What Ezra Klein Gets Wrong About Abortion and Authoritarianism
If you wouldn’t trade away voting rights to win a Senate seat, don’t trade away bodily autonomy either. In 2025, it's the same fight.
In a recent run of appearances, Ezra Klein has argued that if you’re genuinely worried about democratic backsliding, you have to be more flexible about who’s in the anti‑authoritarian coalition. He advised Democrats to broaden the party by “running pro-life Democrats” in red states, specifically Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri. The comments from The New York Times pundit pissed off a lot of progressives, were applauded by some #NeverTrump Republicans and centrist Democrats, and triggered a new round in the decade-long fight among liberals about how to build a big-tent movement to defeat MAGA.
Klein argues that if Trump’s authoritarian attack on our democracy and the rule of law is the most important issue in America, then the opposition party needs to start treating it that way, including by embracing candidates who disagree on core Democratic issues if that will help win back power in Congress and the states.
As a general framework, he’s not wrong, and I’ve made similar arguments, including in 2016, when it was clear that a Trump victory represented a threat to democracy and that Clinton had to do something dramatic to pull pro-democracy Republicans into her coalition.
One of the key lessons from How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s study of how other countries responded to authoritarian threats, is that “whenever extremists emerge as serious electoral contenders, mainstream parties must forge a united front to defeat them.” In Austria in 2016, center‑right leaders backed a member of the Green Party to stop the far‑right FPÖ, which Levitsky and Ziblatt call a “useful model of contemporary gatekeeping.” In France in 2017, conservative François Fillon urged his voters to back liberal Emmanuel Macron to keep the far-right Marine Le Pen from power.
So, given the emergency of MAGA’s illiberal assault, Klein’s instinct about broadening the Democratic coalition in ways that might be uncomfortable to its core constituencies is sound.
It’s just that he picked the wrong issue.
Voters keep siding with abortion rights—especially in red states
There’s no evidence that nominating anti‑abortion rights Democrats increases Democratic vote share in tough states. The record since Dobbs points the other way, and in precisely the states Klein used as examples (Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri):
Kansas (Aug. 2022): Voters in the deep red state defeated a constitutional anti‑abortion amendment—59% to 41%—and carried every congressional district.
Ohio (Nov. 2023): Voters adopted a constitutional protection for abortion—57% to 43%—despite GOP control of state government.
Missouri (Nov. 2024): Voters overturned the state’s near‑total ban on abortion—52% to 48%—and enshrined abortion rights in the constitution.1
The full scoreboard since Dobbs: The abortion rights side has won six of six statewide votes in 2022, two of two key Ohio fights in 2023, and seven of eleven statewide measures in 2024 (with three rights measures failing and one restriction passing in Nebraska).2
National opinion on abortion also remains stable and pro‑choice. Recent polling from Pew reports that 63% agree that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 36% agree that it should be illegal in all or most cases.
But the question Klein raises is about red states, so let’s look more closely at those.
The Public Religion Research Institute surveyed 22,000 Americans last year to get a granular look into opinions on abortion in every state. PRRI’s polling found that in many red states, the percentage favoring abortion rights is larger than the Democratic vote share in those states—meaning support for abortion rights is one of the few issues that can expand the map for Democrats.
PRRI found only eight states where support for abortion rights was at 50% or less:
Kentucky (50%)
Arkansas (49%)
Idaho (48%)
Tennessee (47%)
Oklahoma (46%)
Utah (44%)
Louisiana (42%)
West Virginia (41%)
If Klein wanted to make a ruthless political case that abandoning support for abortion rights would help Democrats, he would at least start with this list rather than the three states he cited that all support abortion rights. But even in these eight states, the numbers don’t suggest that retreating on abortion rights is the key to victory for Democrats.
In fact, the numbers suggest the opposite.
Seven of these eight states—all but Utah—have complete bans on abortion, which is one of the most unpopular positions in American politics, including in the states that have these bans. Nationally, only 8% favor making abortion illegal in all cases. In the states, support for that extreme position ranges from 2% in Rhode Island to 17% in Nebraska.
The way to approach abortion policy as a Democrat in these deep red states is to attack the extremist bans and advocate for the expansion of abortion rights. This is not a hypothetical. That’s exactly how Gov. Andy Beshear (D) won—53% to 47%—two years ago in Kentucky.
As
notes:When Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear was reelected in 2023, it was abortion that won him the election. In one of the country’s reddest states, Beshear’s campaign focused on his opponent’s anti-choice extremism, and pushed out a gut-punch ad featuring Hadley Duvall, a young woman who was raped and impregnated as a child. In his victory speech, she was the first person Beshear thanked after his family.
In 2024, we watched a Democrat flip an Alabama House seat after she ran on repealing the state’s abortion ban and told her own abortion story. Marilyn Lands didn’t just win—she won by 25 points. In Alabama.
If you are one of Klein’s “pro-life Democrats” in one of these seven red states, you are part of a movement pushing extremist policies that nine out of ten of your voters oppose. And the tiny sliver of voters who back full abortion bans in these states are diehard MAGA Republicans—the foot soldiers of the illiberal movement Klein wants to thwart—who are not going to vote for a Democrat.
Abortion rights and authoritarianism
Of all of the examples of authoritarianism one could catalog since Trump’s rise, few are as consequential as women losing a constitutional protection to control their own bodies.
It is not a coincidence that the same voters who are the most reliable bloc of Trump supporters are also the most anti-abortion. This movement, now dominated by adherents of Christian nationalism, overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2016, and six years later, the Supreme Court that Trump created on their behalf erased a half‑century‑old constitutional right for women. That’s not incidental to the authoritarianism liberals oppose. It is a textbook use of state power to police bodies and shrink personal autonomy.
MAGA is not stopping at abortion. The movement is building a network of state laws that is increasingly Orwellian. Consider some recent policies:
Local “travel bans”: Cities and counties in Texas have passed “abortion‑trafficking” ordinances aimed at stopping people from driving on local roads to reach out‑of‑state care.
Criminalizing help for minors to have an abortion or leave the state: Idaho passed a law that would have criminalized “encouragement, counseling, and emotional support” for minors who wanted an abortion. That part of the law was struck down, but the 9th Circuit upheld the criminalization of assisting minors to travel out of state for an abortion.
Prosecuting women for pregnancy outcomes: In Ohio, a woman was arrested for “corpse abuse” after a miscarriage (a grand jury refused to indict her). In Nebraska, a mother was sentenced to two years in prison for helping her 17-year-old daughter secure a medication abortion. Police accessed the mother and daughter’s private Facebook messages to build their case.
Surveilling reproductive data: A jury in California found that Meta “intentionally eavesdropped on and/or recorded conversations” of users of the Flo period‑tracking app. So the infrastructure for reproductive surveillance now plainly exists, and the same cops who got a warrant for Facebook messages in Nebraska will one day be rifling through a target’s Flo data. Think that’s a stretch? This summer, a federal court in Texas vacated a Biden-era rule that shielded reproductive‑health information from being used to investigate or punish care.
Loss of bodily autonomy not just in life but in death: Earlier this year, a pregnant Black woman in Georgia who became brain-dead when her fetus was six weeks old was forced to remain on life support against the wishes of her family, an episode that recalled the grotesque medical experiments conducted on Black women without their consent throughout American history.
Abortion bounties: This month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law that allows private citizens to sue anyone who provides abortion medication, creating a creepy new culture of abortion witch hunts sponsored by the state.
This is just a sampling of these bizarre new laws pushed by MAGA to build a legal regime to control women’s bodies. They are creating a system where the state uses digital surveillance, tracking of women’s movements, the encouragement of vigilanteism, and threats of imprisonment to enforce the network of post-Dobbs abortion bans unleashed by Trump’s 2016 election.
In other words, abortion policy has become the testing ground for MAGA’s assault on civil liberties.
The pre- and post-Dobbs political worlds are not the same
Klein’s argument made some sense before Dobbs. When Roe was still the law of the land, a constitutionally protected right to an abortion limited the risk that one or two Democratic defectors in Congress could help Republicans wipe out abortion rights nationally.
But post‑Dobbs, that’s no longer true, because now the fight is legislative. In Congress right now, anti-abortion proposals include a federal personhood bill (Life at Conception Act) and a six-week national abortion ban (Heartbeat Protection Act). Given the close margins in Congress, one Democrat who opposes abortion rights could decide whether such bills advance or are blocked.
Meanwhile, state legislatures are escalating the penalties for violating abortion bans and pushing increasingly draconian laws that would have been plainly unconstitutional before Dobbs. In South Carolina, which now enforces a 6‑week abortion ban, legislators are promoting fetal personhood proposals that contemplate homicide‑level punishment, including the death penalty, which in South Carolina can mean a firing squad or electrocution. (All this in the name of being pro-life.)
Klein’s “big tent” treats debates about abortion as a minor policy difference unrelated to the larger fight over democracy with which he is ostensibly more concerned. But post‑Dobbs, abortion is a key proxy for that larger debate. It’s about whether you believe women have the right to control their own lives or if their bodies belong to the state—which makes it central to the fight against illiberalism.
Klein is not the only well-meaning pundit who sees the democracy fight as upstream from all other policies, including abortion, and as a result, urges Democrats to be ideologically flexible. I spend a lot of time in these circles both personally and professionally, and I have found that the connection between abortion policy and illiberalism is a major blind spot for many of these public intellectuals.
David French, one of the keenest chroniclers of MAGA’s threat to democracy, posted on X, “Ezra’s completely right. The Democratic Party never should have closed its doors to pro‑life voices, and it will never win if it doesn’t run candidates who actually have a chance to compete in red states.” French’s endorsement of the Klein thesis is typical of the genre. It comes without reference to any data about the electoral politics of abortion, and without any comment on the specific policies that the modern MAGA-fied pro-life movement is pushing.
Similarly, David Remnick, who presents himself as deeply concerned about MAGA’s rise, offered no pushback at all when Klein made his “pro-life Democrats” pitch to Remnick during a recent interview. It was left to women with deep knowledge about this issue, such as Jessica Valenti, Robyn Pennacchia, Carolyn McConnell, and Susan Rinkunas, to do that work.
At this moment in American politics, the practical effect of advising the coalition opposing Trump to run “pro-life Democrats” is to embrace an anti‑abortion regime built on surveillance, selective prosecution, interstate‑travel constraints, and a theory of personhood that invites the carceral state into pregnancy by criminalizing abortion as murder.
There is a name for all of that: authoritarianism.
In 2025 America, telling Democrats to run “pro‑life Democrats” isn’t the savvy strategy Klein thinks it is. Instead, it’s urging them to normalize the same authoritarian threat they’re supposed to defeat.
Virginia, which is not a red state in presidential elections but did elect a Republican governor in 2021, saw Democrats win unified control after Republicans campaigned on a 15‑week abortion limit in 2023.
In Florida, the 2024 abortion rights ballot measure won an impressive 57%, three points short of the supermajority threshold needed for passage.
Ryan Lizza: I have followed your reporting with pleasure for many years and this is the most impressive, well-thought out, and outstanding column you have ever written. I truly believe it will become an important historical document in US history, as we struggle so deeply with the issue of authoritarianism during these troubling, current times. Because I am a lawyer, a practicing psychologist and a woman who studied and taught American History for several years, I feel qualified to make this judgement.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! and THANK YOU!
Thank you for this, especially your clear articulation about the link between authoritarianism and actions taken to constrict women’s bodily autonomy. Women have the most to lose in an authoritarian regime that is based on a patriarchal and religious foundation, which explains in part why I see a majority of women in recent street protests. It is very frightening to see the rapid loss of rights we took for granted, with even the right to vote being threatened by rich and powerful right wing technocrats (e.g. Peter Thiel) and religious leaders (e.g. Doug Wilson.)