Election reveals voters' abortion disconnect

• Republicans will now face pressure from outside groups to pursue a ban on reproductive rights that voters clearly are willing to defend, even in solidly red states.

State of play: Voters in seven states approved ballot proposals to protect abortion rights, including in deep-red Missouri and Montana and the key swing state of Arizona.

• A proposal in Florida to enshrine abortion access until fetal viability, or around 24 weeks, just narrowly missed the state's 60% threshold for passage.
• South Dakota and Nebraska also rejected abortion rights protections yesterday, but the vote was close in Nebraska.

Yes, but: Vice President Harris' campaign message to voters that President-elect Trump was directly responsible for Roe v. Wade's demise didn't land.

• Trump waffled on the issue before settling on a leave-it-to-the-states stance.
• About 14% of voters said in exit polls that abortion was the top issue influencing their vote.
• Moreover, Trump's victory, a Republican Senate and the possibility of a GOP-controlled House could lead to a trifecta that delivers a nationwide ban.
• SBA Pro-Life America and its affiliates spent $92 million on voter mobilization in eight battleground states.
• "Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration. President Trump's first-term pro-life accomplishments are the baseline for his second term," SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement.

Trump has said he would not sign a national abortion ban, and tried to downplay abortion's importance to voters near the end of his presidential campaign.

• But abortion advocates said Wednesday that they're preparing for him to change his mind on a ban, which could supersede state laws — even in states that have passed constitutional abortion protections.

Between the lines: Reproductive rights measures have historically outperformed candidates at the polls, as have other policy issues on the ballot like minimum wage, Medicaid expansion and paid leave.

• Candidate races are more complicated than ballot initiatives and may not be an accurate barometer of public sentiment on an issue, Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, told Axios.
• "They're never just about one thing, and that was certainly true this election cycle, where the economy was a major issue, immigration was a major issue and reproductive rights was a major issue," she said.

That said, some abortion rights groups acknowledge they could have done more with their messaging.

• "The stakes about abortion and the impact of … total abortion bans were communicated really well" throughout the election cycle, said Kelly Baden, vice president of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute.

• "Where we haven't made as much ground is around the connection of abortion to issues of economics and to issues of democracy," she said. "There's room to grow on that."

What we're watching: Even without a national ban, a new Trump administration can still severely curtail abortion access across the country.

• Trump could use a 19th-century law called the Comstock Act to stop Americans from legally mailing abortion medication and equipment used in procedural abortions. Such a move could effectively ban abortions in the United States.
• The federal government could also stop enforcing a national law that requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care.
• Officials could also try to circumvent the Affordable Care Act's requirement that employers cover contraception without out-of-pocket costs, and bring back a policy that prevents health providers at clinics that receive certain federal funds from referring patients to abortion care.

If more women die because they can't access abortion care, voters could start to put more stock in abortion as an electoral priority, said Fatima Goss Graves, CEO of the National Women's Law Center.

• "The overwhelming evidence of the pain of the policy decision to ban abortion in this country, squared with politicians who have refused to solve for this crisis, will potentially change the dynamic going forward," Goss Graves added.

The bottom line: Over the next four years, "living in a protective state doesn't necessarily mean that your right to abortion is going to remain," Guttmacher's Baden said.

• Communicating that to voters is Democrats' and advocates' next big task.

Go deeper: Charted: How abortion fares on state ballots