Midterm Elections Reveal a Failure to Win Hearts and Minds
“Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. … But the value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes.”
― Pope St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, no. 70
Last Tuesday, November 3, American voters handed the Democratic Party one of the most sweeping midterm victories in decades. Before midnight, CBS News had projected that Democrats would take control of both the House and the Senate.
By Wednesday morning, CBS projected that Democrats would hold at least 54 Senate seats, after flipping Republican-held seats in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and even Kansas and Texas. In the House, CBS estimated that Democrats would end up with somewhere between 251 and 268 seats.
The blue wave reached areas where GOP dominance was once considered nearly absolute. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa defeated Gov. Greg Abbott, becoming the state’s first Democratic governor since Ann Richards. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Democrat to win the governor’s race since 1998. Even Sen. Ted Cruz called it “a blue tsunami.”
Political analysts will spend months analyzing the results and the exit polling, trying to figure out what happened. For pro-life and pro-family Americans, however, some of the most consequential results came further down the ballot, where voters in several states were asked directly about abortion, marriage, and gender.
In Virginia, voters approved an amendment enshrining a “right” to abortion in their state constitution, by a margin of 62 to 38 percent. Nevada voters passed a similar amendment with 63 percent of the vote. And in Missouri, voters rejected an amendment that would have repealed the abortion “right” they added to their constitution only two years ago.
Virginians also voted, by roughly 57 percent, to remove the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman from their constitution.
One of the few exceptions came in Idaho, where 56 percent of voters rejected Proposition 1. That measure would have created a legal right to abortion and nullified the state’s pro-life laws.
Virginia Bishops: “Profoundly Tragic”
The bishops of Virginia did not mince words. In a joint statement on Wednesday, Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington and Bishop Barry Knestout of Richmond called the passage of Question 1 “profoundly tragic.”
“Unless a court intervenes, this decision will embed virtually limitless abortion into the constitution,” they wrote. They described “this extreme, radical, dangerous and deadly constitutional amendment” as “a complete rejection of the immeasurable value of human life.”
On Question 2, the bishops reaffirmed that marriage, “created by God,” “is the union of a man and a woman.”
In Nevada, the state’s Catholic Bishops Conference responded that “A vote can change Nevada’s constitution, but it cannot change the dignity and value of every human life.”
Unfortunately, the fight is about to get harder. Democrats have outlined plans to pass the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act “in the first hundred hours of a Democrat-controlled Congress.” The bill would create federal “abortion access” protections that override pro-life laws in every state. For the next two years, pro-lifers will likely be counting on a presidential veto to stop it.
Transgender Ideology is Still Unpopular
And yet Tuesday was not a clean sweep for the culture of death. As I have written many times in this column, the past few years have witnessed a sea change on questions related to gender identity. The sexual revolutionaries pushed too hard and too fast in favor of an extreme transgender ideology, and people have had enough.
Voters in Arizona and Nebraska approved measures keeping male athletes out of girls’ sports. Voters in Colorado also approved Proposition 134, which protects women’s-only sports, with about 53 percent of the vote, and passed Proposition 135, which bars “sex-change” surgeries on minors. And in Washington, one of the most progressive states in the country, the Associated Press called Initiative 638, which bans biological males from women’s sports, for the “yes” side on Wednesday evening.
So, on the same night that Democrats were flipping Senate seats in Kansas and Texas, voters in Colorado and Washington were voting to keep boys off girls’ teams. A good many of them must have voted for Democrats further up the ballot.
Why the difference? Consider what Washington voters were reading about in the weeks before the vote. In Camas, a group of girls walked off before a cross-country race rather than compete against a transgender-identified runner on the girls’ team. And at a district meet in October, Battle Ground High School sophomore Elise Bierer walked away from the starting line of the girls’ varsity race, knowing it could end her season. Her mother said the decision was “about competitive fairness.”
“To every female athlete who wondered whether her voice mattered: tonight, Washington heard you,” the campaign behind Initiative 638 said after the vote.
Some Republicans are Running from the Fight
The fact that commonsense initiatives on gender won the day is good news. However, it’s little more than a silver lining on a day of dark, ominous clouds. Female athletes are protected from the progressive ideologues, but the preborn were not so lucky.
Marjorie Dannenfelser of SBA Pro-Life America, for one, is not pulling any punches about what went wrong. In a post-election memo, she wrote, “It’s impossible to sugarcoat it.” The results, she said, “are a disaster for the unborn, for their mothers, and for the country as a whole.”
But Dannenfelser laid much of the blame at the feet of the Republican Party.
“Republican turnout was the major problem in this election, and it was a major problem among the pro-life base,” she wrote. “At the doors, we found almost zero pre-existing enthusiasm among pro-life voters.”
In First Things, Jonathon Van Maren points to Michigan, where GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers closed his campaign by reposting a video assuring voters that he is “opposed to pro-life laws.” Rogers lost to Abdul El-Sayed. Van Maren’s read is that plenty of pro-life Michiganders looked at a choice between two candidates who both opposed pro-life laws and didn’t bother voting.
Idaho’s Representatives and Pro-life Leaders Scored a Victory
Compare that with Idaho. Proposition 1, the so-called Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, would have created a right to abortion up to fetal viability, overturning a state law that bans most abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the mother’s life.
Idaho’s pro-life leaders did not run from that fight. Gov. Brad Little and other Republican leaders “fiercely opposed” the measure, according to Van Maren, and the LDS Church put $1 million into the campaign against it. On Tuesday, Proposition 1 failed, 56 to 44 percent.
In 2024, when the GOP stripped nearly all of its longstanding pro-life language from its platform, I argued in this column that the party had won elections for decades because of its pro-life stance, not in spite of it. Dannenfelser cites a Cygnal poll showing that 32 percent of Republicans would be “less enthusiastic” about voting if the GOP abandoned pro-life policies, and 34 percent would be less willing to volunteer. On Tuesday, it seems, we saw the fruits of the GOP’s decision to run away from the pro-life issue.
As a Catholic, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat first. With that said, the Democratic Party has made its intentions on abortion perfectly clear. It is a virulently pro-abortion, anti-life and anti-family party. But the GOP’s leaders also need to hear, loud and clear, that pro-life voters will not keep turning out for a party that is embarrassed by them.
As Van Maren puts it, “while they cannot win with pro-life voters alone, they cannot win without them, either.” He argues that restoring the pro-life plank to the GOP platform should be the movement’s first priority. I agree.
The Fight for Hearts and Minds
Tuesday’s results raise a question that I have often referred to in this column, i.e. have we failed to win the hearts and minds of the American people on life, marriage, and sexuality? The polls are not encouraging.
In a report published in March, the Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 38 percent say it should be illegal in all or most cases. And Pew’s most recent breakdown by religion found that 59 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Read that again. Nearly six in ten people who call themselves Catholic reject what their Church teaches about the child in the womb. We priests need to take a hard look at ourselves. When was the last time our parishioners heard a homily on abortion?
There is, however, a silver lining in the Pew data. Thirty-nine percent of Americans say that the statement “human life begins at conception, so an embryo is a person with rights” describes their views at least somewhat well. But about a third say this statement and then claim that the abortion decision “should belong solely to the pregnant woman.”
Got that? A third of Americans believe that the embryo is a person with rights, and also that abortion is the woman’s call alone. These are not committed abortion activists. They are confused, and they can be persuaded. But somebody has to do the persuading.
Virginia and Nevada are painful reminders that having pro-life laws isn’t enough: they need to be backed by citizens who understand the humanity of the preborn child and will vote accordingly. If not, put a ballot initiative before them, and they can strip the preborn of legal protection in a single evening.
This is why the fight for life and family has to begin long before voters ever head to the polls. Consciences are formed first at home. “The future of humanity passes by way of the family,” Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Familiaris Consortio (no. 86). If we want a generation of voters who will defend the preborn and stand up for marriage, we have to raise them. That means parents teaching the faith at the kitchen table. That means ensuring that our children receive an authentically Catholic education, which is reinforced continually in the home.
Dust Off and Get Back to Work
The next two years are going to be hard, especially if the Women’s Health Protection Act makes it to the president’s desk.
Pope St. John Paul II ended Evangelium Vitae with a call for “a general mobilization of consciences and a common ethical effort to set up a great strategy in favor of life” (no. 95). That mobilization has to start with us, in our own families and parishes.
As the Virginia bishops wrote:
To everyone who engaged in this effort, we urge you to persevere in faith and hope – anchored in the sure knowledge that God is the Author of life and marriage. No vote can alter the sacredness of human life. Nor can any vote change the reality that marriage is and can only ever be the union of one man and one woman.
In other words, the truth is the truth, no matter what voters say. And our job is to keep fighting for the truth, no matter the obstacles and setbacks.
We have lost elections before, and we have seen the “settled” law of Roe overturned after nearly fifty years. So let us dust ourselves off and get back to work, building, one conversation at a time, a Culture of Life and a civilization of love.
As we bear witness to the sanctity of human life, let us also be united in prayer:
O God, the Father and Creator of human life, help us never to become discouraged in defending the full breadth of that most precious gift, from the miracle of fertilization to the spiritual serenity of natural death.
Inspire us to remember that without You, we are powerless, and that what we do for the least, especially the helpless unborn dearest to You, we are actually doing for Your Son, who lives and works in and through us.
Protect us against the wiles and wickedness of the devil, a “murderer and a liar from the beginning.” May the Holy Spirit enlighten us along the way! Amen
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the unborn, pray for us!
(Father Paul Marx, OSB, HLI’s Founder).
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
