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For decades, while conservatives were patiently waiting for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, they were busy undermining it. In Congress and in statehouses, they pushed policies to make it harder to secure legal abortions, efforts that helped to widen the gap between the two major parties. And yet during the same time, most Americans settled into a complacent state in which they assumed Roe was settled law, even among those whom Republican Presidents appointed to federal benches.
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Well, on Friday, conservatives finally got their wish. The proverbial dog caught the car—and, at least politically, may come to regret it. Americans are still digesting the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling and its potential far-reaching consequences that could stretch from reproductive rights to personal relationships and marriage equality. But there will be no dodging this topic on the campaign trail.

It’s still early, and Election Day is a relatively distant 19 weeks away. But quick polling conducted in the days since the Supreme Court struck down the 1973 precedent shows political problems for Republicans, who otherwise seemed on a glide path toward November. Historically, the party that holds the White House has a dismal showing in its first test with voters; only the Sept. 11 attacks spared an incumbent President that insult back in 2002. President Joe Biden’s job approval numbers are among the worst since World War II, inflation is a persistent irritant to the electorate, and high gas prices are hitting everyone. Put another way, Republicans would have to really try to mess up their hand.

Yet on abortion rights, Democrats seemingly have an advantage on a topic dominating the news and likely to remain top of mind as almost every state will be forced to revisit its abortion policies. A record number of voters say abortion will be the issue that determines their vote this year, according to Gallup, and recent polls suggest a jump in interest in the midterms that seem to favor Democrats. Yet the threat of apathy and exhaustion is real, and sustaining outrage is hard work.

One group in particular may have outsized sway: college-educated women who determine the outcomes in the swingy suburbs. Many came to regret their support for Trump in 2016, and went back to supporting Democrats in the following two elections. Now they are none-too-happy with the Dobbs ruling. A significant 71% of college-educated white women support abortion rights, a recent NPR poll found, and they are a must-win bloc for Democrats’ longterm prospects.

Even before the Supreme Court issued its ruling, the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they identified as “pro-life” was at its lowest level since 1996. A near-record 55% of those surveyed said they identified as “pro-choice” and, in a first, a majority—52%—said abortion was morally acceptable. Over decades of polls, Gallup has found increasing support for abortion, and even in the last year, support for abortion rights has grown across every single demographic group.

Since Friday’s ruling, voters seem to have doubled down. An NPR-Marist poll over the weekend found 56% of all adults opposed the decision and 53% of independents said the same. And in a reason for Republican alarm, 66% of suburban women said they opposed it, alongside 70% of white women who graduated from college.

The same NPR-Marist survey found, among all registered voters, 48% of Americans said they would vote for the Democrat running for Congress, a slight edge over the 41% who said they’d vote for the Republican. Those numbers track with the same survey’s results a month before the 2018 elections that swept Democrats into power. (Keep in mind, when it comes to which party controls the House, gerrymandering has rendered many of these voters’ opinions unimportant as competitive districts are tough to find in many states.)

In short, if Democrats can sustain the intensity around this topic, they may defy history and a Biden drag and dodge an electoral disaster. They’ve been laying the groundwork for this moment for months, and further stepped up focus groups and polling after a draft of the ruling leaked in early May. EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL—the big three abortion-rights groups—plan a $150 million blitz on the topic heading into the fall.

Republicans, however, are far from despondent. Their base loved the ruling: it carries 75% support among white Evangelicals, 84% of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and 54% of white working-class men, according to NPR’s polling. GOP strategists have long argued that abortion fires up a small but dedicated part of the electorate, the volunteers who knock on doors and make phone calls. The emerging strategy appears to be to cast Democrats who support abortion rights as extremists; in New Mexico, where Democrats control the legislature, the GOP nominee for governor says he’s pro-life but is pledging only to ban “late-term and partial-birth abortion that the current governor supports.” (New Mexico stands to become a destination for abortion services as many other states in that region ban it altogether.)

Then there’s the economy. Everyone is feeling the pinch. Systematically, Democrats are simply hemorrhaging their voter rolls. An Associated Press analysis finds that more than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party in the last year, a shift that is especially pronounced in the suburbs. If that trend holds, it could mean tens of thousands of suburban voters who were sour on Trump may have migrated back to the GOP, enough to potentially determine control of Congress.

What’s unknown is if the new abortion landscape might prompt those same voters to swing back into the Democratic fold. To that end, it’s worth listening to what suburban women are saying, especially the white ones with college degrees.

For Republican candidates, there will be little room to hide, especially if Democrats prove successful in painting the GOP as the party of extremism. Democrats will also have to address what comes next in a post-Roe world. Until recently, millions of swing voters had little expectation that Roe could really be struck down after so many years of hard-won durability. The surprise arrived and remade the political landscape. It’s now up to both parties to figure out how to read the new terrain.

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In overruling Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that women no longer have a constitutional right to abortion. In Dobb’s v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court ruled that the issue of abortion is left entirely to the political process. What will this mean?

At first glance, this restores the law to what it was before 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided. Each state will determine for itself whether to protect abortion rights or whether to outlaw some or all abortions. It is expected that over half the states will prohibit all or virtually all abortions.
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Before 1973, women desiring abortions who had financial resources would travel to places where abortion was legal or find a friendly doctor to perform a safe, illegal abortion. Poor women and teenagers without resources faced the cruel choice between an unwanted child and an unsafe abortion. Women of color suffered much higher rates of death and illness from illegal abortions.

We are sure to see all of this again. But there are also ways that the situation is much different from 50 years ago. Abortion has become a political issue in a way that it was not before Roe v. Wade. Conservative politicians who have been railing against abortion rights for decades are not going to give up this political issue. There likely will be far more aggressive enforcement of prohibitions of abortions than occurred prior to 1973. Expect to see doctors and women prosecuted for violating state laws prohibiting abortion much more frequently than occurred prior to Roe.

Conservative politicians will look for new forms of restrictions, such as a proposed Missouri law that would prohibit a woman from leaving the state to obtain an abortion. Some states will adopt laws to eliminate forms of birth control that take effect after conception, such as IUDs and the morning after pill. There will be regulation of medical procedures, such as in vitro fertilization, with some states likely to adopt laws requiring all embryos to be implanted. All of this will lead to litigation and the Court will have to decide if there are any constitutional limits on the states or if the matter is truly entirely left to the political process.

Read More: Abortion Access After the End of Roe

At the same time, medically induced abortions now are possible and account for almost half of all abortions. This will make it harder for states to prohibit abortions as pills can be sent across state lines. States that outlaw abortions will make consuming these pills a crime, though enforcement will be difficult. Also, there will be much more organized efforts to raise money to help women in states where abortion is illegal to have access to the procedure.

Abortion will come to dominate our political process like never before. State judicial elections—and 39 states have some form of judicial election—will focus on abortion because state judges can protect rights under state constitutions. Elections for state legislatures and city councils and for members of Congress often will focus on abortion rights more than ever before.

With a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress, there will be renewed efforts at passing a federal law protecting a national right to abortion. But it seems unlikely that Democrats can overcome a certain Republican filibuster in the Senate. And the next time there is a Republican President and a Republican Congress, they are sure to try and pass legislation outlawing all abortions in the United States, with Republicans perhaps more likely to be successful in changing the rules of the filibuster to adopt such a law.

Someday, when there is a liberal Supreme Court, it likely will overrule Dobbs and again recognize a constitutional right to abortion. But in the years and perhaps decades until that happens, abortion will be the defining political issue for the U.S.

It is unclear what that will mean for our political system. Will those who favor abortion rights mobilize in a way that makes a political difference? And if so, where and what difference will it make? For decades, especially out of a desire to overrule Roe, Republicans in elections have emphasized judicial appointments. Now will Democrats do this?

The central question in the abortion debate is who should decide. Roe v. Wade held that it is for each woman to decide for herself whether to terminate a pregnancy. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization says it is for the legislatures and the political process. The only thing that is certain is that the implications—for women’s lives and for our society—will be enormous and for a long time to come.

Friday was a day of ecstasy or agony for the many Americans for whom abortion is an important issue. The Supreme Court handed down a decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the foundational case on which a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy was established. For some people of faith, it was the triumphant end to a long, hard fight against what they considered a key human rights violation upon the most vulnerable. But not for all of them. Plenty of those who practice a religion mourned the rollback of what they consider a vital legal protection for women, especially the most vulnerable.
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According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 43% of Americans who “identify strongly” with their religious identity do not believe Roe v. Wade needed to be overturned. There’s a wide variability within the ranks, however. A majority (56%) of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be legal, but only 30% of Catholics who attend mass weekly. Similarly, 60% of mainline protestants favor abortion being legal, but only 30% of white evangelical protestants. A slight majority of Muslims and a large majority of Jews also believe abortion should be legal in most cases.

Read More: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Undoing Constitutional Right to Abortion

The bulk of the work overturning Roe has been undertaken by Christian organizations, but not all Christian organizations are opposed to abortion. Both sides of the debate rapidly released statements after the decision. CatholicVote President Brian Burch set the tone for many of those in the anti-abortion camp: “Catholics and pro-life advocates across the country celebrate today’s landmark Supreme Court decision as the ‘dawning of a new day in America’—a long-awaited first step toward the full protection of American women and children,” he wrote. “A dark chapter in our nation’s history has finally been closed.” Burch pointed to technological advances that he said have shown that the “humanity of children in the womb has become plain and undeniable.”

But Jamie L. Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, took aim at the church for its stance. “The unconscionable Supreme Court decision to end the constitutional right to abortion is the culmination of a decades-long religious crusade—spearheaded by the U.S. Catholic bishops—to take away a woman’s most fundamental freedoms, namely her ability to control her own fertility and determine her own destiny,” said Manson in a statement. Many progressive Christians believe abortion has become a recruiting tool to win over churchgoers to the Republican party, and Manson alluded to this infiltration of politics into matters of faith, saying the “ruling gives right-wing leaders unfettered license to codify fringe religious beliefs into civil law.” President Joe Biden, a Catholic, bemoaned the overturning of Roe, “a decision with broad national consensus that most Americans of [most] faiths and backgrounds found acceptable and that had been the law of the land for most of the lifetime of Americans today.”

While the different attitudes among people of the same faith towards abortion are partly aligned with their politics, and partly with how serious a role their faith plays in their life, they also reflect a genuine theological disagreement among scholars as to what their sacred texts say—or can be interpreted to be saying—about when human life begins. Those who are anti-abortion tend to point to Psalm 139:13, which talks about God forming a person when they are being “knit together in the womb.” Those who support abortion rights point to Exodus 21:22, in which the law allows a person who causes a woman to have a miscarriage to be merely fined rather than face the more serious consequences for murder. Muslim scholars have similar arguments about the Quranic view of when life begins.

Read More: The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun

These divisions are evident in other religious traditions as well. A Palm Beach synagogue filed a lawsuit against the state of Florida in June claiming that the restrictive abortion regulations set to go into effect in July violate the State Constitution’s right to freedom of religion. The suit claims that in Jewish law, “abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman.” Not every synagogue is of the same mind, however. While the National Council of Jewish Women held a virtual vigil on the day of the ruling, to “hold space for pain and consider the road ahead,” more conservative communities were jubilant at the Supreme Court’s move. “Agudath Israel has long been on record as opposing Roe v. Wade’s legalization of abortion on demand,” said the umbrella organization for orthodox Jewish groups. “Informed by the teaching of Jewish law that fetal life is entitled to significant protection, with termination of pregnancy authorized only under certain extraordinary circumstances, we are deeply troubled by the staggering number of pregnancies in the United States that end in abortion.”

Many of those who had been campaigning on this issue on either side used the Supreme Court’s decision as a chance to rally their supporters. “The issue of abortion has now been turned over to the states, many of which have either implemented or are considering some of the most abhorrently permissive pro-abortion proposals ever,” said Brent Leatherwood, the acting president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), which filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case. “A consistent, convictional pro-life witness is needed now more than ever in state legislatures and local communities. So let us rejoice that we live in a nation where past injustices can still be corrected, as we also roll our sleeves up to save preborn lives, serve vulnerable mothers, and support families in our communities.”

For Rev. Jennifer Butler, CEO of Faith in Public Life, the ruling was a warning that social and racial inequities were about to be worsened. “Whatever our opinions on abortion, surely we can agree that jailing a woman or a health care provider for exercising their moral judgment in the moment is wrong. These punitive measures will be aimed disproportionately at Black, Brown, Native and Asian women, LGBTQ people, immigrants and low-income people—compounding the injustice,” she said. “In the aftermath of today’s unjust ruling, we must come together and bear one another’s burdens. We must do everything in our power to ensure that pregnant people who face immediate risk to their health and freedom are respected and protected.”

Others took a more fire and brimstone view about the effect of the ruling. “An ominous cloud still hangs threateningly over our nation,” wrote Phil Ginn, the President of the arch-conservative Southern Evangelical Seminary. “Not only did the Dobbs ruling fail to abate this storm cloud, but rather it perhaps has even given rise to the need for a warning of a tornado, the magnitude of which threatens to strike even at the very core of who we are as Americans.” Ginn went on to warn that “the reality of the present may be even more scary than the world of Roe” that “violence will spread like wildfire” and that “if you dare to speak up for the unborn, you will not be safe even in your home.”

But even among the more evangelical branches, Ginn’s views were an outlier. “Laws are critical, but they cannot change the fact that tomorrow there will still be many women who will face an unplanned pregnancy—afraid, unprepared and unsure of what to do and where to turn,” said one of the the ERLC’s chief campaigners for the anti-abortion cause, Elizabeth Graham. “The Church has a significant opportunity to serve and support these women in crisis and their preborn children in their time of need.”