The Pro-Life Democrat Is a Politically Endangered Species
But a Pro-Choice Republican is much more viable
The conventional wisdom in American politics holds that abortion is a litmus test issue. Simply stated, Republicans must be pro-life and Democrats must be pro-choice to survive in their respective primaries. Let alone a general election.
On the Republican side, the most prominent example of a pro-choice Republican finding electoral success is Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, who won two terms in a deep blue state while maintaining a pro-choice position. Susan Collins of Maine represents another case. She has won four Senate elections in a state that leans Democratic in presidential years while consistently supporting abortion access. But let’s be clear about something in the case of Baker and Collins - the states that they represent aren’t the reddest in the Union. It makes me wonder if their success reflects genuine cross-pressured voters or simply the fact that pro-choice Republicans can do well in a handful of states in the Northeast.
It’s even more difficult to find a pro-life Democrat, though. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania built a career as one of the last prominent pro-life Democrats in the Senate, though his 2024 reelection loss to Dave McCormick raises questions about whether his brand of cross-pressured politics had finally run its course in a nationalized electoral environment. Tim Ryan, who ran a competitive Senate race in Ohio in 2022, moderated his historically pro-choice position during the campaign, suggesting that even candidates in red-leaning states felt pressure to move toward the party mainstream after Dobbs.
For whatever reason, I see a lot of pontificating on social media about what the Democrats and Republicans should do on abortion, and I thought I would try to inject some signal in all that noise by just tracing how abortion has shifted over time and whether candidates are capable of actually splitting the votes of pro-life or pro-choice people in any effective way.
First, let me just show you a couple of graphs that lay out the long term trends surrounding access to abortion. Since 1977, the GSS has been asking, “Do you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants one for any reason?” The trend is certainly in the pro-choice direction.
Obviously the non-religious stand out on this metric. Even back in the late 1970s, the vast majority favored abortion access. That share has only grown over time and now 81% of the nones think a pregnant woman should be able to obtain an abortion if she wants one for any reason. The “other faith” category went from slight majority support (54%) to strong support (67%) over this 45 year window of time.
Every Christian group has moved to the pro-choice side on this question over time. For some groups, the shift has been large, for others it’s been relatively small. Among mainline Protestants, the movement was 15 points to the left —now a bare majority support access (56%). For Catholics, they went from strong opposition back in 1977 (only 32% in favor) to being almost evenly split on this now: 53%. Evangelicals have moved the least of any group: 24% back in 1977 to 32% today. They are the only religious group where a majority did not favor abortion access.
But I have to point out those Black Protestants. Their line looks like no other trend in this graph. For a long time, their views of abortion lined up with Catholics. They moved in almost perfect unison between 1977 and 2007. However, it looks like the election of Barack Obama was an inflection point. Catholic support for abortion did rise, but much slower than Black Protestants. Just think about this: in 2008, about 35% of Black Protestants favored abortion access. That figure in 2024? It was 67%.
I think there’s a good reason for that: access to abortion services has become a part of the “core orthodoxy” of the Democratic party. To give a window into that, I just calculated the share of pro-life voters and pro-choice voters who identified as ideologically conservative over time.
What really should jump out to you is the comparison between the percentages back in 1977. If someone was pro-life, they were just as likely to identify as conservative as someone who favored abortion access. I mean, look at the evangelical graph. 41% of pro-lifers said that they were conservative. It was 36% of pro-choice evangelicals. The gaps for the mainline was 4 points. It was non-existent among Black Protestants and Catholics. You could be pro-life and not necessarily be a conservative. That’s certainly not the case anymore.
But the movement over the last 45 years has been oddly asymmetrical. You can see it among evangelicals. Among pro-choicers, the share who are conservative has actually risen over time to 40% now. A move of 4 points. However, the pro-lifers have become 33 points more conservative during this time period. For Catholics, the movement for pro-choices has been six points. It was 26 points for pro-lifers. It’s becoming increasingly the case that to be pro-life is to be conservative.
Let’s pivot to vote choice now. I wanted to focus particularly on the last three elections because we can hold a very important variable constant: the name of the candidate on the ballot. Trump was at the top of the ticket all three times.
Back in 2016, the pro-choice subgroup was about two-thirds for Hillary Clinton and 27% for Donald Trump. So there were quite a few folks who supported access to an abortion who also cast a ballot for the GOP. But that didn’t last long at all. By 2020, the pro-choice vote went from D+40 to D+63. Biden won 80% of the pro-choice vote and only 17% of them favored Trump. The 2024 election was largely a copy of the 2020 result: Harris got 78% and Trump got 20%. I think it’s very fair to say that pro-choice voters went from a forty point advantage for Democrats to a sixty point cushion in just a couple of election cycles.
But the same thing also happened among pro-lifers. Back in 2016, Clinton got 22% of voters who did not favor abortion access, while Trump received 71% of their ballots. So, basically R+50. But by 2020, that margin swelled to R+64. However, 2024 was an even larger gap. Among pro-life voters, 89% favored Donald Trump while only 9% voted for Harris. That’s a gain of nearly thirty percentage points for the Republicans during this time period.
To summarize:
Pro-Choice voters went from D+40 to D+58 between 2016 and 2024.
Pro-Life voters went from R+49 to R+80 between 2016 and 2024.
The voting blocs are “purifying” themselves over time. There aren’t as many cross-pressured voters when it comes to abortion. If you favor access, you vote for Democrats. If you don’t, then you support the GOP.
What happens when I break it down into a couple of religious groups?
I think that the same general impression comes through here. The gaps for every one of these subgroups is getting larger over time when comparing pro-choice voters to pro-life voters. Among pro-life white evangelicals, Trump’s margin went from 87% in 2016 to 94% in 2024. It increased 24 points for non-white evangelicals, too: 56% to 80%. For mainline Protestants who don’t favor access to abortion, Trump won a whopping 89% of their votes in 2024. It was 90% of white Catholics. You can even see that rightward movement among Jews and non-religious groups, too. Fewer and fewer voters believe that one can support restrictions on abortion and not vote for the Republican.
But what may be even more fascinating to me is that Trump didn’t really seem to lose too much ground among pro-choice voters. I mean, look at the non-white evangelicals: he got 15% of their votes in 2016 and 14% in 2024. He went down about 8 points among pro-choice mainline Protestants and six points among white Catholics. So, pro-life voters have moved 15 or 20 points in his direction and he’s only lost pro-choice voters by an additional five points over time.
However, that also means that the gaps between pro-choice and pro-life Americans at the ballot box have increased over time. It’s 19 points wider among mainline Protestants in 2024 compared to 2016. It’s up 23 points among white Catholics. Again, we just aren’t seeing a whole lot of cross-pressured voters here. Pro-life voters aren’t even considering the Democratic party anymore. Meanwhile, pro-choice voters do seem to be moving away from the GOP but at a much slower rate.
Here’s the point that I really want to make on this issue: the Democrat party has moved a whole lot more on the question of abortion access compared to the Republicans.
In 2014, 79% of Democrats said that they supported access to an abortion if a woman wanted one for any reason. In 2024, that had risen to 91%. I don’t know if there’s a definition of “party orthodoxy” but I think when over 90% of your voting bloc aligns on one position, that makes a pretty strong case. So, a pro-life Democrat is going to hold to a position that will please about 1 in 10 of his or her voters and anger almost all the rest.
Among Republicans, there’s a bit more diversity of thought on this question. In 2024, 34% of Republicans favored access to an abortion. In the next decade, the total amount of movement was 3 points. By 2024, 31% of Republicans favored abortion access. So, 9% of Democratic voters are pro-life and 31% of Republicans are pro-choice. There’s just a whole lot more evidence to support the viability of a pro-choice Republican than a pro-life Democrat.
A couple things are worth summarizing at the end of this post.
It’s empirically true that views of abortion have liberalized over time. That’s the case with every single religious tradition in the data. The only religious group that I can find where a majority aren’t in favor of abortion access are evangelicals.
Pro-choice voters have become more Democratic over time. Pro-life voters have become more likely to vote for the GOP. But pro-lifers are more uniform in their support of the Republicans than pro-choicers are in support of the Democrats.
The pro-life Democrats and the pro-choice Republicans are becoming harder to find with each passing year. However, there’s more diversity of opinion on abortion among the GOP rank and file than among the Democrats.
To me, this is a classic example of partisan sorting. When writing this post, I was reminded of a great paper from Karol and Thurston entitled, “From Personal to Partisan: Abortion, Party, and Religion Among California State Legislators.” Before Roe was decided, legislators in California held abortion opinions that reflected their own religious background. But after 1973, things began to shift. They found that over time the effect of religion waned as partisan affiliation came to supplant the role of religion in predicting abortion support. This was partly due to incumbent politicians shifting their voting behavior and partly due to retirement and replacement of older legislators with those more in tune with their party’s position.
Partisanship rules everything around us.
Code for this post can be found here.
Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
