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A huge Democratic majority in Congress. Six new Democratic state trifectas and governorships. Five new Democratic attorneys general. At least 545 additional state legislative seats.
Reproductive rights leaders have spent the past week trying to wrap their heads around the enormity of the Democratic tsunami and how it could reshape the national abortion-rights landscape.
In states that have seen reproductive access drastically curtailed since the end of Roe v. Wade, newly empowered Democratic governors and lawmakers could repeal abortion restrictions, codify new protections, and work toward enshrining reproductive freedom in state constitutions. Democratic attorneys general could stop enforcing draconian laws that threaten abortion providers and helpers with prosecution and reject efforts to criminalize pregnancy loss.
In Congress, even with Donald Trump in the White House, Democrats will have vast new powers to pass federal abortion-rights bills, claw back cuts to Medicaid and healthcare funding, and block confirmation of anti-abortion federal judges and far-right cabinet nominees. They could use the budget reconciliation process to try to eliminate the 50-year-old Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion—one of the repro-rights movement’s most cherished priorities. And in the likely event Trump tried to thwart these efforts, they could use his expected vetoes to attack Republicans in the 2028 elections. Democrats have an opportunity to make abortion and reproductive health a breakthrough issue “in a way they haven’t been able to before,” says abortion historian Mary Ziegler of the University of California, Davis. “If people want this kind of legislation, and the only thing preventing it from happening is who’s in the White House—that’s a good campaign message.”
Monica Simpson, executive director of the pioneering reproductive justice group SisterSong, realized just how much her world has changed when she flew home to Atlanta a few days after the election. “When I was walking through the airport, I realized, ‘Oh, snap, I’m coming back to a different Georgia’”—one in which Democrats flipped the state House and took every statewide office on the ballot. Seven out of the eight winners—from Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms to new Attorney General Tanya Miller to incoming Insurance Commissioner Keisha Sean Waites—are Black women. Almost immediately, Lance Bottoms pledged to tackle the state’s maternal health crisis, including expanding Medicaid and working to repeal a six-week abortion ban that has been deadly for Black mothers.
“Here is an opportunity for a new way of thinking about how we do our work, to be more visionary and imaginative and innovative about [helping] our community.”
Now, instead of fighting with conservative politicians, Simpson and her fellow advocates can start advancing policies aimed at counteracting decades of slashed budgets and attacks on basic healthcare. “Here is an opportunity for a new way of thinking about how we do our work,” Simpson says, “to be more visionary and imaginative and innovative about [helping] our community”—the complete opposite of the “very reactionary, defensive position” that’s been the norm for abortion rights groups in the South.
Repro leaders in other states long controlled by conservatives are grappling with similar feelings of excitement—and disbelief. “I’m a native Texan, and as long as I’ve been able to read, I’ve never lived in a blue state,” says Raven E. Freeborn, CEO of the abortion rights nonprofit Avow Texas, one of many groups that worked for the Democratic wave that elected James Talarico to the US Senate and Gina Hinojosa to the governor’s mansion. “And so, for me, this is, wow.”
It’s a moment that not even the most determined optimists in the repro rights movement saw coming. “If anyone tells you they planned for this, they expected it—they’re full of shit,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said on an Abortion Every Day livestream. Not that she’s complaining: “Voters delivered an unmistakable mandate for reproductive freedom majorities to deliver protections up and down the ballot,” she said at a press briefing this week. Now, “Democrats must be bold and put Republicans on the record if they stand against the protections that an overwhelming majority of voters support.”
The biggest surprise of the midterms, of course, came in Texas. The state that has enacted the most radical anti-abortion policies in the country went for pro-choice Democrats up and down the ballot, from the governorship to the supreme court to the House of Representatives. Even the state Senate, which remains under Republican control, will have a new Democratic leader helping to shape its agenda, Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin. (Incumbent Dan Patrick, the anti-abortion hardliner Goodwin defeated, is urging Republicans to strip her of the powers that have made him one of the most powerful lieutenant governors in the country.)
The day after winning his race, incoming Texas attorney general Nathan Johnson announced he would stop suing out-of-state abortion providers for sending abortion pills to the state—ending a practice that his predecessor, failed Senate candidate Ken Paxton, obsessively pursued. Johnson criticized the spread of local “abortion trafficking” ordinances that make it illegal to help someone access care, and he’s expected to pull the state out of federal lawsuits against Planned Parenthood and the Food and Drug Administration over the abortion drug mifepristone.
“I cannot tell you how powerful and important this is, given that Ken Paxton was essentially running the law firm for the anti-abortion movement out of the Texas attorney general’s office,” Timmaraju says. “This is a huge sea change.”
In Kansas, Attorney General Kris Kobach—whose extreme views on voting rights and immigration as well as abortion made him a MAGA hero—lost to an ex-prosecutor who claims zero interest in the culture wars. The election of Democrat Chris Mann likely means that Kansas’s participation in yet another federal lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approval and regulation of mifepristone will end.
New state trifectas offer some of the biggest opportunities for Democrats to expand acces to reproductive care. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Gov. Josh Shapiro and Gov.-elect David Crowley have promised to use the powers that come with full control of state government to codify abortion rights and enshrine constitutional protections. In Michigan and Arizona, new trifectas will make it possible to fulfill the promise of abortion ballot measures that passed in 2022 and 2024 but were blocked from being fully implemented by Republican lawmakers.
Even in states where Republicans remain firmly in charge, Democratic gains could have real impact. In at least six states, Democrats cracked GOP supermajorities in one or both legislative chambers, creating new opportunities to thwart anti-abortion bills—and in the case of Ohio and Iowa, strengthening the hands of newly elected Democratic governors.
“This was a bold-change election,” says Nourbese Flint, president of the reproductive justice group All* Above All. “There is an opportunity to move [legislation] in the states in ways that have not happened before. Even in places where there is shared governance, that creates a whole new world, because where before, Republicans were able to [pass] policies without talking to anybody, now they can get blocked on it, they have to come back to the negotiating table.”
It’s also a moment full of new perils. Reproductive rights leaders are bracing for Trump administration officials, who tried to defuse abortion as a midterms issue, to start becoming more aggressive. “Once the midterms are over and it’s truly lame-duck time,” one unnamed conservative told the Washington Sun last month, “we’ve heard the gloves will be off.” The FDA, for example, is widely expected to try to clamp down on abortion pills, while the Justice Department could attempt to revive the Comstock Act, the Victorian-era obscenity law that, if enforced, would amount to a nationwide abortion ban.
But any such move would result in “serious blowback” for Trump and his political allies, says Drexel University legal scholar David Cohen. Since the Dobbs decision in 2022, voters have weighed in on 22 abortion ballot measures around the country, including three in Virginia, Missouri, and Nevada last week, with the pro-choice side winning 60 percent of all votes. “It’s pretty compelling evidence that the American people want abortion rights,” Cohen says. “Any other 60-40 vote we would say was a landslide.”
Still, with Stephen Miller elevated to Trump’s chief of staff and Todd Blanche in charge at the DOJ, abortion-rights groups are intent on fortifying their firewalls. “As long as Trump holds executive and veto powers, we have more work than celebrating to do,” says Brittany Fonteno, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation. “The next two years will be a critical time to prepare for the kind of governing power that will deliver real and lasting reproductive freedom.”
Aside from Trump administration policies, All Above* All’s Flint says, one of the biggest risks that Democrats face—in Congress and the states, on reproductive rights and other issues—is not doing enough to address the real-world problems that drove so many people to vote blue.
“For all of the elected officials that are thinking, ‘Well, we’re just going to go back to things as usual,’ that is a dangerous precedent,” she says. “If we should take anything from [this election], it’s that people are hungry—and I would say almost desperate—to have actual change and to see [their leaders] fighting for something that is different than what we’ve had.”
“If folks feel like, they came out to vote and their lives got worse,” she adds, “I cannot imagine the backlash that is going to happen in 2028.”
