Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, neither party ran many TV advertisements focused on abortion.
Line chart showing the percentage of television ad spending devoted to abortion from 2018 to 2021. Both Democrats and Republicans spent only around 3 percent each year during that period.
Since the constitutional right to abortion was taken away in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, Democratic spending on abortion-related ads has jumped.
Line chart showing the percentage of television ad spending devoted to abortion from 2018 to 2024. Democratic spending jumped up to around one-third in 2022 after the Dobbs ruling and has stayed high.
Campaigns don’t usually reveal their strategy going into an election season; the best way to suss out their plans for victory is to track how they spend their resources. Ads are especially revealing. They show the issues and messages that candidates are betting on. New data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact reveals the surprising degree to which Democrats have leveraged abortion rights as a powerful culture-war wedge issue against Republicans.
Since 2022, the year Roe v. Wade was overturned, the gap in abortion ad spending between Democrats and Republicans has ballooned, with estimated Democratic spending on abortion-related ads rising to over a third of their total broadcast TV budget in 2022 and 2023. Republican spending has hardly budged.
In 2024, Democrats have made huge bets on the issue in battleground states. In the first four months of this year alone, 48 percent of Democratic ad spending on broadcast networks in Pennsylvania centered on abortion. In Michigan and Arizona, the share was above 60 percent, and in Georgia, it was over 90 percent.
The new data shows that Democrats are continuing to go all in on abortion as the key issue for this election year. While that might seem risky, given how much voters are concerned about the economy, inflation and immigration, the post-Dobbs evidence makes a compelling case for this approach.
The salience of abortion rights remains exceptionally high. There are at least 11 states poised to put an abortion measure on the ballot, even though abortion access remains extraordinarily popular nationwide.
There’s a good chance the issue could offset President Biden’s weakness among many young and nonwhite voters, given the strong turnout among women and younger voters in recent years in states where abortion rights were on the ballot. It also appeals to a portion of critical swing voters who are repelled by the anti-abortion policies that have been proposed or enacted across the nation and may worry that a re-elected President Trump may put new restrictions or bans in place.
Arizona is a good test case for this, where the State Supreme Court recently ruled that an 1864 near-total ban on abortions was enforceable, leading a Republican-majority state legislature to repeal the very same law several weeks later. Democrats are seizing the moment, devoting two-thirds of their ad spending to abortion there.
It’s the right call. The past few elections demonstrate how powerful abortion rights are at motivating the Democratic base. Immediately after the ruling, Democrats went from slightly underperforming in special elections to significantly overperforming, with most of those wins driven by improved turnout among Democratic-leaning voters.
In 2022, Democrats overperformed significantly in several key battleground states, including critical flips in Arizona and Pennsylvania — seats they were predicted to lose because of widespread predictions of a Republican red wave that never materialized.
Democrats are also in a favorable position when it comes to swing voters. Data from Pew Research showed 61 percent of Americans — including 38 percent of Republicans and independents who lean Republican — supported keeping abortion legal in all or most cases, even before Roe was overturned.
Support for abortion rights is popular in a vast majority of states …
Map of the contiguous United States showing the percentage who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases per state. A vast majority of states have a majority believing abortion should be legal, with only five states disagreeing.
… including those with abortion on or proposed for the ballot this year …
Same map as above but with the 11 states with abortion proposed or already on the ballot this year highlighted. The 11 states are Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, New York and Maryland. Nine states have a majority who believe abortion should be legal.
… and especially in battleground states.
Same map as above but with the six battleground states highlighted. The states are Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, and all have a majority who believe abortion should be legal.
In ruby-red Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s re-election campaign successfully leveraged then State Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s stance on abortion rights, which made no exceptions for rape and incest, against him, airing advertisements about a girl who became pregnant and miscarried in seventh grade after being raped by her stepfather.
This example demonstrates why the issue works so well for Democrats on the campaign trail: It motivates core Democratic voters while still appealing to swing voters: a coveted win-win for any campaign.
Of course, this approach is not guaranteed to work. Between the war in Gaza and the ensuing college protests, the new headwinds generated by immigration chaos at the southern border and setbacks in the Ukraine war, there are a host of new factors at play in this cycle that could combine to muffle or drown out what has been a winning message for Democrats.
Still, Democrats also faced a host of unfavorable conditions in 2022: record-breaking gasoline prices, a weak stock market and inflation levels that hit 40-year highs. Yet a relentless focus on abortion rights helped Democrats avert a red wave.
Republicans have yet to field (or even find) an effective counter to the barrage of advertisements and attacks levied by Democrats. The problems caused by their already unpopular stance are compounded by their poor recruiting: Subpar candidates forced to address the issue often stumbled gravely over abortion-related messaging, and these mistakes created huge self-inflicted political wounds for their candidates, surely tarnishing their image in the eyes of swing voters.
The issue is far from defined among the electorate just yet — 17 percent of voters in battleground states think Mr. Biden is more responsible for the fall of Roe than Mr. Trump, according to recent polling. Whether this group responds to Democratic messaging on abortion rights as the election nears could be pivotal.
One path for the G.O.P. would be to continue to stay quiet about abortion, hoping that Mr. Biden’s unpopularity after the sting of years of high inflation could drown out the topic. But elections up and down the ballot since the fall of Roe have made clear that ideological adherence to anti-abortion policies is a losing proposition for Republicans, including in the swing states that will decide control of the presidency. If Democrats can keep this issue at the forefront of the election, it is reasonable to wonder whether 2024 will be any different.