By Joshua Arnold

Democratic candidates are talking about their abortion agenda far less in the 2026 midterm elections than in the two previous congressional cycles, according to analysis published Friday by NPR. Abortion was the top issue for Democratic campaign ad spending in 2022 and 2024, it reported, but this year Democratic campaigns have spent a quarter as much on abortion ads, compared to the same period in 2024.

The article does not say that Democrats have retreated from their extreme abortion stance — where no unborn life is protected until the moment of birth, if not later, and the whole expense is borne by taxpayers. It simply says that they are talking about abortion less and affordability more.

For NPR, the dampening of Democratic abortion rhetoric is a bad thing. The article gave pride of place to “abortion-rights advocates” who “argue that calls to protect reproductive access and care need to be part of the political conversation around affordability.” At least their unsubtle propaganda is now unsubsidized by taxpayers.

But Michael J. New, a professor at Catholic University and a senior associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, offers a more insightful take. “The article fails to note that full throated support for legal abortion was poor strategy for Democrats during the most recent election cycle,” he wrote.

“Kamala Harris made support for legal abortion the centerpiece of her 2024 presidential campaign. However, on the abortion issue, voters preferred Kamala Harris to Donald Trump by only four percentage points,” New noted. “Furthermore, not one pro-life incumbent has lost a statewide race since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.”

The Democrats’ apparent retreat from abortion rhetoric comes as the DNC, under activist pressure, finally released what passes for its 2024 election autopsy last Tuesday. On every page, the header disclaims: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

Those who bothered to read through the document’s 192 pages described it as “half-drafted,” with no executive summary, no conclusion, but plenty of red-ink edits throughout.

The document’s best attempt at a narrative was the commonsense observation that “the Party and our candidates have lost the confidence and trust of voters.” It further admits that “many of our critical Democratic wins can be attributed to negative partisanship — where Republicans have nominated deeply flawed candidates.”

If this sounds familiar to you, that’s because you’re old enough (and wise enough) to think back more than a single election. More than once this century, Democrats have put forward a radically progressive agenda, suffered the rebuke of voters, and only had their bacon saved by Republicans managing to nominate disastrous candidates on the other side (remember Senator Doug Jones, the Democrat representing Alabama from 2018-2021?).

Of course, Democratic candidates sometimes haul their own baggage train. In the Maine Senate race, Democrats nominated political newcomer Graham Platner, who elbowed out the state’s current governor, Janet Mills (D). Platner’s political philosophy is hardly distinguishable from that of Zohran Mamdani (on both the communist and anti-Semitic fronts), and the self-proclaimed history buff had a Nazi Totenkopf tattooed on his chest for 20 years but claims he did not know what it was.

Ironically, NPR chose Platner as the best spokesman to elevate their pro-abortion message. “Everyone, in my opinion, deserves good, high-quality healthcare, whether that is reproductive healthcare around the beginning of pregnancy or around ending one. Either way, it is part of reproductive health care,” they quoted him. “I think we need to change our thinking around what access actually is, because something that is unaffordable isn’t accessible.”

Although most Democrats are steering away from abortion messaging, clearly Platner is not. He insists (absurdly so) that abortion is not accessible enough because it is too expensive. The implied solution is that government should stick taxpayers with a larger bill to subsidize abortion even more than they already do. The other implied message in Platner’s remarks is that he thinks poor women have too many babies.

Refuting such an extreme message should be easy. And it is, for the few Republicans still brave enough to talk about it.

Alas, such moral conviction has fallen out of vogue among national Republicans. From the moment in 2022 when the pro-life movement achieved its 50-year aim to overturn Roe v. Wade — which was only a judicial prerequisite to legislatively protecting the unborn — many national Republicans promptly deserted the field altogether, leaving Democrats to set the national narrative on abortion.

The second Trump administration is the most vigorous Republican administration in at least a quarter century on advancing social issues it cares deeply about. But, in nearly 18 months, it has failed to make any discernible progress on reviewing the Biden administration’s relaxed guidelines for dispensing the abortion pill, refused to enforce federal law outlawing the distribution of abortion pills by mail, and even gave up on trying to defund Planned Parenthood.

The Republican-controlled Congress managed little better; it narrowly voted to partially defund Planned Parenthood for only a single year, and no one knows if it will be able to repeat the feat.

In other words, since 2022, most national Republicans have run from the abortion issue as if it were a Philistine giant and they were soldiers in King Saul’s army. But an extensive track record shows that politicians who consistently fought for life saw electoral success. Conversely, the Democratic track record on abortion was so poor in 2024 that Democrats are now avoiding talking about abortion as well. But Republicans can hardly take advantage of this Democratic panic on an issue they have largely abandoned.

As it stands, the 2026 midterm election is shaping up to be a contest where neither party wants to take credit for their stance on abortion. That leaves Republicans to run on a middling economy, diplomatic chaos, and voter dissatisfaction with affordability. No wonder Democrats want to focus on the economy, not abortion. Why do Republicans want to do the same?

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

This article originally appeared here.