One year ago, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which will likely go down in history alongside Dred Scott, Korematsu, and Plessy v. Ferguson as one of the worst decisions the high court has ever made. But that's a gradual process involving a consensus of legal historians, which could take years. In the meantime, the issue has become extremely politically potent. And if the next few years is anything like the first, it is going to become a gigantic albatross around the neck of the Republican Party, since they are now held captive by their most extreme wing on this particular issue.

To state it bluntly, Republicans are trying to outdo each other in state after state by passing the most restrictive abortion laws they can think up. These laws are wildly unpopular. One big issue at the center of the 2024 election is going to be whether Republicans rally behind an effort to impose their strict forced-birth laws on the entire country at once, rather than just state by state -- and both sides are going to be talking about it. The supporters of such a move are going to try to make it paramount to the Republican primary process, while opponents of a national abortion ban are going to be warning voters that this is indeed exactly what the Republican Party wants to do.

The polling shows that the issue is incredibly lopsided against the forced-birth stance. The numbers aren't even close. A whopping 69 percent of the public opposes banning abortion nationwide, including 87 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Republicans. When asked whether abortion should be legal, 79 percent of all Americans said it should be, with just 13 percent saying it shouldn't. And the more Draconian laws Republicans pass at the state level, the worse things get for them. A new poll showed that "one in four Americans say state efforts that have followed [the Dobbs decision] to impose strict limits on abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights." Of those who said their views on abortion have changed over the past year, four times as many said they have become more supportive of abortion rights than those who have become less supportive.

That is a losing formula for Republicans. The biggest mass defection the party has experienced in the age of Trump has been disaffected suburban women who could not bring themselves to vote Republican while Donald Trump was in charge of the party. Republicans attacking abortion rights is only going to exacerbate this trend -- and perhaps even make it a permanent realignment. These are all women who grew up with the protections of Roe and most of them have either gone through an abortion themselves or at the very least had a friend of theirs do so, probably when they were younger. Now they are worried about their daughters' rights (and the rights of their sons' girlfriends as well). And they see one party standing up for those rights and one party trying to take them away.

It is somewhat ironic that we are going to see what is already being called the "most overtly abortion rights platform of any general election [presidential] candidate in political history" coming from President Joe Biden, who is only the second Roman Catholic to ever hold the position. The first, John F. Kennedy, had to reassure voters that he would not be taking direct orders from the Pope as president. With Biden, there is no question he is charting his own path. He was never a strong pro-choice politician before becoming president, but he is going to run on a very simple idea. As former president of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards summed it up: "Look, thank goodness people evolve. And I will say [President Joe Biden] has come a long, long way. And I think he's done it in such a responsible way. In many ways, his voice at this moment is singularly important because of his own faith, and his recognition that people of different faith traditions can have different attitudes and opinions about pregnancy, but fundamentally, it's not the role of government to decide."

On the other side, even Donald Trump is finding out how more-reasonable attitudes on the issue are simply not welcome any more within the Republican Party. Trump, unlike most Republicans, accurately realized how detrimental the extremist positions on abortion were for the party in the midterm elections. Trump tried to get the GOP to be a little more reasonable and not so harsh, but he received immediate pushback for this stance. He has now taken to mostly bragging about naming the three Supreme Court justices who made the overturning of Roe v. Wade a reality, while not talking so much about how many weeks he'd allow or what exceptions to the forced-birth laws the red states are passing he would support.

The hardliners had their own alternate take on the midterm disappointment for their side. According to them, Republicans did badly on abortion because they didn't get out and fight hard enough for the most Draconian laws imaginable. They just didn't explain the extremist position well enough. If the voters saw Republicans championing such laws (instead of refusing to talk about them, as many GOP candidates tried to do), then Republicans would win.

This is jaw-droppingly laughable, when considering the national polling on the issue, but this is precisely what the hardliners are still pushing for. And they've got their sights set on a national law now. "Give us the House, the Senate, and the White House, and we can ban abortion even in blue states like California and New York!" is their rallying cry.

And all Democrats have to do is point this out.

Let's go to the polling, once again (emphasis in original):

Voters across party, gender, and racial lines don't want politicians interfering with decisions about abortion care: When reminded of recent rollbacks on access to abortion, 73% of voters agree that things have gone too far and that politicians should stop interfering with decisions about abortion care. Even a majority (51%) of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 agree.

That last one is worth repeating: even a majority of Trump voters think Republicans have already gone too far.

Republicans' forced-birth laws are so Draconian that they're now having to restrict democracy to protect them. In Ohio, a ballot measure which would cement abortion rights in their state constitution is being fought in a rather underhanded way. The GOP moved to put a new ballot measure before the voters -- in a special and unnecessary election before November -- which would up the majority necessary for such ballot measures to pass as well as make it harder for such measures to even qualify to be on a ballot. If you fear what the voters are going to say, just rig the game so that it won't matter, in other words. And this is merely one example of such antidemocratic efforts.

The reason the GOP is resorting to such measures is that they have been losing at the ballot box. In Kansas, a strict anti-abortion measure failed by a whopping 19 points, which was a real wakeup call for the forced-birth side. Similar results have happened in other states -- red, blue, and purple. When people are given the choice, women's rights have won. Which scares Republicans -- as it should.

The more Democrats make this a central issue to the 2024 campaign, the better they are going to do. In previous elections, the pro-choice issue was mostly an afterthought for Democratic candidates -- one good applause line in stump speech about "protecting the right of a woman to choose," and that was it. The threat of Roe being overturned was nothing more than theoretical, and most voters (especially Democratic voters) simply believed that it would never happen. That is no longer true. It isn't theoretical any more. It is reality, for tens of millions of American women.

Women (and the men who support them) don't like to see their freedoms taken away. They don't like moralizing politicians making the most intimate decisions for them. They want such decisions to be made between themselves and their doctors, period.

The harder the Republicans push, and the more extreme the positions the forced-birth crowd goads them into, the easier it is for Democrats to make the case that the entire GOP will stop at nothing less than banning abortion nationwide. And the more that case is made -- from both the Democratic side as well as the hardliners on the Republican side -- the easier it is going to be for Democrats to win elections in 2024. Politically, at least, that is the legacy after the first year of post-Roe life in America.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant