Historians will be mining the results of Tuesday’s election results for decades, sifting through a debris field that was as wide as it was deep. The defeat of Republican candidates reached states that have been off-limits to the Democratic Party for decades, including Kansas, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina, and perhaps even Mississippi. The margins were not close in most of these locales, belying any insistence that a single difficult issue was the cause of, or solution to, the debacle. The rejection of the Trump GOP was carte blanche, ripping out traditional conservative advantages root and branch.

The finger-pointing will go on for a long while, and it has already elicited the voices of President Trump and Vice President Vance blaming everything from the war in Iran, to fuel costs, to Fox News for the alleged disloyalty of interviewing Democrats about the issues in the race. But the rejection of one political party by this magnitude transcends any particular controversy — it is almost a physiological phenomenon, as if an emetic had been administered to a body politic that could no longer tolerate the foodstuffs being thrust into its face.

The truth is that November 3 was no mere reaction to a misbegotten ad or the antics of an unfaithful husband, it was a protest of the collapse of the most basic social norms. After years of proclaiming that his administration would drain the swamp in cash-saturated Washington, D.C., the Trump family immersed itself in transactions that felt like so much casino winnings, where the house almost invariably wins on everything from crypto trading to the sale of ambassadorships to government contracts to pardons. There was nothing subtle about it. And nothing that a little sprucing up of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall could repair or a NASCAR race there could distract from.

At the same time, President Trump’s second term dealt mighty blows to elements of his coalition that were served notice in 2024 that he no longer cared for the causes that had brought them into being. This was the case with the right to life. Consider the broad history of a fight that has always struggled for staying power in the raw politics of the nation’s capital.

In the 1970s, the pro-life movement as it developed was a bipartisan affair, capable of winning votes — such as on the Hyde Amendment — with slim but real margins in Congress. The nation was a handful of years past the devastatingly wrong Roe and Doe decisions, and activists were focused on trying to build support for national proposals to reverse it. They were willing to vote for anyone in either party who would hear their pleas for the vulnerable unborn.

When Ronald Reagan entered the race for the White House against George H.W. Bush, Texas Governor John Connally, and others, he and his party did not have instant support from right-to-life groups. On the contrary, Reagan had distrust on his hands as a result of his decision to sign into law the Beilenson bill that legalized abortion in California in 1967, six years before Roe. The senior Bush was no better trusted, as he had been a prime congressional sponsor of Title X of the Public Health Service Act, the measure that to this day nationalizes the eugenic and population control ideology of the ultra-rich Planned Parenthood Federation. The role of the Republican Party and projects like the Rockefeller Commission on Population Growth and the American Future were fresh on the minds of pro-lifers.

It was only in early 1980, with his campaign against Bush sagging, that Reagan and his team reached out to right-to-life advocates for support. He asserted that he had been deceived by the Beilenson forces, and the 1967 act had introduced abortion at a scale far beyond what its sponsors said it would do. Of the magnitude of the change there is no doubt: in 1968, according to the National Institutes of Health, there were 5,030 abortions in California. By 1970, the estimate was that there would be 60,000. Today, of course, California has stopped counting the toll, but Guttmacher estimates the annual number at 185,700 — in a contraceptive-saturated society.

Reagan’s outreach produced what became a staple of pro-life activism — a commitment letter expressing support for the national right to life of the unborn and detailing steps, like judicial appointments, that would bring about the reversal of Roe v. Wade and bring the nation closer to constitutional recognition of equal protection for the child in the womb. The letter became legendary in political circles after Reagan’s campaign rallied and defeated Bush in a string of Southern primaries after losing to him in the Iowa caucuses.

The GOP followed Reagan’s lead for decades from that point on, adopting increasingly pro-life planks at its quadrennial conventions. The ups-and-downs of that course are well-known, as Republican judicial nominees were on balance pro-life, but several key choices — Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter — turned out to be protectors of a broad right to abortion. Reagan was described by historian Paul Kengor as mortified by his failure to reverse Roe.

Skip forward to the Trump years — to date. In 2016, due to Trump’s personal history and past support for legal abortion, pro-life groups opposed his run for the GOP nomination. In February of that year, they held a press conference on the eve of the South Carolina primary calling for voters there to choose “anyone but Trump.” Trump, of course, won that primary with 33% of the vote (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush split the majority of the vote at 22.5 , 22.3 and 7.8%, respectively). With a divided field trailing him to the finish line, Trump eventually secured the nomination. Following the Reagan-era playbook, Trump prepared a commitment letter listing four things he would do if he won the presidency. The list was topped by a pledge to nominate “pro-life judges to the Supreme Court.”

To his everlasting credit, President Trump kept that one promise, accomplishing what previous Republican presidents had failed to do. The other three promises made in the September 2016 letter proved harder to accomplish and have not been achieved.

In the aftermath of Dobbs, however, a sea change occurred. Pro-lifers must own a considerable part of the blame. Outgunned financially as always, the movement lost key referenda in 2022 and 2024, including in states like Ohio and Kentucky. Perhaps already inclined to downplay and dismiss the issue, Trump turned more publicly against the cause, initially opposing a Florida measure to protect unborn children with a heartbeat, calling it “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

As he and his running-mate J.D. Vance moved forward in 2024, they became bolder in rejecting the right to life. The extent of that rejection was revealed at the 2024 GOP convention in Milwaukee, when the party’s platform committee adopted a states-rights plank on abortion, erroneously described the nature of the 14th Amendment’s protection for the unborn, omitted other pro-life provisions, and closed doors and cell phones in the meeting room to prevent consideration of even a minority report advocating the GOP’s longtime embrace of life. Moreover, Vance led the way in volunteering a presidential pledge to veto efforts to block chemical abortion, then as now the avenue for the vast majority of the nation’s growing abortion toll.

The next steps now seem to have been inevitable. Pro-life groups, disempowered as never before, plowed on, working races where a candidate had supported the fight in a few places across the country. The Trump administration, repeating pledges here and there to review abortion drug safety, declined to act even to restore a requirement for medical supervision of self-induced abortion. Abortion data tracking was suspended for the first time in decades. The first lady published her own book on the eve of the 2024 election that, in the words of The Daily Mail, “passionately defends abortion rights.” The timing was no accident.

No wonder then that the 2026 midterms ended with not a bang but a whimper on the sanctity of life. Defenders of an indecorous silence on the subject, those who had championed insisting it was merely a state or local matter, found themselves standing behind GOP candidates Michele Tafoya of Minnesota and Mike Rogers of Michigan as they embraced legal abortion, all for the sake of the party. Oddly enough, this gambit did not work. The proclamation that the GOP needed to downplay or dismiss the right to life has now been put to the test — and it utterly failed. The GOP is now adrift on life, and its handling of the issue is just one more example of how it has been damaged by a lack of integrity on subject after subject.

This is not to say that pro-life declarations in this maelstrom would have worked any better in 2026. The primary drivers of conservative defeat in 2026 obviously did not include pro-life commitments. In an era of rampant abortion and practices like assisted suicide, an age of stupefyingly vindictive politics and violence in the streets, at a time when an American president can speak offhandedly about destroying a civilization, something much larger is wrong in America.

No election will suffice to fix it — but if we become unable to respect each other’s simple humanity and refuse to mourn the disappearance of wedding banns and our increasingly empty cradles, recovery will be impossible. Silence is not an answer.