Democrats lost the long battle to maintain Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court but they’ve done their best to capitalize on the loss by making it an issue ever since. Indeed, part of their plan for the 2024 election is to put abortion on the ballot wherever they can.

“We should put the right to choose on every ballot across the country in 2024 – not just with the candidates we choose, but with referendum efforts to enshrine reproductive rights in states where right-wing politicians are stripping those rights away,” Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker told CNN…

Even some conservatives are raising the alarm. After the Wisconsin election, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, referring to last summer’s US Supreme Court decision, tweeted: “Pro-lifers: WE WON. Abortion is not a ‘constitutional right’ anymore!” She suggested that new abortion restrictions are backfiring on the GOP. “Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left,” she added.

Now the Supreme Court is poised to end another long-standing progressive policy. The court will rule on two affirmative action cases this summer and is expected to restrict or eliminate it. So will this hand Democrats another big issue on which they can campaign in 2024? Will they put affirmative action on the ballot?

Probably not. As the NY Times pointed out Sunday, there’s reason to think that while progressives may not be happy to see Affirmative Action go, they aren’t likely to make bringing it back a central concern. Because it turns out they already tried to do exactly that in California. In 2020, Prop 16 was intended to bring back affirmative action, overturning a prior proposition which had outlawed it. But despite strong support from all of the usual suspects, the effort failed spectacularly.

The 2020 campaign to restore race-conscious affirmative action in California was close to gospel within the Democratic Party. It drew support from the governor, senators, state legislative leaders and a who’s who of business, nonprofit and labor elites, Black, Latino, white and Asian.

The Golden State Warriors, San Francisco Giants and 49ers and Oakland Athletics urged voters to support the referendum, Proposition 16, and remove “systemic barriers.” A commercial noted that Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator, had endorsed the campaign, and the ad also suggested that to oppose it was to side with white supremacy. Supporters raised many millions of dollars for the referendum and outspent opponents by 19 to 1.

“Vote for racial justice!” urged the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California…

California is a liberal bastion and one of the most diverse states in the country. That year, President Biden swamped Donald Trump by 29 percentage points in California, but Proposition 16 went down, with 57 percent of voters opposing it.

So in a deep blue state, in the year in which BLM was dominating politics, the push to bring back affirmative action got a measly 43% support.

The Times has gone over the results in Los Angeles County, the largest county in the state, and found there was a pretty distinct racial divide on this question. The group least likely to support it were Asians. Despite a county made up of Democrats who overwhelmingly voted for Joe Biden, support for affirmative action just was not strong. Asian and white voters didn’t offer majority support and even among Hispanics support was just 55 percent. The only voters who were strongly in favor were black voters. Here’s a chart created by the Times which shows the results.

The reason Asian voters offered the least support isn’t hard to understand.

Asian voters spoke of visceral unease. South and East Asians make up just 15 percent of the state population, and 35 percent of the undergraduates in the University of California system.

Affirmative action, to their view, upends traditional measures of merit — grades, test scores and extracurricular activities — and threatens to reduce their numbers.

Sunjay Muralitharan is a voluble freshman and a leader of the Democratic Party chapter at the University of California, San Diego. A Bernie Sanders supporter, he favors universal basic income, a higher minimum wage and national health care.

In 2020, as a 16-year-old, he joined the campaign against race-conscious affirmative action in California. Afterward, he and friends applied to elite private universities outside California and were often surprised by the rejections, reaffirming his view that Asian students need higher grades and scores to gain admission.

“There were lots of students of Indian and Chinese descent who had to settle for schools not of their caliber,” said Mr. Muralitharan, who grew up in Fremont, a predominantly Asian middle-class suburb of San Jose.

If Democrats couldn’t win this fight in California in 2020 then they probably can’t win it anywhere in 2024. This is a loser as an issue, though I doubt that will come across in the coverage from most outlets if the Supreme Court puts an end to it. Kudos to the Times for at least acknowledging reality in this case.