Women powered Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Will they again in 2022?

ARVADA, Colo. — Not long after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion, Robin Kupernik and Elizabeta Stacishin met for lunch and then went for a walk through the Denver Botanic Gardens. “We were both angry,” Kupernik later recalled. “We both said at the same time, ‘This is not about babies, this is about keeping women down.’”

Kupernik, 57, and Stacishin, 53, were spurred to political activism by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But for much of this year, they had been sensing a lack of energy on the left — an absence of the kind of commitment on the part of voters like themselves who had propelled Democrats to victories in 2018 and 2020. Then came the June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Both women said the abortion case persuaded them to redouble their efforts for the 2022 campaign.

“I really didn’t see, you know, a very positive path forward … ,” Stacishin said over coffee in this suburb northwest of downtown Denver. “People have protested so many times and so many different things, it’s not even that meaningful anymore. But I think that everyone is feeling in their bones, especially women, the insult and indignity of what the Supreme Court has done. … And that is in no small part why I am working as hard as I’m working for the midterms right now.”

Stacishin and Kupernik pointed not only to the Supreme Court decision but also to the overwhelming voter turnout in Kansas in August to keep abortion rights as part of the state constitution. They also mentioned summer legislative victories recorded by President Biden and the Democrats in Congress, including the big package focused on climate change, health care and taxes.

“I haven’t felt this good in a long time,” Stacishin said. “I feel lighter. I feel happier.”

In the 2018 midterm elections, women like Kupernik and Stacishin were part of a women-led army that changed politics. Women who had never been particularly active politically worked phone banks, wrote postcards and sent text messages to voters. They were repulsed by Trump and determined to do something about it.

They met in small groups, marched in the streets and went door-to-door to encourage people to vote for Democrats. Their passions were palpable. Many of the congressional candidates they were supporting flipped Republican-held seats, all part of a political tide strong enough to flush the GOP from control of the House, dealing Trump a major defeat. The Pew Research Center has estimated that 62 percent of White women with college degrees backed Democrats for the House four years ago.

For much of this year, the political dynamics appeared to be the reverse of 2018 — a rebellion against Biden poised to eliminate Democrats’ slim majorities in the Senate and House. History alone suggested that. But the crosscurrents are more varied than they were four years ago. Earlier predictions of sweeping Republican gains have been tempered by the changing political climate, thanks in large part to the Dobbs decision, though the GOP remains favored to take control of the House. In the final weeks, with concerns about the economy still dominant, elections could turn on how much sustaining energy the Dobbs decision provides for Democrats or whether it fades in the face of bread-and-butter concerns.

Biden’s approval ratings remain well below 50 percent, though his average rating is not as low as it was a few months ago. Inflation continues at decades-high levels. Crime in major cities and some suburban areas is up. The influx of undocumented immigrants gnaws at many voters. All that continues to push toward Republican victories.

But the midterms are shaping up to be more than just a referendum on the president. Trump remains a central, and polarizing, figure at center stage. He continues to claim falsely the 2020 election was stolen and has remained in the news because of investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his handling of classified documents. He maintains a tight grip on the GOP base and, as election deniers have won many GOP primaries this year, this Trumpian Republican Party is seen by many voters as a growing threat.

That the 2022 election comes with high stakes goes without saying. A Republican takeover of the House, the Senate or both would blunt the president’s agenda for his next two years in office while challenging the GOP to put forth a governing agenda. The November election is also a prelude to what now looks to be a combustible election in 2024, one that could produce a rematch between Biden and Trump — and that looms as a potentially more decisive moment, not only for the nation but also for some of the women interviewed for this story and their families.

In conversations, what comes through from people of different ideologies and different parties is a general sense of powerlessness. For Republicans, it’s seeing Washington in the hands of the Democrats and fearing for the direction of the country. For Democrats, it is threats posed by a Supreme Court that took away a constitutional right and the fear that the loss of control of the House or Senate would stymie any further progress on their agenda.

No single group of voters holds the key to the midterm elections, but both parties see the following demographic blocs as critical.

In the coming weeks, The Washington Post will be looking at some of the voters who will decide the fate of the next Congress, and assessing whether Democrats can maintain the coalition that propelled them to victories in 2018 and 2020. This “Deciders” series begins with a look from Colorado and how some women in Denver and its suburbs view the country, the issues, their families and themselves.

Colorado’s suburbs have been vibrant with political activity for years as the state has trended blue. In 2018, The Post wrote about women here and in other suburban areas who were mobilizing to deal Trump a defeat in those midterms. This story includes interviews with some of those same women, with their perspectives affected by four more years of political upheaval, along with others with their own viewpoints relevant to this year’s midterm campaigns.

In 2018, the political dynamics were clear. As Kupernik said, “It was such a strong shock to the country to have a person like Trump win the election. And so the backlash against that was so aligned and unified and obvious.” Now, four years later, this election year has become more difficult to read, even if historical patterns say the Republicans start with many advantages.

With so much swirling, Democrats are braced for losing control of the House and nervous about the Senate. But Republicans know they could end up disappointed with results that fall short of what they once thought likely.

In most polls, inflation tops the list of concerns to voters. Recent economic data, which showed continued high levels of inflation, will keep it there. Nearly every household is grappling with higher costs.

But in conversations, the issue of inflation doesn’t always translate immediately to the political advantage or disadvantage of one party or the other. Some women reflexively blame Biden; others see the problem as more complex, caused by global economic disruptions from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. In contrast, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision is, for many, more visceral. Democrats believe that difference might be enough for the party to hold down expected losses in the House and maintain their Senate majority. The issue is whether Republican advertising in the final weeks and more bad economic news will override the initial energizing effects from the Dobbs decision.

One afternoon in the Denver suburb of Littleton, Katie Skinner, Corie Detwiler and Nikki Carpenter were talking politics in a study room at the Columbine Public Library. Skinner, 41, and Detwiler, 34, are married and mothers of two young children; their oldest share a kindergarten class. Skinner works as a hair salon sales professional, while Detwiler is in health care. Carpenter, 37, is not married and works as marketing director for a home builder.

When talk turned to the Supreme Court, the tone grew more animated. None of the three disguised their anger or disappointment with the court. To them, what the justices in the conservative majority did was personal. “I think it’s just none of anybody’s business,” Skinner said. “It should be private between a person with a uterus and their doctor and/or their partner to make those decisions.”

Katie Skinner, clockwise from top, plays with her son and daughter before dinner, hangs out with her children and husband, Matt Skinner, on the couch and works on an art project with her children.

Carpenter followed, saying she was in tears when she heard about the Dobbs ruling. “To me, it’s so much more than just the abortion,” she said. “I mean, I’m not valued as a human anymore, like I don’t own my uterus.”

Detwiler works part-time as a physician assistant at an urgent-care facility. She said she worries about women in states with especially restrictive laws, like Oklahoma, where she lived and worked previously. She cited the example of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, who without restrictive laws could be treated simply and effectively, but who now faces potential delays and complications as doctors weigh with lawyers what they are allowed to do.

“We’re going to let her go from perfectly functioning, could take some medicine, walk out, go home, be okay, to now we’re going to wait until she’s had a ruptured fallopian tube and has bleeding into her abdominal cavity and is going to need ICU care to actually intervene,” Detwiler said. “It’s creating these dangerous health outcomes.”

The Kansas vote highlighted the potential power of the abortion issue to motivate voters, though comparisons between how people respond to ballot initiatives vs. a partisan choice between two candidates are imperfect. Kansas saw a surge in registration among women after the Dobbs decision, on top of an already-robust organizing effort by a broad coalition that sought to reach beyond partisan lines to defeat the referendum.

Clockwise from top: Corie Detwiler, right, picks up her daughter Avery, 5, from school and is joined by Skinner, left, who also has a child at the school. Detwiler breastfeeds her 1-year-old son Elliot while petting her dog Gus. Detwiler plays with her children in their Littleton home.

Ashley All, who was a leader in Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, said the Dobbs decision acted as a wake-up call for many moderate voters. “We saw a significant increase in our volunteer engagement,” she said. “We went from averaging about 50 volunteers a week to over 500 after that decision” in metropolitan counties where her group was concentrating. Other volunteer action was taking place throughout the state.

Other states have seen a gender gap in post-Dobbs voter registration. But some experts say the registration gains among Democrats are at the margins, while others are cautious about predicting abortion’s ultimate impact in November.

“Maybe someone else will give you the quote of, like, ‘Dobbs is going to be decisive in November 2022, but I’m not optimistic enough to do it,” said Jennifer M. Piscopo, chair of the department of politics at Occidental College.

Women will influence the November elections in two ways. One is how they vote: for Republicans or Democrats. The other is how many will vote. The combination of the two will shape the outcome.

Republicans hope to move some White suburban women who supported Democrats in 2018 and 2020 back to their column. Democrats hope to prevent that from happening. But Democrats also need sizable participation by the women who powered them to victory in 2018, a year when turnout for a midterm election was the highest in a century.

The challenges for Democrats are evident in the views of two women in Colorado, roughly the same age, each with three children, who describe themselves as moderate. One is a registered Republican who says the country is crumbling. The other is registered as a Democrat but sees herself more as an independent and isn’t sure this election will change much either way.

The former, Julianna Dixon, goes by her childhood nickname of “Boo.” She is a founder of Ladies For Liberty, a network for women. She lives in Denver, is 36, and her children are 7, 5 and 2½. The issues motivating her are the same as those that Republican candidates are trumpeting. “Crime rates, cost of living, education and immigration are all on the top of Mount Rushmore,” she said.

On education, she sees serious problems in the quality of teaching and the performance of schoolchildren. Asked how students should be taught the history of race and racism in America, Dixon said history can sometimes make people uncomfortable and that is okay, but she also has reservations about instruction that she said is putting children into categories based on race. “Because of your race, you are now a suppressor, because of what happened decades ago; or because of your race, you are now at a disadvantage, and you need to be aware of that,” she said. “That inhibits their abilities and kind of dampens their light.”

On the issue of abortion, Dixon said she is “pro-life with exceptions” and knows that the Supreme Court “kicked the hornet’s nest,” but argues there are bigger problems facing the country right now.

Dixon said she voted twice for Trump, and while there were “sketchy” aspects to the 2020 election, she accepts the outcome. “How much energy, how [much] taxpayers’ money, how many lawyers do we need to keep going into the past when again, [problems with] immigration, cost of living, crime, education, all these things are really, really detrimental to our country and they’re happening at an exponential rate?” she asked.

As she looks to November, Dixon has judged Biden to be “the worst president in my lifetime, if not in history.” Republican victories in the midterms, she said, “would definitely bring some much-needed balance that is lacking right now.” Pointing to Glenn Youngkin’s victory as a Republican in the Virginia governor’s race last year, she said she sees similar stirrings among the women she knows. “I feel like politics is the Wild West right now,” she said. “Energy is through the roof, and the mama bears are climbing out of the cave.”

By that, she meant that the shifts among suburban voters that affected the Virginia race could materialize nationally in November to the advantage of Republicans.

Dixon’s characterization of the “mama bears” is one reason Democrats remain in a challenging position. The mobilization of White suburban Republican and independent women who may be worried about the cost of living, school decisions or rising crime could more than neutralize the impact of those who are mobilizing over abortion.

The other Colorado woman is Jenny Rementer, 38, the mother of children ages 5, 3 and 6 months. She lives in Highlands Ranch, a Republican-leaning suburb south of Denver. Her parents emigrated from South Korea. She said she voted for Biden “because I think Trump is not a good person. It had nothing to do with politics.”

Rementer said she is not particularly active in politics. She does not see the November election as an inflection point for the country, nor does she think it will have great consequences for her family. “My life does not change very much based on who’s president or who’s in Congress,” she said.

Asked what issues she sees as most important, Rementer responded, “Inflation’s huge, right? I think we talk about that every day. A trip to the grocery store used to be between, like, $100 and $150 because my kids are little. Now it’s like $200 to $250.”

Still, she is reluctant to pin the blame on the administration. “I’m on a text chain with a bunch of moms, and somebody was like, ‘Thanks, Biden.’ And my husband and I joke about it, but I personally think that it’s probably as a result of a lot of things,” she said. “I don’t know that any one person has that much power in such a short period of time to make such an impact on the economy.”

Rementer said Democrats spent freely to help boost the economy during the pandemic and said she believes that has contributed to distortions in the labor market. She and her husband are searching for an au pair because the cost of a nanny has skyrocketed. “People are demanding outrageous amounts,” she said. “It was never this bad before, and this all kind of started with the stimulus payments.”

When Rementer talked about immigration, as the daughter of immigrants, she focused first on the controversial separation of families that took place during the Trump administration. She called Trump’s effort to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border “the dumbest waste of money.” But having seen refugee issues up close in the Denver area as part of her work in health care, she said she wonders whether cities and states can manage. “It takes a lot of resources,” she said, “and I just I don’t know if we have that infrastructure to take in all that. … Do I think about it every day? No.”

Asked how she views the choice in this election, she replied, “I’m always a huge supporter of split power. I don’t like it when one side or the other has too much control over stuff.” But she also isn’t sure she wants Republicans in control of the House or Senate. She has concerns about what Trump has done to the party. “He has kind of made it acceptable for people to be so open about how terrible they are,” she said.

Four women were seated together at a Starbucks in Arvada one afternoon in August. They are old enough to remember a time before 1973, before the Supreme Court legalized abortion with its Roe v. Wade decision. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, they decided to do what they can to mobilize other women to vote in November. They call themselves Women Organizing for Women — “WOW” for short.

“We’ve got to do something besides talk about it,” said Cheryl Fay, as she and the others worked on a mission statement for their group.

A few weeks later, more than four dozen women were gathered for lunch at a restaurant in Lone Tree, Colo., south of Denver. Their organization, Ladies for Liberty, and the concerns motivating them were entirely different from the earlier discussion in Arvada. The luncheon speakers included Molly Lamar, a Republican and mother of four children who is running for the state school board. “All of us are facing so many of the same issues,” she said, “whether it’s aging parents, prices at the gas pump, prices at the grocery store, and now additionally, we have the burden of knowing that our education system is not serving our children. Parents really need to have a voice. We’re being dismissed. We’re being locked out.”

Scholars who have studied the voting patterns of women say there is no such thing as the women’s vote. “In the same way that we don’t assume men vote as a bloc, we shouldn’t assume women do that,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University and research director at the school’s Center for American Women and Politics.

Still, as she noted, there are differences between the voting patterns of men and women, some of which have become more pronounced in recent decades. For many years after American women earned the right to vote in 1920, men were more likely to cast ballots. Over time, however, the gap reversed itself.

“The story of turnout for women is one of constant advance,” said Christina Wolbrecht, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Beginning in 1980, women become more likely to turn out to vote than are men, and that remains true.”

In 2020, for example, 68.4 percent of eligible women cast votes compared with 65 percent of eligible men. In raw numbers, 82.2 million women voted in the presidential election compared with 72.5 million men. This pattern cuts across all races, whether White, Latino, Asian American or Black. The biggest disparity is between Black women and Black men. In 2020, for example, that gap was eight percentage points.

Over the past three decades or so, another change has taken hold: Women as a group now vote more Democratic than Republican. That wasn’t always the case. Around 6 in 10 women supported Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and for all the talk about the charm of Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960, a bare majority of women supported Republican Richard M. Nixon.

But while White women vote more Democratic than do White men, as a group they tilt to Republicans. In 2016 and 2020, Trump won 52 percent and 55 percent of White women respectively, according to exit polls.

“Gender gap” is a phrase that came fully into the political lexicon in the 1980s. The original gender gap, however, was not the result of what women did; it came about because White ethnic males were leaving the Democratic Party.

Jane Junn, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, said that the gender gap “is being pushed by women of color being super Democratic. … White women haver never been Democrats.” In 2016, 94 percent of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, 90 percent of Black women backed Biden. Nearly 7 in 10 Latino women backed Clinton and Biden.

Top: Norma McGraw, left, and Ruth Edmonson walk through a neighborhood in Broomfield, a suburb north of Denver. Bottom left: McGraw and Edmonson stop to talk to local residents.

Suburban women have been given various labels over the years and have drawn the interest of campaign strategists because they are seen as swing voters (though some scholars question whether they are). At one point, these suburban voters were called “soccer moms,” at another, “security moms.” But the recent focus on women owes largely to the divergence in partisan support between White women with college degrees and White women who do not have college degrees.

In recent elections, college-educated White women moved toward the Democrats; White women without college degrees, who make up a larger share of the electorate than those with degrees, moved toward the GOP. In 2014, 47 percent of White women with college degrees voted Democratic, according to calculations by Catalist, a Democrat-aligned data firm; by 2018, 57 percent backed Democrats.

White college-educated women have been described as a core part of the Democratic coalition, based on this shift. But the question of whether there will be movement back toward Republicans in November is of prime interest to campaign strategists.

Democratic worries about that possibility have been heightened by what happened last year in Virginia. One of the factors in Youngkin’s victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe was a shift toward the GOP among suburban voters. Suburban women, who had broken strongly for Biden in 2020, swung back toward Youngkin, according to exit polls.

Kristin Davison, who was a lead consultant in Youngkin’s campaign, said Republicans have strong issues working in their favor that she contends will prove more powerful than abortion.

“We’re at a point, I think, given where the economy is and, really, a void of leadership at the top, where these household, kitchen-table issues [are] bringing these suburban women home [to Republicans],” she said. “Now, our side can mess it up. We can risk going too far in one direction or another and getting distracted.”

For many women who became politically active after Trump was elected in 2016, another issue has become more urgent in the past two years. That is the state of democracy and what they see as a radicalized Republican Party.

The hearings by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack have helped elevate those fears, as has the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into efforts to overturn the election. Meanwhile, in state after state, Republicans have nominated election deniers for statewide and other offices, setting off alarms about what that could mean for future elections if those candidates are successful in November.

Jessie Danielson, 44, is a Democrat who was elected to the Colorado state Senate in 2018 after serving in the state House. She is the mother of two young children. She has advocated for many issues and causes, but nothing seems to animate her more than what she sees as the fragile state of democracy.

Just back from a family camping trip and sitting in her living room as her baby son clamored for attention, Danielson explained, “To my friends and neighbors, women like me, they’re really worried. When you have the Republican Party [that] is willing to embrace this violence, this effort to basically overthrow government, take power, upend our democratic process, it’s a really dangerous path that they seek.”

For the final prime-time hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, she gathered her family in front of the television. “I just said to my husband, I don’t care if they [the children] fuss,” Danielson recalled. “I don’t care whose bedtime [it is]. We’re all going to watch this.”

Four years ago, when she was first interviewed by The Post during her campaign for state Senate, Danielson’s concerns focused more on Trump as a norm-breaking president. Today those worries are far more serious because of what she called “violent extremism.”

Clockwise from top: Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson, center, attends an early September get-out-the-vote gathering in Lakewood, a suburb west of Denver, with fellow Democrats Duran, left, and Cutter, plays with her son and daughter at their home in Wheat Ridge and speaks to a union member at an AFL-CIO event in Denver.

“I feel this is an unprecedented embrace of that extremism by the Republican Party,” she said. “I don’t think this kind of thing has happened before, and that is what I believe voters across the country will reject — an armed mob storming the United States Capitol to overthrow the elected government. And that mob was driven by Trump.”

Still, Danielson is hopeful that things can change. “I have to believe that now that we’ve gone through this and it’s been over and over and over, that the majority of Americans will say, ‘This is not okay with me, … that is not American,’” she said.

After the 2020 census, Colorado gained a congressional seat through reapportionment thanks to the state’s population growth. The boundaries of the new 8th Congressional District stretch from Denver’s northern suburbs of Adams County to the more remote Weld County, whose economy is reliant on agriculture and energy. The district, which has the highest percentage of Latino voters of any in the state, is rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

The Democratic nominee is Yadira Caraveo, 41, a pediatrician and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She first ran for office four years ago, winning a seat in the Colorado state House. The Republican nominee is Barb Kirkmeyer, 64, a fourth-generation Coloradan, who currently is a state senator and, before that, was a Weld County commissioner.

No single race offers a microcosm of the country this fall, but the campaign in Colorado’s new district showcases the contrasts between how Republicans and Democrats are trying to appeal to undecided voters while at the same time mobilize their party bases.

Barb Kirkmeyer, a state senator and Republican nominee for the new 8th Congressional District, talks at a meet-and-greet in Thornton. Kirkmeyer is campaigning on issues such as concerns about inflation and crime and Democrats’ climate agenda.

Kirkmeyer, who is not an election denier, is running a traditional Republican campaign. On a recent evening, she talked about her policy priorities to a dozen people on the patio of a home in a golf course development in Thornton. “We are bankrupting this nation,” she said, arguing that the Democrats have overspent. She mentioned inflation and then said, “Thank you, Joe Biden.” Some nodded their heads in agreement.

She shifted to rising crime rates, which are a growing problem in and around Denver, including a rash of car thefts. “Right out in front of my house,” a woman in the audience volunteered.

Kirkmeyer blamed the increase in crime on the availability of fentanyl and said it is time to “secure our borders … to stop that flow of drug trafficking.” During a question-and-answer period, she was critical of the Democrats’ climate agenda and environmental regulations. She blamed higher gasoline prices on Biden’s push to end reliance on fossil fuels.

Caraveo, in an interview at a Thornton restaurant, agreed that inflation is a major issue. Her strategy to defuse it is to talk about what she and other Democrats have done in the state legislature to help families, including by lowering some taxes and reducing health care costs.

She said immigration and border security are not so salient in a district whose agriculture sector relies on immigrant labor. “Republicans bring it up, but I haven’t heard it resonate a whole lot among voters,” she said. Crime is a problem “to some extent [but] not nearly as much as [in] Denver.” By contrast, she said, the issue of democracy “is huge.” She called Kirkmeyer “a climate denier.”

Caraveo said the most important change in the political landscape has come as a result of the Dobbs decision. “I’ve noticed a difference,” she says. “[People] were concerned about voting rights and democracy and abortion access, climate change and everything before,” she said. Now abortion is “the one topic to their minds. And some people are simply asking, ‘Are you pro-choice?’ And if you say ‘yes,’ it’s like, ‘You’re a woman, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro-choice, you got me.’”

Pediatrician Yadira Caraveo, the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s new 8th Congressional District, examines members of a family at her clinic in Thornton. The daughter of Mexican immigrants says abortion is a much bigger issue than immigration in the district, whose agriculture sector relies on immigrant labor.

Kirkmeyer says she has seen no sign that the high court’s abortion decision has significantly mobilized voters. “When I go to the door, people are not talking to me about abortion,” she said. “They’re talking to me about the price of gas and the price of food. And they’re worried about their jobs.”

In August, Democrats drew attention to a change in Kirkmeyer’s campaign website, which removed references to abortion. She is one of several Republican candidates who have scrubbed their websites ahead of the general election in what seems an effort to play down the issue.

Earlier this year, Kirkmeyer’s website talked about her determination to “Defend the Sanctity of Life.” Now the focus is on inflation and spending, energy and crime. In an interview, she said that the issues she highlighted during her primary, and the contrasts she drew with her Republican opponents, are not the issues and contrasts she wants to highlight in her general election race against Caraveo.

“I haven’t changed my position on anything,” she said.

Four years ago, Jen Helms threw herself into election work, helping to convert a Republican-held congressional district in the Denver suburbs, which is now held by Rep. Jason Crow (D). She even traveled to Texas to canvass for Democrat Beto O’Rourke in what turned out to be a losing campaign for the Senate. (O’Rourke is now running for governor of Texas.)

Then came 2020 and the pandemic. Helms, now 60, hunkered down with her husband. She stopped traveling, rarely went out and let her hair go naturally gray. “I was very, very afraid,” she said. “The virus, for sure, but also just the fact of the way Trump was handling it.”

And then in September 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Helms heard the news while on the phone with her sister, a call that quickly ended as the women began to absorb the implications. “I knew that my daughter’s life would never be the same,” she said. She saw the times as a perfect storm of trouble: Trump, the pandemic and now the Supreme Court.

Top and bottom left: Jen Helms and her husband, Richard Helms, sit in their Denver home Aug. 16, watching the televised concession speech of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a fierce critic of Trump who lost her primary for reelection. Bottom right: Jen Helms writes campaign postcards.

A former teacher who now is an education consultant, Helms was sitting outdoors at a coffee shop in Denver this summer as she replayed events and her reactions to them. “For me, that was sort of when all my hope kind of went away,” she said.

She looks toward the November elections with a mixture of anger over the Supreme Court’s abortion decision and fear about a Republican takeover of Congress. She vowed to write more postcards and do some other work, but she admits that she looks at politics differently than she did four years ago. Now she finds herself questioning, at times, the efficacy of political activism that she enthusiastically embraced in the past.

“I don’t know that I will ever get back the kind of energy I had in 2018, to work, to be active in politics,” she said.

What changed?

“I think just everything that has happened,” Helms replied. “I don’t know how else to put it. Seeing that no matter what is said or done by Republicans, it doesn’t seem to matter. … I just don’t have the hope that I had. … And I feel, I feel guilty saying that.”

Helms offered an insight to an underlying issue that others may be asking, which is: To what end? In other words, will the energy required to remain active politically bring real change in a divided country, a country where the former president and his allies are seeking retribution for the loss in 2020?

As summer turned to fall, Kupernik and Stacishin, the two activists, ramped up their work, sending out postcards, seeking to register new voters and canvassing, particularly in Colorado’s new 8th Congressional District, where the race remained tight.

Kupernik recounted a conversation with a voter while she was knocking on doors, a young mother who was not fully aware that there was an election in a matter of weeks. “I think that’s what it really is going to be about,” she said. “This is a midterm — it’s not a presidential election — and getting people to recognize the importance of it [may be hard]. … We really are voting on our democracy itself. You can disagree about tax policy or all the typical things that you might argue about in a more stable period. But that’s not what this election is about.”

The two women remained hopeful that Democrats will be able to overcome some of the obstacles they face, but they were not without some concerns. Republicans have redoubled efforts to focus voters’ attention on issues like crime and immigration and away from abortion. Rising prices remain a factor everywhere. “We are in a news cycle that is just so fast,” Stacishin said. “Who knows what we’re going to be talking about a week or two before the election? That’s what I fear.”

ARVADA, Colo. — Not long after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion, Robin Kupernik and Elizabeta Stacishin met for lunch and then went for a walk through the Denver Botanic Gardens. “We were both angry,” Kupernik later recalled. “We both said at the same time, ‘This is not about babies, this is about keeping women down.’”

Kupernik, 57, and Stacishin, 53, were spurred to political activism by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But for much of this year, they had been sensing a lack of energy on the left — an absence of the kind of commitment on the part of voters like themselves who had propelled Democrats to victories in 2018 and 2020. Then came the June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Both women said the abortion case persuaded them to redouble their efforts for the 2022 campaign.

“I really didn’t see, you know, a very positive path forward … ,” Stacishin said over coffee in this suburb northwest of downtown Denver. “People have protested so many times and so many different things, it’s not even that meaningful anymore. But I think that everyone is feeling in their bones, especially women, the insult and indignity of what the Supreme Court has done. … And that is in no small part why I am working as hard as I’m working for the midterms right now.”

Stacishin and Kupernik pointed not only to the Supreme Court decision but also to the overwhelming voter turnout in Kansas in August to keep abortion rights as part of the state constitution. They also mentioned summer legislative victories recorded by President Biden and the Democrats in Congress, including the big package focused on climate change, health care and taxes.

“I haven’t felt this good in a long time,” Stacishin said. “I feel lighter. I feel happier.”

In the 2018 midterm elections, women like Kupernik and Stacishin were part of a women-led army that changed politics. Women who had never been particularly active politically worked phone banks, wrote postcards and sent text messages to voters. They were repulsed by Trump and determined to do something about it.

They met in small groups, marched in the streets and went door-to-door to encourage people to vote for Democrats. Their passions were palpable. Many of the congressional candidates they were supporting flipped Republican-held seats, all part of a political tide strong enough to flush the GOP from control of the House, dealing Trump a major defeat. The Pew Research Center has estimated that 62 percent of White women with college degrees backed Democrats for the House four years ago.

For much of this year, the political dynamics appeared to be the reverse of 2018 — a rebellion against Biden poised to eliminate Democrats’ slim majorities in the Senate and House. History alone suggested that. But the crosscurrents are more varied than they were four years ago. Earlier predictions of sweeping Republican gains have been tempered by the changing political climate, thanks in large part to the Dobbs decision, though the GOP remains favored to take control of the House. In the final weeks, with concerns about the economy still dominant, elections could turn on how much sustaining energy the Dobbs decision provides for Democrats or whether it fades in the face of bread-and-butter concerns.

Biden’s approval ratings remain well below 50 percent, though his average rating is not as low as it was a few months ago. Inflation continues at decades-high levels. Crime in major cities and some suburban areas is up. The influx of undocumented immigrants gnaws at many voters. All that continues to push toward Republican victories.

But the midterms are shaping up to be more than just a referendum on the president. Trump remains a central, and polarizing, figure at center stage. He continues to claim falsely the 2020 election was stolen and has remained in the news because of investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his handling of classified documents. He maintains a tight grip on the GOP base and, as election deniers have won many GOP primaries this year, this Trumpian Republican Party is seen by many voters as a growing threat.

That the 2022 election comes with high stakes goes without saying. A Republican takeover of the House, the Senate or both would blunt the president’s agenda for his next two years in office while challenging the GOP to put forth a governing agenda. The November election is also a prelude to what now looks to be a combustible election in 2024, one that could produce a rematch between Biden and Trump — and that looms as a potentially more decisive moment, not only for the nation but also for some of the women interviewed for this story and their families.

In conversations, what comes through from people of different ideologies and different parties is a general sense of powerlessness. For Republicans, it’s seeing Washington in the hands of the Democrats and fearing for the direction of the country. For Democrats, it is threats posed by a Supreme Court that took away a constitutional right and the fear that the loss of control of the House or Senate would stymie any further progress on their agenda.

No single group of voters holds the key to the midterm elections, but both parties see the following demographic blocs as critical.

In the coming weeks, The Washington Post will be looking at some of the voters who will decide the fate of the next Congress, and assessing whether Democrats can maintain the coalition that propelled them to victories in 2018 and 2020. This “Deciders” series begins with a look from Colorado and how some women in Denver and its suburbs view the country, the issues, their families and themselves.

Colorado’s suburbs have been vibrant with political activity for years as the state has trended blue. In 2018, The Post wrote about women here and in other suburban areas who were mobilizing to deal Trump a defeat in those midterms. This story includes interviews with some of those same women, with their perspectives affected by four more years of political upheaval, along with others with their own viewpoints relevant to this year’s midterm campaigns.

In 2018, the political dynamics were clear. As Kupernik said, “It was such a strong shock to the country to have a person like Trump win the election. And so the backlash against that was so aligned and unified and obvious.” Now, four years later, this election year has become more difficult to read, even if historical patterns say the Republicans start with many advantages.

With so much swirling, Democrats are braced for losing control of the House and nervous about the Senate. But Republicans know they could end up disappointed with results that fall short of what they once thought likely.

In most polls, inflation tops the list of concerns to voters. Recent economic data, which showed continued high levels of inflation, will keep it there. Nearly every household is grappling with higher costs.

But in conversations, the issue of inflation doesn’t always translate immediately to the political advantage or disadvantage of one party or the other. Some women reflexively blame Biden; others see the problem as more complex, caused by global economic disruptions from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. In contrast, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision is, for many, more visceral. Democrats believe that difference might be enough for the party to hold down expected losses in the House and maintain their Senate majority. The issue is whether Republican advertising in the final weeks and more bad economic news will override the initial energizing effects from the Dobbs decision.

One afternoon in the Denver suburb of Littleton, Katie Skinner, Corie Detwiler and Nikki Carpenter were talking politics in a study room at the Columbine Public Library. Skinner, 41, and Detwiler, 34, are married and mothers of two young children; their oldest share a kindergarten class. Skinner works as a hair salon sales professional, while Detwiler is in health care. Carpenter, 37, is not married and works as marketing director for a home builder.

When talk turned to the Supreme Court, the tone grew more animated. None of the three disguised their anger or disappointment with the court. To them, what the justices in the conservative majority did was personal. “I think it’s just none of anybody’s business,” Skinner said. “It should be private between a person with a uterus and their doctor and/or their partner to make those decisions.”

Katie Skinner, clockwise from top, plays with her son and daughter before dinner, hangs out with her children and husband, Matt Skinner, on the couch and works on an art project with her children.

Carpenter followed, saying she was in tears when she heard about the Dobbs ruling. “To me, it’s so much more than just the abortion,” she said. “I mean, I’m not valued as a human anymore, like I don’t own my uterus.”

Detwiler works part-time as a physician assistant at an urgent-care facility. She said she worries about women in states with especially restrictive laws, like Oklahoma, where she lived and worked previously. She cited the example of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, who without restrictive laws could be treated simply and effectively, but who now faces potential delays and complications as doctors weigh with lawyers what they are allowed to do.

“We’re going to let her go from perfectly functioning, could take some medicine, walk out, go home, be okay, to now we’re going to wait until she’s had a ruptured fallopian tube and has bleeding into her abdominal cavity and is going to need ICU care to actually intervene,” Detwiler said. “It’s creating these dangerous health outcomes.”

The Kansas vote highlighted the potential power of the abortion issue to motivate voters, though comparisons between how people respond to ballot initiatives vs. a partisan choice between two candidates are imperfect. Kansas saw a surge in registration among women after the Dobbs decision, on top of an already-robust organizing effort by a broad coalition that sought to reach beyond partisan lines to defeat the referendum.

Clockwise from top: Corie Detwiler, right, picks up her daughter Avery, 5, from school and is joined by Skinner, left, who also has a child at the school. Detwiler breastfeeds her 1-year-old son Elliot while petting her dog Gus. Detwiler plays with her children in their Littleton home.

Ashley All, who was a leader in Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, said the Dobbs decision acted as a wake-up call for many moderate voters. “We saw a significant increase in our volunteer engagement,” she said. “We went from averaging about 50 volunteers a week to over 500 after that decision” in metropolitan counties where her group was concentrating. Other volunteer action was taking place throughout the state.

Other states have seen a gender gap in post-Dobbs voter registration. But some experts say the registration gains among Democrats are at the margins, while others are cautious about predicting abortion’s ultimate impact in November.

“Maybe someone else will give you the quote of, like, ‘Dobbs is going to be decisive in November 2022, but I’m not optimistic enough to do it,” said Jennifer M. Piscopo, chair of the department of politics at Occidental College.

Women will influence the November elections in two ways. One is how they vote: for Republicans or Democrats. The other is how many will vote. The combination of the two will shape the outcome.

Republicans hope to move some White suburban women who supported Democrats in 2018 and 2020 back to their column. Democrats hope to prevent that from happening. But Democrats also need sizable participation by the women who powered them to victory in 2018, a year when turnout for a midterm election was the highest in a century.

The challenges for Democrats are evident in the views of two women in Colorado, roughly the same age, each with three children, who describe themselves as moderate. One is a registered Republican who says the country is crumbling. The other is registered as a Democrat but sees herself more as an independent and isn’t sure this election will change much either way.

The former, Julianna Dixon, goes by her childhood nickname of “Boo.” She is a founder of Ladies For Liberty, a network for women. She lives in Denver, is 36, and her children are 7, 5 and 2½. The issues motivating her are the same as those that Republican candidates are trumpeting. “Crime rates, cost of living, education and immigration are all on the top of Mount Rushmore,” she said.

On education, she sees serious problems in the quality of teaching and the performance of schoolchildren. Asked how students should be taught the history of race and racism in America, Dixon said history can sometimes make people uncomfortable and that is okay, but she also has reservations about instruction that she said is putting children into categories based on race. “Because of your race, you are now a suppressor, because of what happened decades ago; or because of your race, you are now at a disadvantage, and you need to be aware of that,” she said. “That inhibits their abilities and kind of dampens their light.”

On the issue of abortion, Dixon said she is “pro-life with exceptions” and knows that the Supreme Court “kicked the hornet’s nest,” but argues there are bigger problems facing the country right now.

Dixon said she voted twice for Trump, and while there were “sketchy” aspects to the 2020 election, she accepts the outcome. “How much energy, how [much] taxpayers’ money, how many lawyers do we need to keep going into the past when again, [problems with] immigration, cost of living, crime, education, all these things are really, really detrimental to our country and they’re happening at an exponential rate?” she asked.

As she looks to November, Dixon has judged Biden to be “the worst president in my lifetime, if not in history.” Republican victories in the midterms, she said, “would definitely bring some much-needed balance that is lacking right now.” Pointing to Glenn Youngkin’s victory as a Republican in the Virginia governor’s race last year, she said she sees similar stirrings among the women she knows. “I feel like politics is the Wild West right now,” she said. “Energy is through the roof, and the mama bears are climbing out of the cave.”

By that, she meant that the shifts among suburban voters that affected the Virginia race could materialize nationally in November to the advantage of Republicans.

Dixon’s characterization of the “mama bears” is one reason Democrats remain in a challenging position. The mobilization of White suburban Republican and independent women who may be worried about the cost of living, school decisions or rising crime could more than neutralize the impact of those who are mobilizing over abortion.

The other Colorado woman is Jenny Rementer, 38, the mother of children ages 5, 3 and 6 months. She lives in Highlands Ranch, a Republican-leaning suburb south of Denver. Her parents emigrated from South Korea. She said she voted for Biden “because I think Trump is not a good person. It had nothing to do with politics.”

Rementer said she is not particularly active in politics. She does not see the November election as an inflection point for the country, nor does she think it will have great consequences for her family. “My life does not change very much based on who’s president or who’s in Congress,” she said.

Asked what issues she sees as most important, Rementer responded, “Inflation’s huge, right? I think we talk about that every day. A trip to the grocery store used to be between, like, $100 and $150 because my kids are little. Now it’s like $200 to $250.”

Still, she is reluctant to pin the blame on the administration. “I’m on a text chain with a bunch of moms, and somebody was like, ‘Thanks, Biden.’ And my husband and I joke about it, but I personally think that it’s probably as a result of a lot of things,” she said. “I don’t know that any one person has that much power in such a short period of time to make such an impact on the economy.”

Rementer said Democrats spent freely to help boost the economy during the pandemic and said she believes that has contributed to distortions in the labor market. She and her husband are searching for an au pair because the cost of a nanny has skyrocketed. “People are demanding outrageous amounts,” she said. “It was never this bad before, and this all kind of started with the stimulus payments.”

When Rementer talked about immigration, as the daughter of immigrants, she focused first on the controversial separation of families that took place during the Trump administration. She called Trump’s effort to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border “the dumbest waste of money.” But having seen refugee issues up close in the Denver area as part of her work in health care, she said she wonders whether cities and states can manage. “It takes a lot of resources,” she said, “and I just I don’t know if we have that infrastructure to take in all that. … Do I think about it every day? No.”

Asked how she views the choice in this election, she replied, “I’m always a huge supporter of split power. I don’t like it when one side or the other has too much control over stuff.” But she also isn’t sure she wants Republicans in control of the House or Senate. She has concerns about what Trump has done to the party. “He has kind of made it acceptable for people to be so open about how terrible they are,” she said.

Four women were seated together at a Starbucks in Arvada one afternoon in August. They are old enough to remember a time before 1973, before the Supreme Court legalized abortion with its Roe v. Wade decision. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, they decided to do what they can to mobilize other women to vote in November. They call themselves Women Organizing for Women — “WOW” for short.

“We’ve got to do something besides talk about it,” said Cheryl Fay, as she and the others worked on a mission statement for their group.

A few weeks later, more than four dozen women were gathered for lunch at a restaurant in Lone Tree, Colo., south of Denver. Their organization, Ladies for Liberty, and the concerns motivating them were entirely different from the earlier discussion in Arvada. The luncheon speakers included Molly Lamar, a Republican and mother of four children who is running for the state school board. “All of us are facing so many of the same issues,” she said, “whether it’s aging parents, prices at the gas pump, prices at the grocery store, and now additionally, we have the burden of knowing that our education system is not serving our children. Parents really need to have a voice. We’re being dismissed. We’re being locked out.”

Scholars who have studied the voting patterns of women say there is no such thing as the women’s vote. “In the same way that we don’t assume men vote as a bloc, we shouldn’t assume women do that,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University and research director at the school’s Center for American Women and Politics.

Still, as she noted, there are differences between the voting patterns of men and women, some of which have become more pronounced in recent decades. For many years after American women earned the right to vote in 1920, men were more likely to cast ballots. Over time, however, the gap reversed itself.

“The story of turnout for women is one of constant advance,” said Christina Wolbrecht, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Beginning in 1980, women become more likely to turn out to vote than are men, and that remains true.”

In 2020, for example, 68.4 percent of eligible women cast votes compared with 65 percent of eligible men. In raw numbers, 82.2 million women voted in the presidential election compared with 72.5 million men. This pattern cuts across all races, whether White, Latino, Asian American or Black. The biggest disparity is between Black women and Black men. In 2020, for example, that gap was eight percentage points.

Over the past three decades or so, another change has taken hold: Women as a group now vote more Democratic than Republican. That wasn’t always the case. Around 6 in 10 women supported Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and for all the talk about the charm of Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960, a bare majority of women supported Republican Richard M. Nixon.

But while White women vote more Democratic than do White men, as a group they tilt to Republicans. In 2016 and 2020, Trump won 52 percent and 55 percent of White women respectively, according to exit polls.

“Gender gap” is a phrase that came fully into the political lexicon in the 1980s. The original gender gap, however, was not the result of what women did; it came about because White ethnic males were leaving the Democratic Party.

Jane Junn, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, said that the gender gap “is being pushed by women of color being super Democratic. … White women haver never been Democrats.” In 2016, 94 percent of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, 90 percent of Black women backed Biden. Nearly 7 in 10 Latino women backed Clinton and Biden.

Top: Norma McGraw, left, and Ruth Edmonson walk through a neighborhood in Broomfield, a suburb north of Denver. Bottom left: McGraw and Edmonson stop to talk to local residents.

Suburban women have been given various labels over the years and have drawn the interest of campaign strategists because they are seen as swing voters (though some scholars question whether they are). At one point, these suburban voters were called “soccer moms,” at another, “security moms.” But the recent focus on women owes largely to the divergence in partisan support between White women with college degrees and White women who do not have college degrees.

In recent elections, college-educated White women moved toward the Democrats; White women without college degrees, who make up a larger share of the electorate than those with degrees, moved toward the GOP. In 2014, 47 percent of White women with college degrees voted Democratic, according to calculations by Catalist, a Democrat-aligned data firm; by 2018, 57 percent backed Democrats.

White college-educated women have been described as a core part of the Democratic coalition, based on this shift. But the question of whether there will be movement back toward Republicans in November is of prime interest to campaign strategists.

Democratic worries about that possibility have been heightened by what happened last year in Virginia. One of the factors in Youngkin’s victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe was a shift toward the GOP among suburban voters. Suburban women, who had broken strongly for Biden in 2020, swung back toward Youngkin, according to exit polls.

Kristin Davison, who was a lead consultant in Youngkin’s campaign, said Republicans have strong issues working in their favor that she contends will prove more powerful than abortion.

“We’re at a point, I think, given where the economy is and, really, a void of leadership at the top, where these household, kitchen-table issues [are] bringing these suburban women home [to Republicans],” she said. “Now, our side can mess it up. We can risk going too far in one direction or another and getting distracted.”

For many women who became politically active after Trump was elected in 2016, another issue has become more urgent in the past two years. That is the state of democracy and what they see as a radicalized Republican Party.

The hearings by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack have helped elevate those fears, as has the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into efforts to overturn the election. Meanwhile, in state after state, Republicans have nominated election deniers for statewide and other offices, setting off alarms about what that could mean for future elections if those candidates are successful in November.

Jessie Danielson, 44, is a Democrat who was elected to the Colorado state Senate in 2018 after serving in the state House. She is the mother of two young children. She has advocated for many issues and causes, but nothing seems to animate her more than what she sees as the fragile state of democracy.

Just back from a family camping trip and sitting in her living room as her baby son clamored for attention, Danielson explained, “To my friends and neighbors, women like me, they’re really worried. When you have the Republican Party [that] is willing to embrace this violence, this effort to basically overthrow government, take power, upend our democratic process, it’s a really dangerous path that they seek.”

For the final prime-time hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, she gathered her family in front of the television. “I just said to my husband, I don’t care if they [the children] fuss,” Danielson recalled. “I don’t care whose bedtime [it is]. We’re all going to watch this.”

Four years ago, when she was first interviewed by The Post during her campaign for state Senate, Danielson’s concerns focused more on Trump as a norm-breaking president. Today those worries are far more serious because of what she called “violent extremism.”

Clockwise from top: Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson, center, attends an early September get-out-the-vote gathering in Lakewood, a suburb west of Denver, with fellow Democrats Duran, left, and Cutter, plays with her son and daughter at their home in Wheat Ridge and speaks to a union member at an AFL-CIO event in Denver.

“I feel this is an unprecedented embrace of that extremism by the Republican Party,” she said. “I don’t think this kind of thing has happened before, and that is what I believe voters across the country will reject — an armed mob storming the United States Capitol to overthrow the elected government. And that mob was driven by Trump.”

Still, Danielson is hopeful that things can change. “I have to believe that now that we’ve gone through this and it’s been over and over and over, that the majority of Americans will say, ‘This is not okay with me, … that is not American,’” she said.

After the 2020 census, Colorado gained a congressional seat through reapportionment thanks to the state’s population growth. The boundaries of the new 8th Congressional District stretch from Denver’s northern suburbs of Adams County to the more remote Weld County, whose economy is reliant on agriculture and energy. The district, which has the highest percentage of Latino voters of any in the state, is rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

The Democratic nominee is Yadira Caraveo, 41, a pediatrician and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She first ran for office four years ago, winning a seat in the Colorado state House. The Republican nominee is Barb Kirkmeyer, 64, a fourth-generation Coloradan, who currently is a state senator and, before that, was a Weld County commissioner.

No single race offers a microcosm of the country this fall, but the campaign in Colorado’s new district showcases the contrasts between how Republicans and Democrats are trying to appeal to undecided voters while at the same time mobilize their party bases.

Barb Kirkmeyer, a state senator and Republican nominee for the new 8th Congressional District, talks at a meet-and-greet in Thornton. Kirkmeyer is campaigning on issues such as concerns about inflation and crime and Democrats’ climate agenda.

Kirkmeyer, who is not an election denier, is running a traditional Republican campaign. On a recent evening, she talked about her policy priorities to a dozen people on the patio of a home in a golf course development in Thornton. “We are bankrupting this nation,” she said, arguing that the Democrats have overspent. She mentioned inflation and then said, “Thank you, Joe Biden.” Some nodded their heads in agreement.

She shifted to rising crime rates, which are a growing problem in and around Denver, including a rash of car thefts. “Right out in front of my house,” a woman in the audience volunteered.

Kirkmeyer blamed the increase in crime on the availability of fentanyl and said it is time to “secure our borders … to stop that flow of drug trafficking.” During a question-and-answer period, she was critical of the Democrats’ climate agenda and environmental regulations. She blamed higher gasoline prices on Biden’s push to end reliance on fossil fuels.

Caraveo, in an interview at a Thornton restaurant, agreed that inflation is a major issue. Her strategy to defuse it is to talk about what she and other Democrats have done in the state legislature to help families, including by lowering some taxes and reducing health care costs.

She said immigration and border security are not so salient in a district whose agriculture sector relies on immigrant labor. “Republicans bring it up, but I haven’t heard it resonate a whole lot among voters,” she said. Crime is a problem “to some extent [but] not nearly as much as [in] Denver.” By contrast, she said, the issue of democracy “is huge.” She called Kirkmeyer “a climate denier.”

Caraveo said the most important change in the political landscape has come as a result of the Dobbs decision. “I’ve noticed a difference,” she says. “[People] were concerned about voting rights and democracy and abortion access, climate change and everything before,” she said. Now abortion is “the one topic to their minds. And some people are simply asking, ‘Are you pro-choice?’ And if you say ‘yes,’ it’s like, ‘You’re a woman, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro-choice, you got me.’”

Pediatrician Yadira Caraveo, the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s new 8th Congressional District, examines members of a family at her clinic in Thornton. The daughter of Mexican immigrants says abortion is a much bigger issue than immigration in the district, whose agriculture sector relies on immigrant labor.

Kirkmeyer says she has seen no sign that the high court’s abortion decision has significantly mobilized voters. “When I go to the door, people are not talking to me about abortion,” she said. “They’re talking to me about the price of gas and the price of food. And they’re worried about their jobs.”

In August, Democrats drew attention to a change in Kirkmeyer’s campaign website, which removed references to abortion. She is one of several Republican candidates who have scrubbed their websites ahead of the general election in what seems an effort to play down the issue.

Earlier this year, Kirkmeyer’s website talked about her determination to “Defend the Sanctity of Life.” Now the focus is on inflation and spending, energy and crime. In an interview, she said that the issues she highlighted during her primary, and the contrasts she drew with her Republican opponents, are not the issues and contrasts she wants to highlight in her general election race against Caraveo.

“I haven’t changed my position on anything,” she said.

Four years ago, Jen Helms threw herself into election work, helping to convert a Republican-held congressional district in the Denver suburbs, which is now held by Rep. Jason Crow (D). She even traveled to Texas to canvass for Democrat Beto O’Rourke in what turned out to be a losing campaign for the Senate. (O’Rourke is now running for governor of Texas.)

Then came 2020 and the pandemic. Helms, now 60, hunkered down with her husband. She stopped traveling, rarely went out and let her hair go naturally gray. “I was very, very afraid,” she said. “The virus, for sure, but also just the fact of the way Trump was handling it.”

And then in September 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Helms heard the news while on the phone with her sister, a call that quickly ended as the women began to absorb the implications. “I knew that my daughter’s life would never be the same,” she said. She saw the times as a perfect storm of trouble: Trump, the pandemic and now the Supreme Court.

Top and bottom left: Jen Helms and her husband, Richard Helms, sit in their Denver home Aug. 16, watching the televised concession speech of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a fierce critic of Trump who lost her primary for reelection. Bottom right: Jen Helms writes campaign postcards.

A former teacher who now is an education consultant, Helms was sitting outdoors at a coffee shop in Denver this summer as she replayed events and her reactions to them. “For me, that was sort of when all my hope kind of went away,” she said.

She looks toward the November elections with a mixture of anger over the Supreme Court’s abortion decision and fear about a Republican takeover of Congress. She vowed to write more postcards and do some other work, but she admits that she looks at politics differently than she did four years ago. Now she finds herself questioning, at times, the efficacy of political activism that she enthusiastically embraced in the past.

“I don’t know that I will ever get back the kind of energy I had in 2018, to work, to be active in politics,” she said.

What changed?

“I think just everything that has happened,” Helms replied. “I don’t know how else to put it. Seeing that no matter what is said or done by Republicans, it doesn’t seem to matter. … I just don’t have the hope that I had. … And I feel, I feel guilty saying that.”

Helms offered an insight to an underlying issue that others may be asking, which is: To what end? In other words, will the energy required to remain active politically bring real change in a divided country, a country where the former president and his allies are seeking retribution for the loss in 2020?

As summer turned to fall, Kupernik and Stacishin, the two activists, ramped up their work, sending out postcards, seeking to register new voters and canvassing, particularly in Colorado’s new 8th Congressional District, where the race remained tight.

Kupernik recounted a conversation with a voter while she was knocking on doors, a young mother who was not fully aware that there was an election in a matter of weeks. “I think that’s what it really is going to be about,” she said. “This is a midterm — it’s not a presidential election — and getting people to recognize the importance of it [may be hard]. … We really are voting on our democracy itself. You can disagree about tax policy or all the typical things that you might argue about in a more stable period. But that’s not what this election is about.”

The two women remained hopeful that Democrats will be able to overcome some of the obstacles they face, but they were not without some concerns. Republicans have redoubled efforts to focus voters’ attention on issues like crime and immigration and away from abortion. Rising prices remain a factor everywhere. “We are in a news cycle that is just so fast,” Stacishin said. “Who knows what we’re going to be talking about a week or two before the election? That’s what I fear.”