow the procedure up to 15 weeks—but Democrats nonetheless retained control of the Virginia Senate and flipped the Virginia House this year.

All this at a time when President Biden’s approval rating is at an all-time low (39 percent), and President Trump narrowly leads him (44 percent to 41 percent) in bipartisan presidential polls. Is abortion really the political career-killing issue that nearly all the pundits say it is? Are the culture wars, with their focus on moral issues and parental rights, really dead?

Actually, the situation is more complicated. For one thing, despite all the media fireworks about abortion’s poisonous effect on GOP political prospects, a You Gov/Statista Research Service poll of U.S. adults conducted in late September 2023 showed that only 5 percent of them regarded abortion as the most important issue facing American voters.

Nearly five times as many (24 percent) put inflation at the top of their lists, with another 10 percent choosing “jobs and the economy.” Another 11 percent listed “health care,” presumably out of concern over its soaring costs, while 9 percent listed “immigration” with its wage-depressing effects, and 6 percent listed “taxes and government spending.” That’s a total of 60 percent of Americans placing economic issues at the very top of their lists of concerns just a month before Election Day 2023. By contrast, non-economic issues—abortion, climate change, guns, civil rights, national security, and even education—fared relatively poorly.

It’s hard not to conclude that American voters this election season, distracted by economic concerns, simply didn’t care one way or the other about abortion and related social issues.

And why should they? Although inflation seems to be slowing, the fact remains that it has eroded nearly 24 percent of Americans’ purchasing power since January 2020. The average national home price rose 29 percent from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. During most of this period, wage growth significantly trailed these inflationary effects. Add to that record levels of cynicism among Americans as to whether government or the political process can improve their lives. A September 2023 poll conducted by the Pew Research Institute revealed that nearly two-thirds of Americans say they always or often feel “exhausted” when thinking about politics.

So call it voter fatigue: Americans flummoxed by skyrocketing grocery and gasoline prices, out-of-control illegal immigration, and what they perceived as a general decline in their own quality of life,  simply threw in the towel this year on social issues. If a woman wants to abort her baby—not their problem, because they’ve got enough problems of their own.

The apathy reflected itself in November 2023’s voter turnout: unusually high (49 percent) for an off-off election year in Ohio thanks to media drum-beating and donor dollars raised by the abortion-rights lobby, but anemically low in Virginia (39 percent) and Kentucky (38 percent).

Still, why did Ohio voters approve a ballot measure that blesses not only abortion but brutal third-trimester procedures—plus, most likely, transgender surgery for minors? Why did Virginians resoundingly reject Glenn Youngkin’s essentially moderate stance on abortion—and have they forgotten all about LGBT indoctrination of their school-age children?

There may be another factor: the fast-growing decline of religious faith in American life, leaving a moral vacuum filled by the cultural leftism preached at every educational level from kindergarten up. By 2020, a Gallup poll reported, only 47 percent of American adults said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Compare that to the 70 percent who reported membership in a house of worship as late as 1999. Church attendance has declined even further since the pandemic.

This year’s overwhelmed voters not only didn’t have the fight to do battle on the moral front, but may also have been unable to recognize what could be wrong with the positions they tacitly endorsed.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.