Former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees may have cost him the 2024 election, experts told Newsweek.
Trump was already running in what was widely expected to be a close election, but with Vice President Kamala Harris now at the top of the Democratic ticket, and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in place, the Republican nominee’s dreams of a second term may be spoiled by the very justices who he put on the bench.
Trump’s third Supreme Court appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett solidified the court’s conservative supermajority. And it was the six conservative justices on the bench that ultimately would overturn Roe v. Wade with its 2022 Dobbs decision.
The rollback on reproductive rights sparked national outcry in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, but it was over the next two years that voters made it clear they were upset with the court’s conservative justices. At the ballot box, voters, even in ruby red states, resoundingly rejected amendments that challenged the right to an abortion, while emphatically supporting those that codified that right into law.
In November, it will be Trump’s turn to face the angry voters.
Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy, education & politics at Third Way, told Newsweek that in a race this close, any issue could potentially cost a candidate the election, “[b]ut the Dobbs decision might be the top of that list.”
“Every single time abortion rights have been on the ballot since Dobbs, voters have sided with reproductive freedom, and Democrats have overperformed,” Erickson said.
Democrats already successfully defeated Republicans’ hopes for a red wave in the 2022 midterms because of the issue. This year, abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states, the most ever recorded in a single election year.
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Nationally, abortion is ranked as the second most important voting issue behind the economy, which includes jobs and the stock market, the latest poll from New York Times/Siena College shows. Although 22 percent of voters rank the economy first, 14 percent say abortion is the most important.
That trend has trickled down into swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, where abortion is second to the economy. Abortion also ties in second place with immigration in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, where 15 percent, 12 percent and 13 percent of voters rank abortion and immigration as their top voting issue. In North Carolina, 16 percent of voters said abortion was the most important.
Trump trails Harris by 4 points in Arizona and 3 points in North Carolina, while he leads by 7 points in Georgia and 2 points in Nevada.
Although abortion may still rank behind the economy in key battleground states, the issue has emerged as the number one issue for three critical voting blocs: women, young voters and Black voters.
In the August poll, 22 percent of women, 18 percent of those under 30 and 20 percent of Black Americans said abortion was the most important issue. Comparably, 18 percent, 15 percent and 13 percent ranked the economy as their deciding issue.
All three of these groups will be instrumental to a 2024 victory. Harris leads Trump by a 15 percent among women, 10 percent among young voters and a whopping 62 percent among Black voters.
“The key areas where abortion will have an impact with these [educated female] voters are the affluent suburbs of major cities in swing states—suburban Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee and Madison, Atlanta, Phoenix and Las Vegas,” political expert Steve Schier told Newsweek.
Schier also said that the more urban a swing state is, the more abortion will help Harris at the polls. Urban swing states, according to the 2020 Census, include Arizona, Georgia, Nevada Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Strategist Jay Townsend told Newsweek that if Harris wins in November, “reproductive freedom will be one of the reasons [why.]”
“The only way pro-choice voters get what they want is by voting for Harris. And most of them rightly believe that Trump took that right away with his Supreme Court picks,” Townsend said. “Pro-choice voters are also a larger group than fervent pro-life voters. The math works for Harris and doesn’t for Trump.”
“Trump handed Harris a gift during his first term. It would be foolish for her to squander it,” he said.
After the Dobbs ruling, Harris became central to the Biden campaign’s efforts to keep the national spotlight on abortion. On behalf of the White House, she traveled across the nation, championing reproductive rights and personifying the administration’s commitment to defending those rights. In March, she made what was believed to be the first official visit by a president or vice president to an abortion clinic.
At the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris drove that message home.
“Tonight, in America, too many women are not able to make those decisions,” Harris said in her acceptance speech. “And let’s be clear about how we got here: Donald Trump handpicked members of the U.S. Supreme Court to take away reproductive freedom. And now, he brags about it.”
She tied him to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Trump has sought to distance himself from, warning that “he is done” with restricting reproductive rights while plainly asking, “Why exactly is it that they don’t trust women?”
Erickson said that the biggest political advantage that the Dobbs decision handed to Democrats is the “opportunity to reclaim being the party of freedom.”
“Democrats want this to be a free country, and they trust voters to make their own decisions about how to live their lives,” she said. “Republicans want to control the private medical decisions of every American and overrule the judgment of parents about how to raise their own kids. One of those things is popular. The other is political poison.”
She pointed out that Trump had already been super vulnerable on the issue, and his selection of Senator JD Vance as his running mate has only made that problem “exponentially worse.”
“His VP pick is out there insulting women and trying every aspect of their lives every single day in the news,” Erickson said.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email for comment Tuesday afternoon.
