An email: “You are correct that overturning Roe would decrease the importance of the presidency to pro-life voters, but the opposite is true of the importance of the state officeholders. As long as Roe stands, the positions of my state legislators on abortion are almost completely irrelevant. My state can pass as many anti-abortion laws as it wants, and they’ll all be instantly flattened by the Ad Hoc Nullification Machine that protects abortion.

“Remove Roe, and the states become the front lines in the battle to save the unborn. If the states were empowered to restrict abortion, there’s just no way I could settle for a Christine Whitman.”

That’s a good point, but Whitman isn’t a pro-choice moderate; she’s a pro-choice extremist. Plenty of pro-lifers would be willing to vote for people who weren’t 100 percent pro-life but were willing to make the law more just toward the unborn–and who would be able to do so in a post-Roe world. Because legislators would be actually legislating–and legislating compromises in most places–there would, I suspect, be less polarization.