Pro-life Republicans will lick their wounds, blame each other, and point to uniquely unhelpful factors in each race. But the pattern is now so obvious as to be irrefutable. Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the ballot, the party of abortion keeps winning.

The pro-abortion electoral tide could be stemmed in next year’s presidential elections, when turn-out will be much higher and the highly mobilized “reproductive choice” lobby will have less sway. But for the Democrats, who are losing on the economy, on immigration and so much else, the tactic is clear. We can expect the party of abortion to add ballot “reproductive rights” measures in every state in November next year to drive up their support. And Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic whose Church teaches that abortion is an excommunicable sin, will make it a major campaign issue — assuming his re-election campaign isn’t itself terminated in the coming months.

[It doesn’t matter if Biden’s on the ticket or not. Democrats will make it a top campaign issue in any case, and as long as Republicans can’t make an effective and consistent argument for abortion restrictions, they’ll succeed in rallying their base around it. Jazz has a good post up today on that topic, and I’ll have one shortly in which I argue that there’s a larger problem that feeds into the Democrats’ arguments. — Ed]