Twenty years had passed since Tina Staley was marching alongside other members of Republicans for Choice, pushing to get candidates who supported abortion elected.
Staley was registered as an unaffiliated voter, and still is. At the time, she was finding it hard to get people to care about the right to abortion. It was already the established law of the land.
So she never imagined that she would come back to this work decades later because Roe v. Wade had been overturned.
Staley, a therapist by profession who had had an abortion herself 35 years ago, said she couldn’t tolerate “us going back underground,” after the leaked Supreme Court decision on abortion.
“We saw the writing on the wall and what was happening, and it was just that moment of truth.”
Staley, and two other Denver women involved in reproductive rights work, Amie Knox and Jocelyn Childs, formed a group called Spurr Colorado to educate people about abortion, get “pro-choice” candidates elected and encourage more people to vote in the upcoming 2022 midterm election. The three women are among the Colorado voters who were propelled to take action after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, overturning the right to abortion — making this Colorado’s third-highest turnout in a midterm election since mail voting was passed in 2013. Exit polling and analysis show that the issue motivated voters across the country, and even though Colorado guarantees the right to abortion in state law, voters still cited it as a contributing factor in why and how they voted.
They held their first meetings in their apartments, focusing on making the group inclusive and open to any discussion, and now their mailing list has grown to 250 people. They’ve invited speakers such as the attorney general, candidates running for offices and directors from abortion rights groups.
“We were very, very pro vote and … we let it be known that your vote really matters and it really does matter,” Knox said, noting that a small number of votes made a difference in the Colorado’s 8th Congressional District and in the 3rd Congressional District.
Karen Middleton, the executive director of Cobalt, an abortion-rights advocacy organization, was one of the speakers at a Spurr Colorado event. She saw a lot more enthusiasm and involvement in this midterm election from candidates and voters from all parties — including those who weren’t normally active, and from those across the state, not just the Denver metro.
“I think voters really spoke and they spoke about really protecting rights and that includes protecting democracy,” Middleton said. “So I would just encourage voters who came out this time to stay active and engaged through the municipal and local elections and onward to the next election because everyone who felt so compelled this time, we need them again next time.”
Staley said she thinks people underestimated how much the Dobbs decision would affect the election and the power of coming together to have their voices heard.
The Colorado Republican Party did not see the results of the “red wave” pollsters had predicted nationally, and GOP party chair Kristi Burton Brown blames that, at least partly, on abortion and how she said Democrats portrayed Republican candidates as “extremists” on the issue.
“Colorado voters don’t like ‘extremism,’ so yes, I think these lies affected the vote. In reality, the Colorado Democrats passed the most extreme abortion law in the nation that allows abortion on demand until the day of birth. That’s the extremism voters deserved to know about,” she said.
The state’s law, passed in April, guarantees the right to access abortion at any stage of pregnancy, but data show that the vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester of pregnancy. Voters in Colorado have repeatedly rejected attempts at the ballot box to restrict abortion access, and Democrats say the elected GOP representatives’ stance is what’s extreme. Abortion-rights advocates plan to pursue a constitutional amendment in 2024 that ask voters to affirm the right to abortion in the state constitution and, potentially with a second measure, strip out the ban that doesn’t allow state coverage for abortions.
Although Colorado Republican candidates tried to steer the conversation away from abortion, instead focusing on crime and inflation, which they said are what voters really care about and what they believed Democrats have failed to address, voters ultimately elected Democratic candidates who support abortion.
Michaele Ferguson, a political science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies feminism and democracy, said it wasn’t surprising to her that abortion motivated voters across the country, despite what was going on with the economy and inflation. Abortion is an economic issue, whether related to the costs of a child or traveling to other states to get an abortion, she said, and women aren’t just single-issue voters.
What the Dobbs decision did was limit the ability for Republican candidates to make an appeal to centrist voters, Ferguson said.
“Regardless of party identification, I think that it helps the party to look more extreme, and that was how the Democratic Party was painting them,” she said. “And I think that that stuck.”
In Colorado’s primary elections, which took place a week after the Dobbs decision came down, there was a significant bump in female Democratic voters ages 20-39 and male voters 20-29 that wasn’t matched on the Republican side, according to Ferguson’s analysis of voter data.
There was also a significant bump in the number of women voting in the Democratic primaries in person, despite there not being many contested races until voters were down ballot.
“That indicated to me that there were a lot of women of reproductive age, who were very concerned about the Dobbs decision who wanted to make sure that their voices were heard, and were willing to go in person to get a ballot and make sure that their votes were counted,” Ferguson said.
In the latest Colorado midterm election data released, a higher percentage of women voted than men in the 25-34 age range, but only by a few percentage points. Otherwise, the gender gaps were on par with what was expected, which Ferguson said suggests that men were also more motivated to vote because of the Dobbs decision. In other states, the gap was more pronounced.
She believes abortion still played a role in the turnout and in the margin of votes that Democrats won by, not just from an increase in Democratic turnout but also likely votes from unaffiliated voters (unlike in the primaries, it’s not known which party candidates unaffiliated voters chose to vote for). In other states that had abortion rights on the ballot, that connection is even clearer.
A Mountaineer Research exit poll released last month surveyed 800 Colorado voters, and respondents in an open-ended question cited abortion and the economy as the two most important issues affecting their votes, with 37% citing abortion as one of the top two, 37% citing the inflation or economy and 8% citing both. The poll was administered in collaboration with two Democratic groups, the well-regarded polling firm Global Strategy Group and advocacy group ProgressNow Colorado.
“Abortion voters went for (Democratic Gov. Jared) Polis and (Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael) Bennet much stronger than partisanship would suggest,” the research memo stated.
Just as Latino voters were critical in Yadira Caraveo’s win in the 8th Congressional District, a statewide poll of 1,504 Latino registered voters this year showed that support for abortion access and protecting reproductive health outnumbered support for banning abortion by a margin of 3 to 1. About 61% of respondents said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who supports the expansion of abortion and reproductive health access; and 58% said the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade makes it more likely they would vote in the November midterms.
The Colorado Latino exit poll showed that respondents voted for Democrats over Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin, with the majority of respondents saying Democrats would be best to protect and expand reproductive health care. Twenty-three percent of first-time voters who responded to the poll were ages 30-49 and 14% were 50 and over.
Nationally, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement showed that young voters of color turned out at the second-highest rate in the last three decades at 27%, breaking for Democrats at a higher margin than any other demographic.
The Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights saw that play out in the state, with a lot of excitement around community engagement from young people, particularly Latinos, leading up to the midterms. More women were registering to vote and more young people were turning out, said Jennifer Arreola, COLOR’s civic engagement coordinator.
Arreola, who’s Mexican-American, noticed more posts on social media about the election and she was having more discussions with family. More people were volunteering to register people to vote, and those not previously involved in reproductive justice efforts were asking questions and educating others. Volunteers had conversations with Latino voters across the state who didn’t know much about the election or didn’t plan to vote, and they helped them understand their ballot questions and encouraged them to participate.
“We’re just really excited with the turnout that we saw,” Arreola said. “And we are just feeling really hopeful for our future in our state and also in our nation and seeing so many people protect abortion. We’re continuing on this momentum to continue to reach out to Latinos helping them register to vote if they’re not, but also providing them with all the resources they need to to make confident votes.”
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