Abortion is likely not going to be a motivating cause for most voters heading into the 2026 midterm elections, following a downward trend in the issue’s importance since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Several states will likely have abortion rights initiatives on the ballot come election season, but the majority of voters, even Democrats, are no longer ranking abortion as one of their top decisions in choosing for whom to vote.
The Public Religion Research Institute, in its American Values Survey of 2024, found that 55% of Democrats cited abortion as a critical issue in their choice of candidate. That fell to only 36% of Democrats saying the same in the PPRI’s 2025 iteration of the survey.
Abortion’s importance declined for independents too, from 36% in 2024 to only 25% in 2025. The issue’s relevance also dropped slightly for Republicans, from 29% to 27%.
The role of abortion in electoral politics reached a new zenith in 2022 following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to give states control over gestational age limits on abortion.
In the four years since the Dobbs decision, some data suggest that abortion’s importance has reverted to a pre-Roe status quo of anti-abortion conservatives ranking abortion as their No. 1 issue instead of abortion-rights Democrats.
A September 2025 survey from the gender politics news outlet the 19th and Survey Monkey found that only 2% of people say abortion is their top issue in 2025, compared to 7% in 2024. Among those who see abortion as their first priority, nearly 6 in 10 want abortion outlawed or significantly curtailed.
Prior to the Dobbs decision, a Pew Research Center poll from 2020 found that only 35% of Democrats saw abortion as a “very important” issue. But by August 2022, two months after the overturning of Roe, 74% of Democrats said it was very important.
During the 2024 presidential election, then-Vice President Kamala Harris and downballot Democrats overplayed their hand, leaning into abortion-rights messaging despite polling showing that voters on both sides of the aisle were more concerned about the state of the economy.
Democrats in 2024 also hoped that state-level ballot initiatives on abortion would drive voter turnout and elevate their candidates. But that plan backfired, with now-President Donald Trump winning four states that voted in support of ballot measures that added abortion rights to their respective constitutions.
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Even in the politically purple Arizona, 28% of voters who voted to enshrine abortion rights voted for Trump, with similar margins across other less-contested states, according to the health policy organization KFF.
Five states that are likely to have abortion-related ballot initiatives in 2026 are also slated to have elections for Senate this year, including Virginia, Oregon, Idaho, Nebraska, and Montana.
