While true, abortion is still, after 4 decades, the real 3rd rail in American politics. It, along with race, is the ever-present elephant in the room whenever we talk about U.S. national elections. Why do evangelicals reliably vote Republican? Because, for 40 years, they’ve been trying to alter the political composition of the Supreme Court in order to strike down Roe v Wade. And GOP strategists have, for 40 years, been promising them that. I grew up in that milieu; it really and truly is their principle political motivation, and is largely responsible for the current dysfunction of American politics. Without abortion, evangelicals would split like Catholics (i.e. you wouldn’t be able to statistically infer their political affiliation from their religious identification) and political pressure would probably have forced the GOP to be a fairly sane center-right party, kind of like the Democrats are now.
There is a thread for abortion debate, but it’s mostly non-contentious and not very active. I don’t think there’s any reasonable non-religious argument against early-term abortion, and @HighPlainsDrifter claimed to be able to offer one. I was intrigued by that, but ultimately not surprised that they couldn’t actually offer one nor explain how to resolve the moral conundrums that an absolutist anti-abortion position creates, which is part-and-parcel of the hoodwinking that the GOP has pulled over American voters’ eyes on this issue. It’s the GOP who convinced voters that the line should be drawn at conception, which is a completely unreasonable, extreme position. It’s why you now have Republican male politicians claiming that consensual rape doesn’t cause pregnancy. It’s why rapist Brett Kavanaugh is sitting on the Supreme Court. It’s why rapist Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office.
Democrats evince a wide spectrum of responses to the issue: from “should be allowed on demand without question” to “should be allowed, but with significant restriction.” They also support a wide variety of policies meant to mitigate the economic and social forces that lead to abortions. In our society all of that gets lumped under “pro-choice”, when in any rational society, we’d be able to talk about all of that as a wide spectrum of political options and moral beliefs.
Everything the candidates discuss on other issues is just waves on the surface of the wide ocean of abortion politics. Someone like @HighPlainsDrifter will never vote for a Democrat because of it, no matter how salutary every other policy the Democrat espouses might be to their values, no matter how despicable, corrupt and evil the opposing candidate is, even if policies espoused by the Democrat would result in fewer abortions. How do you fight that? You can’t. On that single issue, the GOP has won two generations of “conservative” voters and counting.