How Abortion Lost Its Cool, by Carmel Richardson

By Carmel Richardson, First Things, April 28, 2025

Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential election victory shocked many. The deplorables won the day, the elites were disgraced, and history was shown to have at least one more chapter. As Matthew Yglesias put it, “the vibes, they are a-shiftin’.” The vibe shift was especially evident among young voters, who swung hard to the right in 2024. According to ­Yglesias, “A big part of the ‘rightward’ shift in vibes is not the revivification of old conservative ideas but precisely the opposite.” Marginal groups have been centered so completely that the plight of the sexually nonconforming or promiscuous isn’t edgy anymore.

Liberal shibboleths are eroding. Concerning abortion, several data points from November bear this out. According to exit polls, women aged sixty-five and over were the only female age cohort to vote as loyally for Kamala Harris as they had for Joe Biden. Younger women shifted away from the Democratic candidate, sometimes splitting their tickets to vote for both Trump and state-level ballot initiatives that favored abortion access. Many of those ballot initiatives succeeded, continuing a trend that has held since Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the enshrinement of legal abortion in the Constitution. …

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