I’m looking at new apartments this week here in Portland, Oregon. It’s time for an upgrade.
This has triggered a debate I often have with myself: If I’m going to move, why not leave dysfunctional, far-left Portland altogether?
Had I become so comfortable with the bad vibes of Portland that I would stay here indefinitely, out of inertia or laziness or not wanting to start over?
This is my chance to move to a different city. Or another state. Somewhere with fewer drug addicts and criminals roaming the streets and fewer democratic socialists roaming city hall.
I grew up in Portland. I have lived here off and on throughout my life. During my most productive years as a writer, I lived in bigger, more media-oriented cities, mainly New York and Los Angeles.
But I’ve always loved coming back to Oregon and assumed I would settle here when I retire. Portland always felt like my place. I love the tall trees, the gentle rain, the misty Oregon coast.
Unfortunately, over the last 15 years, Portland has become a hotbed of radicalism and political intolerance. So much so that it has affected my daily life.
I’ve always socialized with creative types. But in Portland, the artistic community is often more hysterical than the violent protesters in the street.
Once it became known I was conservative, I lost about 80% of my writer friends. And maybe half of my other friends. This social exclusion was especially bad during the years around #MeToo, and then COVID, and of course the constant presence of Trump derangement syndrome.
The result is that living here has been like living on a desert island. I feel unwelcome at art events. I avoid literary parties and gallery openings.
One egregious example: I didn’t attend the celebration of life for one of my most important literary mentors, a beloved Portland poet who encouraged me as a young writer and helped advance my career.
I owed so much to this man, and I couldn’t go to his funeral!
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Recently, I saw a TikTok video by a woman whose family had moved from Seattle to Wyoming.
Her message was simple: “No matter how much you think you are aware of the bubble you live in, when you get out of these far-left cities, a whole new world opens up to you.”
This hit me hard. Had I become so comfortable with the bad vibes of Portland that I would stay here indefinitely, out of inertia or laziness or not wanting to start over?
One reason I’m reluctant to move to a red state is I’m not sure I would fit in.
Take for example, Boise, Idaho, the closest red city to Portland. I’ve visited there many times. It’s clean. There are no homeless. The people are super nice. It’s very “churchy” and family-oriented. There’s a large Mormon population.
But could I adapt to such a place? I’ve lived in liberal cities MY ENTIRE LIFE. I have never lived in a place like Boise. Would I find people who understand my sense of humor? People who like the obscure music I listen to? Or read the books I read?
Yes, the people of Boise would share my core values. But would they share my urban tastes?
I had a Republican friend here in Portland who moved to Florida during Trump’s first term. At the time, that seemed like a drastic change.
For a couple of years, I emailed him every few months to ask how he was doing. He had settled right in. Florida was great. He loved it there.
As he grew more comfortable in Florida, I grew less comfortable in Portland. Now, in 2026, moving to Florida 10 years ago seems like a genius move. I am humbled by his foresight.
So what should I do? Be the latecomer, arriving in Tampa or Austin or Nashville a decade after all the smart people already moved there?
I guess it’s never too late. I could still escape.
But what about the tall trees, the gentle rain, and the misty coastline I love so much? What about my roots in the place where I grew up?
Robert E. Lee didn’t abandon his home state of Virginia in the face of a civil war. But Virginia was famous for its proud history and strong cultural heritage.
I’m from Portland, famous for people with orange hair who don’t know what gender they are.
I’ve always assumed Portland’s current political extremism would fade over time. Sooner or later, people would calm down and return to some form of normalcy.
But whenever I try to connect with my former liberal friends, I quickly learn that the derangement is stronger than ever.
So, should I stay or should I go?
These are the decisions we have to make during these difficult times — as we struggle to maintain our sense of ourselves and of where we came from.
Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez (D) recently said the quiet part out loud: If Democrats regain power, they intend to “melt ICE” and “dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.”
Not reform. Not recalibrate. Dismantle.
At this point, no one should be surprised, but everyone should be paying attention.
The window for aligned federal action is limited, and states must be prepared to carry that work forward regardless of what happens in Washington.
Over the past several years, we have seen what a serious approach to border security can look like. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government has taken long overdue steps to restore enforcement at the border, disrupt cartel operations that extend into American communities, and reassert the basic principle that immigration law should be enforced.
But the job is nowhere near finished.
Cartel networks are still heavily embedded in trafficking routes, financial systems, and communities across the country. Interior enforcement remains inconsistent. Local and state cooperation is uneven at best. And despite real progress, the broader homeland defense framework is still fragile — dependent on political will, which can shift overnight.
That fragility is exactly what Ramirez’s comments expose. We are not debating hypotheticals; we are being explicitly told what will happen when the balance of power shifts.
The same agencies tasked with protecting the homeland would be targeted for dismantlement, the enforcement tools that have begun to regain ground would be stripped away, and the limited progress made in confronting transnational criminal networks would be reversed.
This threat is not just rhetoric from some far-left politician. Polling trends are already pointing toward a potential shift in power in the 2026 midterms. That means the window for aligned federal action is limited, and states must be prepared to carry that work forward regardless of what happens in Washington.
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Key legislation like the SAVE America Act remains stalled, and DHS is still not fully funded to meet the scale of the challenge, caught in the middle of ongoing congressional budget standoffs. Structural reforms that would lock in enforcement gains for the long-term have yet to materialize. In other words, even with unified control, the system is struggling to deliver the level of security the country requires.
So what happens when that control goes away? We don’t have to guess — we’ve been told.
Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D) has said that under Democratic control, officials carrying out deportations could face mass prosecutions, while taxpayers would be expected to fund reparations for the “trauma” inflicted on foreign nationals.
The largest deportation effort in American history would be halted. Federal enforcement would be curtailed. The focus of immigration policy would shift away from American communities and toward accommodating foreign nationals.
And once that signal is sent from Washington, it will cascade downward — into statehouses, city councils, and law enforcement agencies across America.
This fight cannot be viewed as strictly federal. As I’ve written before, it starts at home. It depends on governors willing to lead, legislatures willing to fund enforcement, and local law enforcement willing to uphold the law consistently and without apology.
Sheriffs, police chiefs, and county officials are not peripheral actors in this system; they are fundamental to whether it succeeds or fails.
That responsibility is especially urgent in red states. And right now, Texas has an opportunity to lead.
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The Texas Legislature has already laid the groundwork with its 2026 Interim Charges, taking on everything from hostile foreign networks operating inside our state to strengthening and equipping the new Texas Division of Homeland Security. But our interim work only matters if it turns into action.
As we head into the 90th Legislature, and while there is still alignment in the White House, Texas has an opportunity to go further — building a real, state-led homeland defense framework that doesn’t depend on shifting priorities in Washington. That means passing laws with teeth, funding enforcement, closing loopholes, and making it clear that in Texas, the rule of law is not optional.
Because when the political winds shift, and they always do, the difference between a secure nation and a vulnerable one will come down to what was built beforehand. The left’s intentions are no longer implied, they are explicit. The time for debate about what might happen is over. The only question now is whether we have the will to act before those promises become policy.
Fourteen months into Trump’s second term, the verdict is in. No mass deportations. No major immigration reform. And if Democrats return to power, they will rip the doors off the hinges again.
Trump did slow the flow and put a dent in some outdated visa programs. But the results remain too small relative to the scale of what came before him and what may come after him.
One day, red states will need to enact these deterrents. The only question is timing.
That leaves one durable partial solution: Use red-state supermajorities to deter illegal aliens from settling in those states when the next wave comes. States may lack the power to deport illegal aliens outright, but they can make daily life harder. They can deny jobs and benefits, impose criminal penalties, and create a lasting deterrent that survives any one presidency.
Ron DeSantis appears to understand this in Florida. Almost no other Republican governor does.
Idaho offers the clearest example of the problem. On paper, it looks like the kind of state where serious immigration enforcement should be easy. Republicans hold 61-9 and 29-6 majorities in the House and Senate. Conservatives gained ground in the House thanks to the Freedom Caucus. Yet when the time came to pass meaningful reforms, the GOP establishment folded.
The House moved several bills. The Senate is quietly killing them. Gov. Brad Little (R) remains publicly silent, apparently hoping the issue dies in committee while he cruises to re-election under Trump’s preemptive endorsement and keeps his donor class happy.
The bills now stalled in Idaho expose the fraud.
H704 would mandate E-Verify for all public and private employers and give the state attorney general real enforcement power. It passed the House 43-26 despite opposition from 17 Republicans. It now sits dead in the Senate State Affairs Committee under Chairman Jim Guthrie and Senate President Pro Tempore Kelly Anthon.
H700 would make it a misdemeanor knowingly to hire illegal aliens without using E-Verify. That bill is also dead in the Senate, and 22 House Republicans opposed it.
H659 would require all counties and cities to cooperate with ICE through 287(g) agreements. In a state with barely any elected Democrats, one might assume mandatory ICE cooperation would be the easiest of calls. Instead, the bill passed the House 41-27, with 18 lukewarm Republicans joining Democrats in opposition, and now sits dead in the Senate State Affairs Committee.
H660 would require police to inquire about immigration status after a lawful arrest and would mandate a twice-yearly report on crimes committed by illegal aliens. By definition, this involves people already suspected of some other offense. Even so, the bill passed only 40-30 and is now being blocked in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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H764 would create a state analogue to the federal statute that penalizes anyone who knowingly or recklessly conceals, harbors, transports, or materially assists illegal aliens. It includes misdemeanor and felony penalties, license revocations, and forfeiture provisions. In other words, it would build precisely the kind of standing deterrent red states will need when Democrats reopen the border. It has not even advanced out of committee.
S1318 would audit refugee-resettlement contractors in Idaho, including the number of refugees served, their demographic and language data, participation in language programs, housing use, geographic distribution, and relevant public-health statistics. It would also require disclosure if those entities aided illegal aliens. It remains blocked in the Senate State Affairs Committee.
H592 would require the state to track how many illegal aliens receive hospital services and how much that costs taxpayers. It would not deny care. It would merely quantify the burden. A similar law in Florida led to a drop in illegal-alien use of the health care system. Idaho’s bill has not moved.
H656 would do the same basic thing in schools by auditing the number of illegal aliens enrolled. It has gone nowhere.
How does this happen in a state so red? The answer is simple: Many Republican officials remain functionally progressive on immigration.
Little is deeply unpopular with the grassroots, but he neutralized the threat of a primary by securing Trump’s endorsement. Everyone knows he opposes these bills. He simply does not want to say so out loud. Better to let them die quietly in committee than risk angering the base or the business interests that still demand cheap labor.
Call it political Murphy’s law. DeSantis is term-limited in Florida. Brad Little gets a third term.
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Even Florida has not gone far enough. It already has E-Verify, but lawmakers failed to remove the 25-employee exception. Similar attempts to strengthen E-Verify have failed in West Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, all solidly red states.
A few bright spots remain.
Tennessee may pass some worthwhile bills, though lawmakers gutted legislation to charge illegal aliens tuition. Arizona’s legislature is close to passing SB 1421, which would bar illegal aliens from opening bank accounts, cashing checks, or obtaining loans by prohibiting financial institutions from accepting foreign ID cards or ITINs as sole identification. It would make life in the United States much harder without legal status. The bill passed the Senate and awaits a House vote. Unfortunately, Arizona has a Democrat governor who will likely veto it.
That only raises the harder question: Why is this not already law in the 22 Republican trifecta states?
The same problem appears in commercial trucking. Amid the rash of crashes involving illegal-alien drivers, very few states have acted seriously. Oklahoma alone passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to reciprocate out-of-state commercial driver’s licenses. Florida appears to be the one state seriously enforcing the English-language requirement and checking for illegal aliens at truck stops.
Iowa let a bill die in committee that would have required driver’s license exams to be administered only in English. Indiana passed an English-only testing bill, but still failed to address out-of-state CDLs, even after two illegal aliens killed Indiana residents in separate incidents in less than two weeks in February.
One day, red states will need to enact these deterrents. The only question is timing. Will Republicans build them now, during the lull, or will they wait until hundreds of thousands of new invaders flood back in under a future President Gavin Newsom?
That choice will tell us whether Republicans ever meant a word they said about immigration.
Half a century after the book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” sounded an alarm about the rise of illiteracy in the U.S., the problem has only gotten worse. A quarter of all young adults, many of them high-school graduates, are now functionally illiterate. Unable to read more than basic, short sentences, their prospects in today’s information economy are bleak.
This crisis gave rise to a movement that embraced the science of reading and produced a surprising success story in the Deep South, a region dogged by the highest rates of childhood illiteracy in the nation. State leaders and education reformers in Mississippi and Louisiana led a remarkable improvement in elementary reading scores that now rank among the highest in the nation.
Advocates estimate that about half of the state’s districts are experimenting with or rolling out higher-quality curricula.
The turnaround was a long slog, requiring a heavy hand from the state to win buy-in for a wholesale transformation of curricula, teaching methods, accountability, and more. Former state education chief Carey Wright called it the “Mississippi Marathon.” One of the biggest questions in public education now is whether the southern surge can spread nationwide, turning millions of struggling students into proficient readers with a brighter future.
But such a top-down approach is running into resistance, particularly in blue states like New York and Illinois, where strong teachers’ unions have fought to preserve local control over schools. And nowhere is the political battle over who runs the classroom more pronounced than in Massachusetts, which has long boasted the nation’s best public schools.
Massachusetts’ governor is expected to sign a literacy bill in the coming months, making it one of about a dozen states to mandate adoption of curricula based on the science of reading in elementary grades. Laws in another 30 states merely encourage its use. Although these laws suggest a big step forward for the nation, Massachusetts illustrates the challenges ahead in some states — many of the educators responsible for implementing the mandated reforms see them as an affront to local control of classrooms.
The influential Massachusetts Teachers Association led the campaign against the legislation, suffering a rare defeat at the statehouse. At least 300 superintendents, principals, and teachers in about 40 Massachusetts districts also signed a letter opposing the mandate, arguing that local educators know what’s best for students.
The pushback in Massachusetts raises concerns among advocates about whether the reforms, especially the evidence-based curriculum and teacher training, will be fully implemented across the state. ExcelinEd, an advocacy group chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), has identified many science-of-reading policies, big and small, that have helped states boost literacy rates. The group’s research found that the difference between states with the biggest reading gains and those that floundered boils down to how thoroughly they implemented most of the reforms.
“We know what works, and we have state exemplars like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida that have actually done it,” said ExcelinEd senior policy fellow Christy Hovanetz. “So unless more states are willing to do the hard work, we’re not going to see improved outcomes for our kids. And that severely impacts our economic prosperity and future. So yes, I’m concerned.”
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In the United States, most school districts call the shots regarding the curriculum — the crucial teaching materials that determine how kids are taught. Although research shows that the quality of curricula makes a big difference in whether Johnny and Jill learn to read, this area of public education remains largely unregulated by most states, leaving 13,000 districts to pick instructional materials based on convenience, corporate marketing, or price. And nobody knows what curricula most districts use since only six states require such disclosure, according to Karen Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project.
Science-of-reading advocates say local control over curricula isn’t working. Consider fourth-graders, about the age when children's reading skills strongly predict their future academic success or failure. In 2024, 40% of fourth-graders across the nation scored below the basic level, up from 34% in 2019 and nearly matching levels in 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard in testing. These students have trouble reading aloud, recognizing and decoding many grade-level words, and thus comprehending the meaning of text. They will struggle in all their classes through high school if they aren’t reading well in elementary school.
States like Massachusetts are responding with mandates that require districts to pick from a menu of approved curricula backed by research showing their effectiveness. The Massachusetts Teachers Association doesn’t dispute that there’s a literacy crisis. But the union opposed the mandate, casting it as a form of government overreach in complex curricular matters best left to trained educators.
“Our members have opposed legislated curriculum mandates for literacy education because they know losing flexibility to do their jobs and restricting their professional judgment inevitably means some students will continue to struggle with learning to read and write,” MTA President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy said in a statement to RealClearInvestigations. “The law in Massachusetts will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, and that money would be better spent on hiring staff and increasing professional development opportunities for educators.”
The union says it supports the voluntary adoption of evidence-based curricula by districts, which has been spurred on by grants from programs like Literacy Launch. Advocates estimate that about half of the state’s districts are experimenting with or rolling out higher-quality curricula. The other half are still using less effective instructional materials, including Lucy Calkins' popular Units of Study, which is based on the principles of a teaching strategy called Balanced Literacy.
Balanced Literacy emerged during the “reading wars” of the 1990s in an attempt to address the nation’s literacy decline. At the time, the prominent approach to instruction, called Whole Language, required students to learn words and sentences by looking at simple picture books as they were read aloud and, if needed, guess at pronunciation and meaning by the story’s context and images. Experts hoped that this loosely structured method would inspire a love of reading.
While it worked for some students, critics said the lack of any explicit instruction in methods to decode words left many students struggling. Balanced Literacy came about as a compromise, adding a dash of phonics to help these students sound out words while keeping the fundamentals of the Whole Language strategy.
States with new literacy laws are not all doing a good job of vetting curricula to ensure they give districts the strongest options.
De’Shawn Washington, winner of the 2024 Teacher of the Year award in Massachusetts, saw the damage Balanced Literacy’s Units of Study did to his elementary students. In his Boston and Lexington classrooms, students who were already proficient readers advanced at a fast clip. But most students, who were one or two grade levels behind because they didn’t have exposure to reading at home or suffered from a disability, learned at a much slower pace, if at all. A few of his third-graders were unable to read books for kindergarteners or write their names. Washington did his best to supplement Units of Study with more phonics, but it wasn’t much help.
“The struggling readers tended to get left behind, and the disparity between them and the proficient readers widened,” said Washington, whose experience turned him into an advocate of Massachusetts’ mandate.
Calkins, a professor at Columbia, has publicly acknowledged her curriculum’s shortcomings. Yet Units of Study remains entrenched in more than two dozen Massachusetts districts, which are part of the “widespread” resistance to literacy reforms, including in Boston Public Schools, says Darci Burns, executive director of HILL for Literacy, which trains Massachusetts teachers in evidence-based literacy practices.
Burns says many of the gatekeepers of instructional materials, such as assistant superintendents and directors of curriculum, were trained to use Balanced Literacy and remain wedded to it like a religion. Teachers like its unscripted approach, giving them more freedom. Burns predicts they will try to skirt the mandate rather than support it.
“These districts might adopt a reading program that’s the most aligned with Balanced Literacy,” Burns told RCI. “And then they’ll go through the motions, but they won’t really do it.”
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In 2000, a National Reading Panel of top experts was set up to distill what several hundred gold-standard studies revealed about literacy instruction. Although the panel didn’t explicitly reject Balanced Literacy, it found that a more structured approach to instruction in five areas was the most effective: phonemic awareness (learning word sounds), phonics (matching sounds to letters), fluency (reading aloud), vocabulary (learning word meanings), and comprehension (gleaning the meaning of text).
The science-of-reading movement was built on these five pillars, with Massachusetts and other states incorporating them into legislation. Although more recent research has brought new insights — leading scholar Louisa Moats says language skills need much more emphasis in the five pillars — they remain the best approach to improved literacy.
Yet two decades after the panel’s findings, most universities still haven’t read the memo. Signaling the challenges of wholesale reform, only a quarter of teacher preparation programs cover all five pillars, denying most instructors the training they need to be effective.
This leaves educators in an unusual position — unlike most professionals, they are not trained in, and sometimes reject, the best practices of their trade. It’s another knock on the relevance of higher education that Massachusetts and other states are now addressing by requiring teacher preparation to include the five pillars.
“Most teachers don’t know the science of reading — that the point of phonemic awareness is to facilitate word recognition with an alphabetic writing system, or that the primary comprehension enabler is vocabulary,” said Moats. “I don’t want my grandkids in a classroom where the teacher has the autonomy to do whatever the hell she wants, because I have seen the results of that.”
The five pillars may be on solid footing, but the curricula based on them are a work in progress. Some are comprehensive, others are too narrowly focused on the foundational skills like phonics and don’t include enough reading and writing; some don’t focus enough on building students’ knowledge about subjects like history and science, which is key to reading comprehension; some haven’t been around long enough to have a proven track record.
States with new literacy laws are not all doing a good job of vetting curricula to ensure they give districts the strongest options, says Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project. The varying quality of curricula has given ammunition to critics of mandates, such as Superintendent Julie Hackett, whose affluent Lexington district in Massachusetts uses Units of Study.
Southern states found that a new curriculum isn’t worth much unless teachers are trained to master it.
“We’ve done some looking into results around districts that have adopted new curricula, and we are not seeing the results that would necessarily justify” spending up to $1 million to buy new instructional materials, Hackett said at an MTA event.
Vaites wrote that Hackett’s concerns are overblown. Although Massachusetts’ current list isn’t perfect, it does offer comprehensive programs covering the five pillars, with an emphasis on reading books and building knowledge.
“Most of the curricula on Massachusetts’ list are pretty good, and now with the mandate, most people think that state leaders are savvy enough to make it even better,” Vaites told RCI.
Southern states found that a new curriculum isn’t worth much unless teachers are trained to master it. Washington, the former teacher, says adopting a new curriculum is a lot of work, and classes and coaching give teachers more confidence about handling such a big transition.
“The training shifts the conversation away from resistance because teachers realize they are not going into this new situation blind and that there’s a big investment being made to improve the profession,” Washington said.
The bills in Massachusetts offer training to all teachers rather than requiring it, as 18 other states, including Louisiana, have done, according to ExcelinEd’s literacy policy tracker. If that’s a concession to opponents, so is the decision by Massachusetts lawmakers not to adopt another reform that has proven effective in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states: retaining third-graders who can’t read at or near grade level from promotion.
It’s a highly controversial policy that parents almost always oppose, despite the long-term literacy benefits, according to a study of Mississippi that found retention “led to substantially higher ELA scores in sixth grade.”
In all, ExcelinEd has identified 18 reforms, including dyslexia screening and parental notification of reading problems, that the most successful states have implemented. Given the heavy lift, it’s not surprising that some states have stumbled.
Of the 15 states that had adopted most of the 18 policies by 2019, 10 outpaced the national average in fourth-grade NAEP reading scores by 2024, with Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina far out in front, according to Hovanetz, the policy fellow. These 10 states illustrate the effectiveness of the reforms.
But test scores in four of the 15 states declined more than the nation’s did, and Michigan tied, showing the difficulty of implementing the reforms. Among the backsliding states, Hovanetz says, New Mexico didn’t train and deploy all of its reading coaches, and Oklahoma and North Carolina ended their third-grade retention policy.
“States get a whole bunch of constituent calls saying, ‘It’s not fair you’re retaining my kid.’ Then they back off of the policy and lose any momentum that they had gained,” says Hovanetz, a former Florida education official.
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Minnesota illustrates how things can go wrong when districts are encouraged, rather than mandated, to adopt evidence-based curricula and teacher training.
“Some teachers took the training. Not everyone did, and when they went back to their schools, teachers didn’t have the instructional materials to support what they learned in training, and they might not have had a leader at the school to support them,” Hovanetz said. “So Minnesota probably wasted a whole lot of money.”
A number of other states haven’t bothered to pass meaningful science-of-reading laws. They include liberal states like Washington and Illinois and more conservative states like Montana and Maine.
In Massachusetts, a conference committee is reconciling the two bills, with the rollout of reforms set for 2027. The Senate bill requires districts to regularly assess K-3 students’ reading abilities and create improvement plans for those who score significantly below grade level. It’s a measure of accountability that advocates hope will produce positive results in a state that’s moving backwards in literacy on the NAEP test.
In another concession to opponents of the mandate, lawmakers gave districts a narrow escape hatch. They can apply for a waiver from the mandate if their alternative curriculum is backed by research evidence. While the waiver could open the door to the adoption of Calkins' revised Units of Study, it will have to pass muster with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Mary Tamer, who convened the Mass Reads coalition of 40 education groups to support the legislation she helped write, is bullish about adopting reforms. Despite the opposition, she says the political momentum, underscored by the unanimous votes for the literacy bills in both the House and Senate, is strong enough to compel most districts to buy in.
“Our expectation is that districts will move toward evidence-based instruction as quickly as they can because it’s proven to teach children how to read,” she said. “And that is our goal here.”
Editor's note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Many conservatives still treat the fall of Roe v. Wade as a decisive victory. The four years since have looked more like a warning.
States passed more pro-life laws. Abortion numbers still climbed as chemical abortions expanded. Republicans hold Congress and the White House, yet their best legislative win amounted to defunding Planned Parenthood for a single year — while Washington toys with expanding IVF mandates and even hints at becoming more “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment.
When the pro-life movement treats its own argument as too radioactive to say plainly, moderates still aren’t convinced — and the base stops listening.
The biggest losses didn’t come from legislatures. They came from voters.
Across the country, abortion-rights activists have used ballot initiatives to write a “right to abortion” into state constitutions. Once voters approve those amendments, courts use them to bulldoze state pro-life laws. The trend will continue unless the anti-abortion movement rethinks its messaging — fast.
Blue states predictably enshrined abortion rights. Red and purple states did too. Voters in Missouri, Montana, and Arizona backed abortion amendments. Colorado, New York, and Maryland did as well.
In 2024, abortion ballot measures passed in seven states and failed in three. Florida stopped an amendment only because state law requires a 60% supermajority. Nebraska rejected one by 51%. South Dakota defeated its measure with 59%. All three states backed President Donald Trump by larger margins than that.
Another wave of initiatives is coming this year. Nevada voters will decide whether to provide the second affirmative vote needed to add an abortion amendment they approved in 2024. Virginia, where Democrats control state government, will vote on an abortion amendment as well. Idaho voters may consider an abortion statute that lawmakers can later amend or repeal. Arkansas could vote on a measure to make the state constitution easier to amend, which would almost certainly tee up an abortion amendment fight soon after.
The pro-life movement keeps walking into these battles with a losing playbook.
Many pro-life groups center their messaging on women who get abortions rather than the babies murdered by abortion. They assume the issue primarily drives Democratic turnout. They want to “compete” by shifting to softer language about women’s health, hoping to win moderates on neutral ground.
That approach doesn’t persuade moderates, and it often fails to mobilize the pro-life base.
Take Arizona. The pro-life coalition opposing Proposition 139 called itself “It Goes Too Far.” One of its yard signs read: “Protect Women’s Health.” It didn’t even mention abortion.
Arizona voters re-elected Trump with 52% of the vote. They also approved Proposition 139 with nearly 62%. That’s the same margin New York voters gave their own abortion amendment.
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Ohio followed the same pattern. Pro-life groups launched “Protect Women Ohio” to oppose Issue 1, which passed with nearly 57% of the vote in 2023. The messaging leaned on parental rights and transgender issues — as if linking Issue 1 to other debates would broaden the opposition.
Instead, the coalition blurred the point. Issue 1 appeared in an off-year election, one year after Roe fell. Progressive voters turned out. Conservatives stayed home.
Afterward, activists who knocked doors against Issue 1 told the same story: Pro-life voters felt confused. The campaign avoided the central issue, then wondered why the people most likely to vote against abortion never felt compelled to show up.
Abortion amendments raise other policy questions. They touch parental consent, conscience protections, and medical regulation. But the core reason to oppose them remains simple: Abortion murders babies. Pro-life messaging that refuses to say that out loud shouldn’t expect to win.
A blunt moral argument does two things that “women’s health” slogans don’t. It keeps the debate centered on what abortion is. It also activates the voters needed to defeat these measures — voters who will turn out when they understand their ballot could save lives.
Conservatives face a familiar temptation in a culture that punishes conviction: soften the message for short-term gains. Electoral politics requires prudence. It doesn’t require self-censorship. When the pro-life movement treats its own argument as too radioactive to say plainly, moderates still aren’t convinced — and the base stops listening.
If Republicans want to win ballot fights and build lasting cultural renewal, they need to speak with moral clarity. Until they do, they’ll keep losing these amendments — and babies will keep dying because of it.
Hundreds of billions spent nationwide on homeless services have only resulted in more homelessness. Councilman Russ Jehl says Fort Wayne should try a third option besides doing nothing or enabling addicts.
If Republicans can't find it within themselves to step up, then they should get out of office and make room for people who will.
Lawmakers focused on their reelection in a few months or years care little about whether the United States faces economic stagnation decades from now.
'The bureaucratic control that the left has is a huge problem ... and so we're trying to give [the conservative movement] a laser-focused strategy for [combatting] this,' SLI Founder Noah Wall told The Federalist.
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