Anti-abortion leaders who spent tens of millions boosting Republicans in the midterms have a message for the party following Tuesday’s blue wave election: It’s your own damn fault.

Voters overwhelmingly rejected an anti-abortion ballot measure in Missouri; approved pro-abortion rights referendums in Nevada and Virginia; and flipped the House and Senate to Democratic control by electing candidates in Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and other battlegrounds who ran on protecting or restoring access to the procedure.

Now, the jockeying over what those results mean and how they should shape politicians’ actions heading into next year’s Democratic congressional majority and the 2028 presidential race begins.

Some abortion opponents, including Sarah Zagorski with Americans United for Life, saw the results as a sign that their movement has “a long way to go in changing hearts and shifting culture toward life.”But others attributed the results to Trump administration inaction on the issue and GOP candidates’ reticence to talk about it, which they said left the party’s base frustrated and unmotivated.

“With Republicans not bringing the issue to the forefront, it has been difficult to mobilize pro-life voters,” said Kelsey Pritchard, the communications director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “It's really extremely unwise for the GOP to ignore this block of voters.”Though the conservative advocacy group poured more than $80 million into airing ads and knocking on doors in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin, Democrats won big in all of those states.

Abortion rights activists — who also spent tens of millions of dollars on ads, canvassing and other get-out-the-vote efforts — had a different interpretation of Tuesday’s results: as a testament to the enduring power of abortion rights in motivating Democratic voters.

While acknowledging that the issue has slipped down voters’ priority list from the top spot it held in past cycles, progressive leaders argued it still acted as a “dealbreaker” in races where Democrats wielded it against their GOP counterparts.

“When you ask a voter, ‘What are your top three issues?’ It's going to be inflation. It's going to be gas prices. It's going to be the cost of health care. It's going to be those things that are affecting your everyday life,” Yvonne Gutierrez, the executive director of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in an interview. “But when voters hear a candidate is anti-reproductive freedom and does not support equality, that really does flip a switch in their mind, and we saw that all over the country.”Gutierrez and other abortion rights supporters celebrated the victories of candidates like Keisha Lance Bottoms, who won the Georgia governor’s race after campaigning on overturning her state’s ban, saying her win and others create a mandate for the party to take action on the issue.

Even with Trump still in office, progressive advocates are pushing for Congress to pass bills to override state bans and restore abortion access nationwide — something House Democratic leadership pledged to take up within the first 100 hours of winning the majority.

“It took them 50 years,” she said of the right’s effort to overturn . “It's not going to take us 50 years. We’ve got to get it done.”Yet how far the Democratic majority is willing to go on the issue will be a battle in the months and years ahead, with moderates favoring restoring while progressives demand national protections for abortion with no gestational limits and a repeal of the Hyde amendment to allow federal funding of the prcedure.

“Compromise on abortion rights has no place in the work that lies ahead,” said Brittany Fonteno, the president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation. “With a pro-abortion majority in Congress, we must swiftly work to craft federal protections that secure access to abortion throughout pregnancy.”Anti-abortion leaders were already bracing for major losses and airing their grievances with the GOP in the leadup to election day, lamenting in op-eds, social media posts and interviews that Republicans in close races have scrubbed the anti-abortion records from their websites and issued pledges not to roll back back abortion access as Democrats leaned into the issue.

“It's almost like the GOP, in many instances, did a Control-Shift-Replace and put in trans issues instead of abortion,” said Kristi Hamrick, who leads policy and communications for Students for Life of America.

She said President Donald Trump’s second term record on abortion has largely been an “epic fail” for the movement, noting that even the administration’s one significant blow to abortion access — a measure stripping federal funding from Planned Parenthood — expired earlier this year after Republicans in Congress failed to muster the votes to extend it.

Pritchard, Hamrick and other anti-abortion leaders had spent months warning the Trump administration that its lack of action as the number of abortions increased nationwide would come back to bite them.

When anti-abortion activists with SBA were out canvassing, the group said, they frequently heard complaints about the Trump administration’s decision to continue allowing abortion pills to be prescribed online and shipped across state lines, including into states with bans. The administration recently punted acting on the issue until March, when it expects to complete an internal review of the drugs’ safety.

“At the doors, we found almost zero pre-existing enthusiasm among pro-life voters for Republican candidates this election,” they wrote in a postmortem memo shared with POLITICO, which warned the GOP will fare even worse in 2028 if they don’t prioritize restricting abortion in the lame duck period. “Over the next two years, Republicans are going to have to figure out how to stake out a pro-life position that remotivates the base.”

Without a Republican record to tout, SBA and other groups focused instead on making the argument that Democrats are too “extreme” in their support for abortion access — a message their internal polling and focus groups indicated was “really motivating pro-life, low-propensity voters to show up,” Pritchard said.

A few Republicans aired ads with a similar message, accusing their Democratic opponents of supporting “abortion up to a baby's first breath.”But most GOP campaigns sidestepped the issue entirely. In Kansas, for example, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall ran zero ads about abortion this cycle compared to the 10 ads he aired on the issue in his 2020 reelection bid, in which he touted his record as a “pro-life doctor” who“will never stop” fighting for restrictions on the procedure. Marshall lost Tuesday night, handing the seat to a Democrat for the first time since 1932.

“You have these conservatives that really didn't share their outlooks on life, and that was not inspiring,” Daniel White, a leader of the anti-abortion advocacy group Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, told POLITICO as he left the election night party of Vivek Ramaswamay in downtown Columbus. “You’re either pro-life or you're not.”Democratic campaigns and PACs invested far more in ads about the issue in the leadup to the election, according to an analysis by the pro-abortion rights advocacy group Free and Just.

In the final stretch in October, for instance, they spent millions on TV spots attacking Sen. Susan Collins for helping confirm the Supreme Court justices who overturned and criticizing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson for supporting the state’s six-week ban. Both Republicans lost on Tuesday.

Abortion rights leaders were thrilled that the message their anti-abortion counterparts took from Tuesday’s bloodbath for Republicans was the need to lean harder on the issue heading into 2028.

“Bring it on,” said Mini Timmaraju, the president of Reproductive Freedom for All said in a call with POLITICO. “We will continue to beat the hell out of you.”One of anti-abortion activists’ few victories in the midterms was in Idaho, where voters rejected a ballot measure that would have overturned the state’s ban and restored some abortion access. Major national abortion rights groups did not invest in the campaign there as they did in Missouri, Nevada and Virginia, in part because Idaho’s initiative was statutory rather than a constitutional amendment, meaning it could be overturned by the state legislature.

Lila Rose, the leader of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said in a statement Wednesday morning that amid “devastating setbacks” for her movement in other ballot measures and candidate results, she saw the Idaho outcome as “proof that the abortion industry’s agenda can be defeated at the ballot box.”