But why? Why did they have an audience? Why did peddling abortion restrictions cause people to vote for them?

I'll tell you why. Because we intentionally gave them an citizenry equipped with the kinds of beliefs and moral compasses with which those sorts of arguments resonate. We spent decades raising people to think that human life is infinity valuable and that even the risk of harm is tantamount to blood in the streets. We have been raising people to err on the side of restricting people's freedom in order to prevent harm, both real harm and the statistical hypothetical small harm. We have done this on purpose so that people become outraged when they hear that some employer's machinery does not conform to the latest safety standards. We have done this so that people shun people who engage in slightly dangerous behavior. Of course, everything has tradeoffs and as a side effect of this we have created a society of people who are happy to err on the side of the fetus to the detriment of the mother's bodily autonomy and vote accordingly.

In short, we are reaping exactly what we sowed.