Two and a half years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which for nearly fifty years had guaranteed Americans the right to make their own decisions about abortion, voters re-elected Donald Trump — the president who packed the Court with justices who took it. this immediately. Many observers expected voters to deliver a Trump defeat in what some called a “Hell hath no fury” election. But while there was a sizable Democratic advantage with women on Nov. 5, it appears to have been smaller than for Joe Biden four years earlier or for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Exit polls indicate that most voters, including fifty-three percent of white women, rejected Kamala Harris, a female candidate who had made restoring reproductive freedom a passionate centerpiece of her campaign.

It might be tempting to conclude that most Americans approve of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which declared Roe “flagrantly wrong.” But poll after poll shows that’s not the case. In fact, the election provided further evidence that most voters, even in red states, strongly support abortion rights. Seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Montana, Missouri, New York and Nevada — have passed a variety of ballot measures to protect abortion. Voters in the eighth state, Florida, approved a similar measure by more than fifty-seven percent, and it failed to pass only because of a required sixty percent threshold. Similar ballot initiatives failed in two other states, Nebraska and South Dakota.

However, all but three states that passed ballot measures protecting abortion rights appear to have voted to return Trump to the White House. This mixed result suggests that while most American voters support abortion rights, they did not blame Trump, or the Supreme Court he built, for eviscerating those rights. Although Democrats have made abortion an issue—one that ranked first in importance to fourteen percent of voters, according to exit polls—they have failed to make the Supreme Court itself an issue, despite the extremism still greater of the decisions made by the 6… 3 conservative super-majority, and despite a series of shocking disclosures documenting the ethical failings of several judges, all of which have caused public confidence in the Court to decline.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who focuses on reproductive issues, told me, “It seems clear that pro-abortion voters don’t think the election will make much of a difference.” Nothing could be further from the truth, Ziegler warned: “Although Democrats haven’t talked about it much, this is not as far as the Court can go on abortion.” Trump, she said, “did a good job of dodging and obfuscating” the issue, saying he simply returned the matter to the states. In contrast, when Harris spoke about it, Ziegler believes “her message was too retrospective. She said that “Trump brought you abortion bans.” But that happened in the past. She did not show how this would affect her in future.” Legal issues are complicated and often don’t test well in newsgroups. But Ziegler told me, “I don’t think people understood what could happen in a second Trump term.”

The Harris campaign’s failure to explain how much more extreme the Supreme Court could become under a second Trump administration may turn out to be a major political blunder. There are numerous ways the Justice could impose even more draconian restrictions on reproductive rights. For example, the Court could allow the Justice Department to apply the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that criminalized the distribution of abortion paraphernalia by mail, in a way that would allow it to be used to prosecute doctors or drug companies who they send abortion pills to patients. Both JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, and Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy project for a second Trump term, have supported the idea, and Ziegler believes the current Supreme Court may well approve. It’s also possible, she noted, that the Drug Enforcement Administration under Trump would pull medical abortion drugs from the market. “If it starts a legal battle, it’s not inconceivable that the Court would side with the Administration,” Ziegler said.

Meanwhile, at the state level, Republican attorneys general have already begun exploring new approaches to further criminalize abortion care. In Alabama, a legal challenge has been launched over potential prosecutions of people who help patients travel out of state for abortions. Anti-abortion lawmakers in red states also aspire to enact “fetal personhood” laws that would declare that from the moment an egg is fertilized, it is a person with all the Constitution’s protections. Such laws would create court challenges to any legislation legalizing abortion. If a state law allowing abortion were to make it to the current Supreme Court, it wouldn’t necessarily be overturned, but, Ziegler said, “I don’t think you can rule out the possibility of it coming later. This is the end of the anti-abortion movement.”

Leaders of the conservative legal movement, meanwhile, see Trump’s election as a tremendous opportunity to push the Court further to the right, breaking down old barriers and appointing a new generation of right-wing justices who can cement conservative control of the Court for decades. In Trump’s first term, he had the extraordinary opportunity to appoint three of the nine Supreme Court justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. In his second term, if the two oldest conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, seventy-six, and Samuel Alito, seventy-four — can be pushed into retirement, Trump could nominate even more extreme justices as replacements.

Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer and former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, wasted no time in sending a smoke signal to the senior justices that it was time to go. Just after Election Day, Whelan posted an essay about National Magazine Blog Bench Memos that basically handed Thomas and Alito gold watches whether they want them or not. Whelan wrote: “I expect Alito to announce his retirement in the spring of 2025.” As for Thomas, Whelan said he expected to retire “in the spring of 2026.” Whelan admitted many doubted Thomas, who is notoriously stubborn, would voluntarily quit. But Whelan, sounding like a stern parent, wrote that “it would be foolish of him to risk repeating Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake — staying on only to die in office and be replaced by someone with a very different judicial philosophy . He will recognize that the best way to strengthen his jurisprudential legacy is to allow a strong originalist to take his place and secure an originalist majority for decades to come.” Whelan noted that if the two oldest conservatives were replaced by much younger ones, five Trump appointees could easily serve until 2045.

Josh Blackman, a conservative professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, thinks Alito might actually be happy to retire. “He can hang out on the Jersey Shore and go to the opera and have fun without the media trying to destroy him,” he told me. “What’s next after I write the Dobbs decision? Dobbs was the eldest. It was the white whale and he caught it.”

But in the short term, Blackman said, leaders of the conservative legal movement have more immediate concerns, such as reversing the Biden administration’s position in several current Supreme Court cases. For example, Blackman expects to see a Trump-appointed attorney general reversed in the ongoing Supreme Court case, United States v. Skrmetti, which is challenging Tennessee’s 2023 ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Biden’s attorney general sided with three transgender teenagers and their parents, who argued the law violated their constitutional rights. A Trump attorney general could support the ban, making the case moot.

As Blackman puts it, abortion may “disappear” as a priority as the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority moves on to even more ambitious issues. Gloria Steinem, the longtime feminist leader, told me that the right’s restrictions on abortion may have been just the beginning of a larger assault on personal liberties, and not for the first time in history. She noted: “We should remember that one of the first things Hitler did when he was elected – and he was elected – was to declare abortion a crime against the state.”