Ezra Klein is Wrong About Abortion

Abortion *is* a big tent issue

Abortion is a winner for Democrats—a big one. The issue has flipped red state seats, brought home ballot measure wins, and rattled the GOP so badly that they even considered losing the term ‘pro-life’ altogether. They know that forcing raped children to give birth and letting pregnant women go septic isn’t winning them any votes: abortion bans are massively unpopular—even in red states—and 81% of Americans don’t want the issue legislated by the government at all.

That’s why I’m stunned that New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has quadrupled down on his argument that Democrats should run ‘pro-life’ candidates. To single out abortion, of all things, as the place for compromise is to ignore the political reality of the last three years. And in a moment when the stakes are so high—as women are literally and regularly dying—being both confidently wrong and hugely influential is straight up dangerous.

Since first making the argument to fellow Times columnist Ross Douthat, Klein has defended his comments to a series of additional men: Tim Miller at The Bulwark, David Remnick at The New Yorker, and, most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Times. And while Klein has acknowledged that he understands why “people got very upset,” he continues to insist that he’s right.

Klein seems to believe that those who took offense to his call for anti-abortion Democrats are simply unwilling to make the compromises necessary to build lasting power—and that our upset was solely a moral one.

“Politics is about power, and I think people have missed this,” he told Remnick on Friday. “Politics is about building coalitions capable of winning power and about making the decisions you need to to be able to do that.”

Believe it or not, Klein’s critics—from Planned Parenthood to yours truly—do actually understand how politics works. And while it’s true that women are tired of watching their humanity be treated like a political trading card, that’s not the urgent issue here.

Klein is one of the most powerful thinkers in politics right now: the Democratic mainstream views him as a sort of strategic wunderkind, and his new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, has already shaped how the party is thinking about 2026 and beyond.

What he says matters; it has an impact. So if he’s going to use the rights of half the population as a bargaining chip, he should know what he’s talking about.

Klein kicked this off, for example, by telling Douthat that Democrats should run ‘pro-life’ candidates to “make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri.” But as I wrote last week, all three of those states have seen massive pro-choice victories: Kansas voters crushed an anti-abortion ballot measure with 60% of the vote in 2022; Ohio passed an abortion rights amendment in 2023; and Missouri voters approved a pro-choice measure in 2024.

Those wins came despite unprecedented attacks on democracy. In Ohio, the Secretary of State admitted working with the nation’s top anti-abortion group to draft a biased ballot summary, and Republican legislators spent nearly $20 million on a special election designed to sink the amendment. The night before Kansas weighed in on an anti-abortion measure, voters got texts from a Republican PAC falsely claiming, “Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice.”

After Missouri’s Attorney General spent months blocking signature-gathering for Amendment 3—finally forced to back down by the state Supreme Court—voters got texts telling them pro-choice petitioners were trying to steal their personal data. And now, just months after Missouri voters passed the pro-choice Amendment 3, Republicans have put an abortion ban on the 2026 ballot. The name they chose? Amendment 3.

Even our ballot measure losses are reminders of America’s pro-choice majority: In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis weaponized state agencies in a multimillion dollar disinformation campaign, threatened TV stations with criminal charges for airing Amendment 4 campaign ads, and even sent police to voters’ doors in a bogus fraud investigation. Still, Amendment 4 won 57% of the vote—just shy of the 60% needed to pass.

In Nebraska, conservatives beat a pro-choice amendment by running a competing measure under a near-identical name—collecting signatures by telling voters their ban was actually ‘pro-choice.’

Threatening voters and journalists with arrest, blasting out bullshit texts, and calling abortion bans ‘pro-choice’—does any of that sound like Republicans think they can win on being ‘pro-life’?

This is what we’re supposed to believe Democrats should compromise on?

If Klein’s worry is that there’s a difference between voting on an issue and voting for a candidate, let’s put that to rest, too.

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.

It’s not just that abortion rights win—it’s that anti-abortion politics lose. Just look at Virginia’s 2023 election: Republicans followed Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s playbook—a strategy the group pitched as a model for GOP candidates nationwide. Instead of dodging abortion, they went all in—insisting they didn’t support ‘bans’, but ‘limits’ and ‘reasonable compromises.’ Even with the softened language, voters weren’t interested: Republicans lost the legislature.

And while some might argue abortion rights weren’t enough to win Democrats the presidency, let’s remember that—in addition to the mistakes the party made in the lead-up to November—Donald Trump didn’t embrace anti-abortion politics. Just the opposite: his team made sure that every headline claimed Trump and JD Vance didn’t support a national abortion ban and that they’d veto such legislation.

We’ve seen the same pattern across the country: Republicans are trying to soften their messaging and claim that they don’t support bans. The powerful conservative machine behind GOP candidates understands very clearly that abortion is a winning issue for Democrats. What does Klein think he knows that everyone else doesn’t?

Most importantly: support for abortion rights will only get stronger. It won’t be long before every single person in this country has been touched by anti-abortion policy—whether it’s because they can’t get their birth control pills at Planned Parenthood anymore or because a friend got seriously ill after being denied care. This issue only gets worse for Republicans with time—to concede anything right now would be absurd.

What’s that saying? Skate to where the puck is going.

If the political reality isn’t enough to convince those intent on abortion compromise, women’s lived reality should be. Republican bans have driven up maternal and infant mortality, and codified the extreme suffering of pregnant people. Women across the country have been turned into “walking coffins,” forced to carry dead and dying fetuses. In 2023, I interviewed a 21-year-old in Texas who was denied an abortion even though her fetus was developing without a head.

Pregnant cancer patients are being denied radiation. Brain-dead mothers are having their bodies used as incubators. Women are being arrested for flushing their miscarriages. Where, exactly, is ‘the middle’ in any of that?

This is no time for compromise. To support a ‘pro-life’ candidate—from any party—is morally incomprehensible.

Here’s the thing: I suspect Klein regrets using abortion as his example of why Democrats need a ‘big tent’, but feels too far gone to backtrack. When Ta-Nehisi Coates pressed him on the issue in their conversation this weekend, Klein hinted at that—saying abortion was just an “illustrative example.” Coates, admirably, didn’t let it slide:

“I know it’s not necessarily the example that you would hold out. But I think the problem with musing about that is: Abandoning it is a very real possibility for people who don’t have the option to fly to another state or do X, Y and Z. So I suspect when they hear somebody of your status, even if it’s not the example you mean, putting it out in the air, they feel—and it’s not just that you’re putting it out in the air. You’re putting it out in the air and then saying: I don’t necessarily even mean that one.”

That’s exactly right: these aren’t abstract debates. We’re talking about real policies impacting real people, and Klein is a powerful player whose opinions will shape what those people’s lives look like. If he hasn’t been paying attention to abortion politics since the end of Roe, he shouldn’t be talking about abortion rights at all—let alone throwing them under the bus.

After Coates held his feet to the fire, Klein dug back in: “I will stand behind it...I am saying the thing it sounds like I’m saying.”

I hope he rethinks that. I hope he talks to some people—women, especially—who understand this issue and what’s at stake. Most of all, I hope Klein considers that if he wants to use abortion to build a ‘bigger tent’, the move isn’t to retreat. It’s to lean all the way forward.