Thoughts on the 2026 U.S. Mid-Terms
by Rachel MacNair
First, good news: Idaho turned down a petition-driven effort to overturn their abortion ban. Colorado turned down a petition-driven effort to require local police to turn over arrestees to ICE, which could have been devastating for pregnant women, unborn children, war refugees, etc. Massachusetts turned down a petition-driven veto referendum, so gun safety laws the legislature passed remain; we were interested in preventing mass shootings, a form of mini-war.
As for candidates – over the decades, they go back and forth on which party predominates. We have to work with what we have. At the grassroots, we always have.
Learn a Lesson: Missouri
I vote in Missouri, so I watched Amendment 3 develop. It was to overturn the Amendment 3 of 2024, which made abortion a state constitutional right. It passed with only 52%. Since the original’s advertising kept saying Missouri’s abortion ban went too far, many didn’t understand how extreme the 2024 amendment was in the other direction.
So it was reasonable to think with a little tweaking, the normal adding of the rape and incest exception, perhaps getting it on the ballot could get this repealed.
Unfortunately, they took a page from the pro-abortion playbook with a “ballot candy” technique. They added a provision they thought would be popular and get it over the finish line: banning transgender surgeries for minors.
This does something against Missouri law – having two topics in one measure. But a court decided they were the same topic: reproductive medicine. That looks ridiculous to me. Neither has anything to do with actual reproduction. I suppose the judge was thinking of medicine involving private body parts. This is a common problem in the abortion debate.
Early on, the court also changed the ballot language to be more accurate. I was relieved, since being put in a position of being expected to defend deliberately deceptive language was a position I didn’t want to be in. The best I could do is to say that the original pro-abortion amendment had also used deceptive language. That’s not much of a defense.
Then I watched the ads. The pro-3 group offered an ad advocating how important the ban on transgender surgery for minors was, as if that were what the measure was about. That made it simple for the anti-3 side: they just pointed out such surgery was already illegal in Missouri, so saying this was what it was about was a trick. This measure was really about an abortion ban. I watched painfully a surreal scene: the pro-abortion side was actually being more accurate.
Then abortion advocates did the onslaught of ads with predictable content. I could easily have refuted what they said, but of course I don’t have that kind of money. The people who did let them get away with it, unrefuted.
They not only lost with only 45% of the vote, but they spent so much work only to show slippage of support for the pro-life cause. Given all the people who stayed home in this political environment, there may not have been much help for it.
But they didn’t even use this as a public education opportunity, so that even if we lost the election in the short term, we still could have gained a more educated public for the long term.
Friends, please learn these lessons:
1) Abortion advocates may have money and know how to win politically, but that doesn’t make them good role models.
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2) Deception in service of a goal of promoting violence can be efficient, but deception with an eye to preventing violence just doesn’t work so well.
Character matters.
Democrats Take Over Congress
Being ever the person looking for signs of hope, I offer:
A common perception was that a major issue was the war in Iran. Even those who don’t oppose war for the reason we do – namely, it kills people – think it shouldn’t happen just because one man says so. Especially a man who promised as a candidate he wouldn’t do that kind of thing. But some speculated the “wag-the-dog” scenario of using a war to distract from a sex scandal, namely the Epstein files, was the actual motivation here. Whether or not this is so, the tactic has probably lost its potency. Perhaps in the future this especially despicable reason for going to war has lost its ability to be a temptation.
I think a case can be made that repudiation of Trump is better for the pro-life movement. He’s a lip-service pro-lifer, but functionally pro-abortion. Single-issue voters point out he wasn’t nearly as bad as Clinton or Harris would have been on abortion, and of course appointing the judges that finally overturned Roe v. Wade is a major achievement. But it’s now achieved. Now some conservatives make the case that Trump is sabotaging the pro-life movement. Positive actions to help on abortion-prevention public policy are things the Republicans mainly didn’t do in the past two years when they had the chance (or in the case of Planned Parenthood defunding, they allowed it to lapse). There’s no reason to think they would have done better had they remained in control.
A prime illustration: the Talarico-Paxton Senate race in Texas. From a cold-hearted paperwork point of view, Paxton as state attorney general took action on some good abortion policy in Texas. But his corruption was so bad, it turned off many who always vote Republican but couldn’t stomach voting for him. He would vote against abortion when bills come up, but it would give a stench hard to recuperate from.
Talarico, on the other hand, can pretty well be counted on to vote the wrong way on abortion. But in a respectful conversation with a pro-lifer, when he claimed the Bible was silent on abortion, she pointed out the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not kill.” The pro-lifers I saw commenting on this were disgusted with his approach, of course. But the point is, he was listening to her and being respectful.
I have a sense that if he could ever give me just 15 minutes to explain out the problems, he’d actually listen. And he’s among the kind of people who would find the consistent-life approach more persuasive than some other arguments that could be made to him.
So he’s not a fanatic. Being a non-fanatic that can listen is an awfully low bar, but it’s better than a whole lot of Democrats do. So I’m ever hopeful.
Lobbying
The positive is that we may get better funding back to social services and health care, which in addition to their poverty-prevention aspects help pregnant women choose life, and help targets of “aid in dying” to avoid the practice. Some of the states may become better on the death penalty; the governor of California commuted all death sentences, a quarter of death row in the United States, just after the election.
One major negative, of course, is that abortion policy could deteriorate badly.
The grassroots parts of the pro-life movement remain as strong as ever, and if Democrats over-reach, as is the custom of politicians, some more people may get angry enough to be active.
But I do feel for the lobbying arm of the movement. Prospects seem to be to spend time keeping bad things from happening rather than promoting good things to happen. This is exacerbated by how all the work pro-lifers had put into getting better policy outcomes was mainly being ignored by officeholders who claimed to be with us.
But here we are on federal legislation:
- Nationally “codifying Roe,” reinstating the nation-wide ban on abortion-regulating or banning legislation. Democrats have in the past discussed getting rid of the filibuster to do it. It may happen, but I haven’t seen it discussed in the mainstream punditry after the election. There’s discussion about how much Democrats want to try to actually pass things that can get enough Republicans to be veto-proof, or to avoid vetoes.
- Since the Hyde Amendment has been a rider every year and Republicans did nothing to make it more permanent when they had the chance, there’s a very real danger here. See our post on how Hyde helps low-income women.
- The one-year defunding of Planned Parenthood ending last July never got renewed, and it certainly won’t for the time being.
Rachel MacNair at literature table
But again, we have grassroots. The Consistent Life Network has a project website called Grassroots Defunding: Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood. This isn’t merely getting women away from abortions, which the pro-life movement does well, but getting women at Planned Parenthood for other things away from the institution. We have community health centers nearby each individual Planned Parenthood center listed, plus other resources.
Also, the Problems at Planned Parenthood Committee runs a facts-based documentation website on Problems at Planned Parenthood, designed especially for people who refer or donate to Planned Parenthood, along with journalists and other researchers.
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See also:
What History Shows: The Consistent Life Ethic Works for Pro-life Referendums
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
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