Online, people predicted the 2024 US election would be Roevember.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center poll, 63% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, which is up four percentage points from 2021.

In another poll by Gallup, nearly a third of registered voters said they would “only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion”.

Abortion rights were central throughout the campaign. Many predicted it would mean huge numbers of women turned out in support of Kamala Harris and the Democrats.

That did not happen.

In fact, exit polling indicates that while women of colour overwhelmingly voted for Harris, a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump. This mirrors their electoral choices in 2016 and 2020.

Yet voters clearly were concerned about abortion.

Seven of the 10 state reproductive rights ballot initiatives passed, including in the swing state of Arizona. And while the Florida initiative was defeated, it still received a clear majority of the vote, while failing to reach the 60% supermajority required in that state.

This seeming anomaly may indicate that voters genuinely believe that after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and found there was not a constitutional right to abortion, the issue is now exclusively a state matter.

If so, they are in for a rude awakening.

Conservatives see the federal government as central in their fight against legal abortion.

So what might a Trump victory mean for abortion access in the US and beyond?

Early in the primaries, Trump claimed to be the “MOST pro-life President in history”, taking sole credit for the end of Roe v Wade.

Yet simultaneously, because abortion had become politically toxic for Republicans, Trump........

© The Conversation