Election Day: Pro-life victories and devastating defeats for abortion activists

Donald J. Trump has staged the greatest political comeback in American history, and he did so definitively. He  unseated Grover Cleveland as the last president to serve non-consecutive terms; his victory overshadows even Richard Nixon’s accomplishment in 1972. After losses in the 2018 midterms, the 2020 election, and the “red wave” that never came in 2022, the Republican Party has won the Senate, the presidency—and the popular vote. The scale of the achievement is staggering. What does this mean for social conservatives and pro-lifers?

First, American abortion activists have been dealt their first massive defeats since Dobbs. Abortion activists and Democrat strategists convinced Kamala Harris to make abortion the centerpiece of her entire campaign. As I’ve noted before, she was the first vice-president to visit an abortion clinic. A mobile abortion clinic killed babies outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. She had a fifty-stop “Reproductive Rights” tour plugging abortion. She had abortionists come on stage at her rallies. She talked about it constantly—as did all of her campaign surrogates, including her husband, Doug.

After a winning streak in a series of post-Dobbs abortion referendums, abortion activists were convinced that the path to the presidency was over the bodies of aborted babies. As it turns out, they were wrong. It wasn’t even close. Harris the Abortion Candidate lost in a blowout. As one CNN analyst put it last night: “It seems like abortion was not the animating issue.” We do not yet know what Donald Trump will do on abortion, considering the fact that he staked out a pro-choice position throughout the campaign. But here’s what we do know:

• Harris had promised to nuke the filibuster in order to ramrod through a national abortion law. Neither of those things will happen, and I suspect that the Democrats will suddenly rediscover the filibuster as an essential democratic norm that cannot be done away with.

• Harris had promised to prioritize the agenda of abortion activists if elected. Now abortion activists, who poured all of their efforts into opposing Trump, will have no influence. This is far more significant than it might seem.

• Biden and Harris had promised “reforms” of the Supreme Court that included court-packing and term limits in an attempt to break the current conservative majority. That will no longer happen—and again, I suspect that Democrats now hate the idea. They are willing to do away with any democratic norm in the way of their abortion agenda.

• It may be slightly premature, but social conservatives are already celebrating the defeat of the transgender movement. Trump and JD Vance ran against the transgender agenda—especially sex changes for minors—and won. On CNN, Van Jones bloviated about the Trump ticket succeeding by “using the faces of trans children as a springboard.” This is obvious nonsense, but there is an admission there—that Democrats are losing the public debate on this issue, definitively. This morning, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough made a similar comment: “85% of Americans oppose men transitioning after puberty and competing against women. And I’m not just saying this the day after the election.”

As Matt Walsh noted: “One of the takeaways from tonight’s results: the trans movement is dead. Trump campaigned heavily against it and won in a landslide. Americans have finally rejected trans insanity. We had the trans activists on the ropes for a while. This was the knockout blow. Good riddance.” Again, I think trans activists are deeply embedded in many institutions, and they will be difficult to purge, but there is certainly reason for optimism.

So what do pro-lifers do next? First, we must be clear-eyed. Trump is not pro-life, but he will be appointing thousands of people. Personnel is policy, and the pro-life movement must work hard to ensure that pro-lifers are appointed to places of influence. That made an enormous difference during his first term. As the philosopher Ed Feser put it: “Dear pro-life Trump voters who shielded their eyes from his endorsement of the abortion pill, the IVF mandate, etc., and insisted “Save your criticisms until after the election!” Get some rest tonight. You’ve got a lot of work to catch up on starting tomorrow.”

He is precisely right. The war for the soul of the GOP is on. Trump cannot run for president again. So what will the future look like? Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida? Or the Trump family?

That brings me to the first big news of last night—the failure of Florida’s Amendment 4, which would have enshrined abortion up until birth into the state constitution. Abortion activists needed to get 60% of the vote to achieve this, and it would have overturned Governor DeSantis’s “heartbeat bill,” which protects babies at six weeks. Despite spending a staggering $118 million—against the pro-life campaign’s $12 million—the abortion activists failed, missing the threshold by several percentage points. Ron DeSantis made all the difference. He and his beautiful wife Casey were tireless in their defence of the unborn.

DeSantis did interviews; he pushed back against pro-abortion talking points; he used all of his power and influence to defend unborn babies. Everyone said that it could not be done—Florida was, until very recently, a purple swing state. Even Trump refused to say on Election Day whether he had voted for or against Amendment 4 (Melania certainly voted for abortion). DeSantis has now proven to every GOP governor and politician who has been running from the abortion issue since Roe was overturned that one can actually run and win on conviction rather than in spite of conviction. Governor Ron DeSantis is now the de facto political leader of the pro-life movement. I wasn’t the only one saying this last night.

DeSantis has proven that if you are willing to lead and fight, victory is possible. His pro-life advocacy and defeat of Amendment 4 reminds me of something Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s Iron Lady, once told William F. Buckley. “For years now, this word has reared its head: consensus, you must have consensus,” she said. “It’s a word you used not to use when I first came into politics. We had convictions, and we tried to persuade people that our convictions were the right ones.” According to some estimates, the failure of Amendment 4 will save over 50,000 unborn lives every year. God bless Governor DeSantis.

Despite being outspent by massive margins, pro-lifers succeeded in several other referendums, as well. In short, the losing streak since Dobbs was broken not just by a Florida outlier. Nebraskans voted down Initiative 439, which was a proposed amendment to Nebraska’s constitution would create a right to abortion until fetal viability or when needed to protect the life or health of a pregnant woman. It failed 51.3% to 48.7%.

In South Dakota, Amendment G, which would have created a constitutional right to abortion, failed by even wider margins—59.5% to 40.5%. Additionally, a proposed constitutional ban on “medically assisted suicide, euthanasia, and mercy killing” in West Virginia was, as of this morning with 90% of the votes counted, slated to pass. Pro-lifers lost some abortion referendums, which is tragic but was expected. Missouri, Colorado, Maryland, Montana, and Arizona passed constitutional amendments enshrining abortion in the constitution. New York, where abortion is legal throughout all nine months, also passed the Equal Protection of Law Amendment, further entrenching abortion.

Abortion activists lost big on November 5. They had hoped that they could roll out a new slogan: “Roe-vember the Fifth.” Instead, they have been dealt their worst series of defeats since Roe v. Wade was overturned.