As for the prospect that Trump’s full-scale (and highly transactional) embrace of the anti-abortion position might drive some social moderates in the GOP away, exit polls show that Trump received 94 percent of the vote of self-identified Republicans.

And herein lies a principal reason for skepticism about the power of the abortion issue to move votes: the political polarization at the heart of our current politics. Unlike past decades, party identification is now the most powerful indicator of how a voter will choose; once you’ve signed up with your team, or tribe, or sect, it takes far more than it once did for you to abandon that tribe at the polls. John F. Kennedy famously said, “sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” But these days it speaks with a roar. If the behavior of Trump in the White House over four years was not enough to drive significant numbers of Republicans from the party’s ranks, it’s hard to imagine that an issue like abortion rights will.

There is, of course, another possibility for a big political impact: the threat to abortion rights might mobilize an army of new voters whose complacency about the issue has now been shattered. That mobilization effort was at the heart of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and it came up short. Beyond that, the Republican campaign across states to restrict voting access, and the likelihood of gerrymandered districts in so many key states where GOP legislatures and governors rule, mean that even energetic registration and turnout drives may be limited by the use (and abuse) of raw political power.