In Wisconsin, a liberal candidate for state Supreme Court won her April race by 20 points after highlighting her work supporting abortion rights. In Georgia, two liberal candidates running for their state’s highest court are running on their opposition to the state’s six-week abortion ban. And in California, a Planned Parenthood leader is running for Congress as a Democrat after Republicans slashed funding for the organization last year.
The economy and the cost of living are driving voters’ concerns and Democratic campaigns’ messaging going into the 2026 midterms. But abortion is still shaping messaging in state-level and especially state supreme court elections. Several Democratic strategists and abortion rights advocates told The 19th it could be a more prominent issue in the midterms than many expect.
“There’s going to be a focus on this by the Democratic campaigns, even if it’s not as prominent in the discourse as affordability,” said J.J. Abbott, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist.
“I just think that it’s too ripe an issue for the Democratic base, it’s a really strong issue with a lot of independents, and it’s a disqualifier,” he added, dissuading many voters concerned about the issue from voting Republican.
Abortion was a major campaign issue after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, setting off a wave of state-level abortion bans. Anger over the decision helped Democrats defy historical trends to stem losses in the 2022 midterms, and voters in red and blue states alike passed new constitutional amendments enshrining access to the procedure.
It was one of the issues at the center of then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign. But after her loss to now-President Donald Trump amid voter discontent with inflation, the issue has largely faded from the political discourse. Democrats have focused their messaging on high prices and affordability and hammered the Trump administration over its aggressive mass deportation agenda and, more recently, the war in Iran.
Mini Timmaraju, president of abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, argued that access to health care, including abortion, is inherently tied to affordability and the high cost of living.
“It’s never been a more difficult time to have a family, and then eliminating the freedom to decide if, when and how to have a family, and all the investment and support that’s lacking to have a family makes the crisis compounded, right?,” she said. “American voters want to see solutions to all of these problems, and they don’t vote single issue.”
In the battleground state of Georgia, abortion is playing a role in two officially nonpartisan state Supreme Court races.
Former Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan and trial attorney Miracle Rankin have emphasized the issue in their messaging and recently appeared at a news conference with the family of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old Georgia woman who died in an abortion-related death in 2022. Planned Parenthood Votes also announced a six-figure ad campaign attacking incumbent justices Charlie Bethel and Sarah Warren over the court’s rulings upholding the ban.
“We saw it in Wisconsin and we expect to see it in Georgia, too: When voters are fed up, they show up. In a state with one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the U.S., Georgians can hold Justices Sarah Warren and Charlie Bethel accountable for ruling to reinstate the six-week abortion ban that caused so much harm,” Sarah Standiford, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said in a Tuesday statement.
Most Americans support abortion rights and overwhelmingly oppose strict bans. Despite Trump’s election, downballot Republican and GOP-backed candidates have still struggled to sufficiently neutralize the political unpopularity of the abortion restrictions the party spent decades supporting.
Last year, in a party-line vote that got pushback from moderate House Republicans, congressional Republicans barred Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions from receiving Medicaid dollars. House Speaker Mike Johnson is not pushing to extend the provision, which expires July 4, in a spending bill Republicans are aiming to pass this year, the Washington Examiner reported this month.
“If you hear a sigh of relief, it’s coming from Bucks County and Brian Fitzpatrick,” Abbott said, referring to the centrist House Republican from a competitive Pennsylvania district.
“It’s pretty much clear across the board, even with Republicans, that abortion is a vulnerability for them,” Timmaraju said.
Abortion has been a top issue in recent state Supreme Court races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, battleground states with divided government and no citizen-led ballot initiative process, where the courts often have the last word on major constitutional issues like abortion.
Last year, Democrats and abortion rights groups successfully went all-in on the issue in retention elections for three Democratic justices on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, races Abbott worked on. Abortion has also been “front and center of the conversation” in Wisconsin since 2022, said Devin Remiker, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, as the procedure became temporarily unavailable due to an 1849 ban before being reversed by the court.
Earlier this month, liberal Judge Chris Taylor defeated conservative candidate Maria Lazar for a seat on the court by 20 points, a landslide by Wisconsin standards, which expanded liberals’ majority on the court to 5-2 and locked in a liberal majority through at least 2030.
“We have a track record of having changed the game for these court races,” Remiker said.
Mike Browne, deputy director of A Better Wisconsin Together, a major progressive group operating in the state, said abortion has been “central” to its strategy and messaging in state Supreme Court races.
“We have seen it as a stark contrast issue, and one in which the progressives are on the side of the vast majority of the electorate, and conservatives are completely out of step with where the public’s at,” he said.
Both candidates addressed abortion in advertising ahead of the election. Taylor, a former Democratic state lawmaker and attorney for Planned Parenthood Wisconsin, centered her past work on abortion rights. Lazar, meanwhile, worked to reassure voters that she wouldn’t restrict access, saying she supported the 20-week ban and framing it as a “compromise.”
Heather Weininger, executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, which endorsed Lazar, said in a statement after the election: “We are disappointed, but we are not deterred. Every human life is worth fighting for, and that will never change.”
Several national Republican and anti-abortion groups that had previously been engaged in Supreme Court races in the state did not spend in the 2026 race, leading to calls to oust the Republican state party chair and puzzling several Democrats on the ground. Remiker suggested Republicans felt “burned” after Schimel’s defeat last year, but said he was surprised by how major conservative groups seemingly “abandoned” Lazar.
“It sure looks, for all the world, like they didn’t do a damn thing. It’s like they didn’t even step on the field,” said Joe Zepecki, a Wisconsin-based Democratic strategist.
“This is the perfect place to try to figure out how they’re going to deal with the political disaster that is Trump 2.0, and they didn’t even try,” he added.
The Wisconsin Republican Party and two national groups that have been involved in past Wisconsin Supreme Court elections, SBA Pro-Life America and the Republican State Leadership Committee, did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Taylor’s margin of victory has Wisconsin Democrats feeling optimistic about November: She flipped a dozen counties won by Schimel in 2025 and, in some municipalities, earned more raw votes than Harris did in 2024.
“The Democratic base is even more fired up than it was in 2018, and that should be cause for a five-alarm on the Republican side,” Zepecki said.
Emily’s List, which backs Democratic women supportive of abortion rights, and its affiliated PAC Women Vote, are also messaging on the issue in upcoming U.S. House primaries — an indication of the issue’s salience among Democratic primary voters.
Women Vote and Elect Democratic Women are backing Denise Powell over state Sen. John Cavanaugh in the May 12 primary in Nebraska’s 2nd District, a Democratic-trending Omaha-based seat held by retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon.
They and a Nebraska-based PAC are arguing that if Cavanaugh were elected to Congress, Nebraska’s Republican governor could appoint a Republican to his state Senate seat that could give them the votes to pass a strict abortion ban and potentially eliminate the district’s standalone Electoral College vote, known as the “Blue Dot.”
Cavanaugh is pushing back on that claim, countering that Democrats are likely to pick up seats in Nebraska’s legislature in the midterms.
“Don’t buy the lies from the MAGA Republicans about losing the blue dot or a woman’s right to choose,” state Sen. Ashlei Spivey, says in a TV ad featuring his allies and legislative colleagues.
In California’s 6th District, Lauren Babb Tomlinson, who leads public affairs at Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte, is highlighting the cuts to the organization in her campaign for Congress.
Babb Tomlinson is running in the top-two, all-party primary that includes Rep. Kevin Kiley, who changed his party affiliation from Republican to independent after voters approved a new congressional map favoring Democrats last year.
“I’ve never run for office before. But after Donald Trump and Kevin Kiley forced five health centers in our community to close, stripping access to health care for over 20,000 patients, I knew I had to step up,” Babb Tomlinson says in the ad. “This moment demands new leaders who will restore abortion rights, lower costs and stand up to ICE.”
Abbott said he expects more Democrats to run on the cuts to Medicaid, including the defunding of Planned Parenthood, leading up to November.
“It’s such an advantageous issue for Democrats electorally,” he said. “I think paired with the health care cuts, the Medicaid cuts, it’s a really effective way to cover both issues.”