Is this the year a U.S. Senate seat in Texas turns blue? It’s possible: Republicans have nominated the polarizing state attorney general Ken Paxton, and in their corner, the Democrats have the state lawmaker James Talarico, a progressive Christian who has impressed even the less-than-Democratic-friendly podcaster Joe Rogan, who urged him to run for president.
But there’s one issue that may trip up Mr. Talarico.
“I trust Texas women to make decisions about their own bodies, to shape their own destinies,” he told a podcaster, Jamie Kern Lima, in May about his stance on abortion. “I don’t believe that’s a place for government.”
His campaign calls for codifying Roe v. Wade, which allowed states to ban abortion only after fetal viability. Abortion rights advocates nationwide would support Talarico’s stance; it’s what you’d expect to hear from Democrats from coast to coast.
But is it what Texans believe?
A survey of Texans last year by the University of Houston found some good news for pro-choice Democrats. Only 23 percent of Texans believed that unrestricted abortion should never be legal. Currently, Texas’ strict abortion ban allows the procedure only if the pregnant woman’s life is endangered or one of her major bodily functions is threatened. There are no exceptions in the law for rape or incest, but the survey found that 83 percent of Texans supported adding such provisions.
So why hasn’t there been broader support for changing the law or more political damage inflicted on officials who implemented it?
If you return to the survey, you’ll find that only 10 percent of Texans agreed that abortion should be legal for any reason after 24 weeks. Just 20 percent believed that it should be legal for any reason after 15 weeks.
Many Texans may think both that the state’s abortion ban is too harsh and that the Democrats’ alternative is also extreme.
Texas Democrats’ failure to calibrate on abortion serves as a microcosm for what’s happened to abortion politics in the party writ large. The party has long been the home of pro-choice Americans and has for decades worked to expand access to abortion. But Democrats used to see the issue with more nuance, acknowledging the moral complexity behind the procedure.
President Bill Clinton, for instance, appointed a bevy of federal judges who defended abortion rights. But he also insisted that abortion should be “safe and legal but rare” and that we should “protect the right to choose while reducing the number of abortions.”
This served as an admission that abortion is not just a routine medical procedure like a root canal, and it would be best if it was rare.
When his vice president, Al Gore, ran for the White House, Mr. Gore vowed to defend Roe but also signaled his openness to banning late-term abortions. When Congress voted to ban what some politicians called “partial-birth abortions” a few years later, it did so with the votes of dozens of Democrats.
President Barack Obama, too, took pains to respect opponents of abortion and insist on the need to reduce the procedure’s frequency. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, more than 60 House Democrats supported an amendment to prevent taxpayer funds from being used for abortions.
But today, Democrats who advocate any restrictions on abortion are a dying breed. The Democratic platform once talked about reducing the need for abortion; no such language exists now.
In some parts of the country, this alienation of antiabortion voters may carry no political cost. The abortion rights movement has won a majority of abortion referendums since the overturning of Roe. Even voters in red states such as Missouri and Montana approved the right to abortion until fetal viability.
In the South and states without procedures for referendums, Democrats have had little luck imposing a cost on G.O.P. officials who support strict bans. Brian Kemp, who is the Republican governor in my swing state, Georgia, remains popular despite imposing a ban on abortions after six weeks — a point at which many women don’t even know they’re pregnant.
Democrats might solve this problem by embracing nuance on abortion again.
This would include acknowledging that many Americans who are skeptical of abortion arrive at that position not because they want to control women but because they have deeply held concerns about when they believe life begins.
Democrats should be more willing to admit that it’s desirable to reduce the number of abortions and to link that goal to progressive policy that has been proven to do so — like broadening access to birth control and reproductive education.
In conservative states including Texas and Georgia, Democrats should also be willing to endorse limits on abortion at 12 or 15 weeks. (Florida voters backed a 2024 measure to permit abortions up to the point of viability, though it failed to reach the necessary 60 percent support). Such a compromise would give women in those states far more freedom than they have today while addressing the public’s concerns about the right to life.
While Democrats were able to use ballot measures to help enshrine abortion rights into the Missouri and Montana Constitutions, Democrats in Georgia or Texas will have to persuade Republicans in their legislatures to liberalize the laws there. And in other Southern states, Democrats willing to compromise could have success in legislative races.
Progressives would argue that this is throwing women under the bus, or onto a slippery slope to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
In 2023, the liberal website Vox published an article that included a discussion of how chicken embryos may feel pain. As someone who doesn’t eat chicken because of my animal welfare concerns, I found the article to be well reported and thoughtful. But it also stood out to me that the progressive press is more likely to raise this concern for chickens than human beings.
It’s time for supporters of abortion rights to realize that nuance and compromise aren’t dirty words. Dogmatism was always the purview of the Christian right, not the secular left. There are millions of Americans in the middle of the polarized abortion debate, and the Democrats should realize we exist and meet us where we are.
Zaid Jilani, a journalist based in Georgia, writes the newsletter The American Saga.
