The Supreme Court’s reversal of the 50-year-old decision in Roe v. Wade transformed the debate and politics around abortion in the United States, shifting battles to state courts and legislatures — and galvanizing a fresh wave of voters in the midterm elections who turned out more forcefully than ever to make abortion rights a winning issue.

While the terms of the abortion conflict had been set for decades, the results of the elections so closely following the court’s decision now have both sides reevaluating their strengths, weaknesses and strategies. Heading into the new legislative sessions next year, supporters and opponents of abortion rights are girding for fresh combat, with new ground rules, new opponents and new battlefronts.

Anti-abortion groups are pulling back from ballot initiatives as a way to restrict abortion, having failed with those measures in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Instead, they’re pushing to reinforce abortion restrictions where they’ve had success or hold the majority: in sympathetic court jurisdictions and Republican-controlled legislatures.

Abortion rights advocates are coming out of the midterms with momentum. But for all their victories, they face the steeper challenge. With abortion now illegal or inaccessible in roughly half the country, they have to keep their supporters energized for a long fight.

After winning 6 out of 6 ballot initiatives this year, abortion rights supporters are pressing for more, especially in states such as Ohio and Missouri where the legislatures are gerrymandered and staunchly anti-abortion. Yet ballot initiatives aren’t an option in every state.

The path to restoring abortion rights still runs largely through state legislatures, where it has traditionally been harder to mobilize voters and donors.

“Now more than ever, I think our supporters, and voters in general, feel they have a role to play in protecting abortion access,” said Sarah Standiford, the national campaigns director for Planned Parenthood. When the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion leaked in May, she said, many supporters felt there was nothing they could do. Now, she said, “the imperative is to really engage individuals in a way that they not only feel less helpless but are less helpless. The challenge and opportunity there is to continue to ensure that there’s a path for every person to take action.”

But the anti-abortion side is not stepping back from the fight either. Last month, anti-abortion groups filed suit in federal court in Texas, seeking to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of abortion pills.

At a meeting of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers outside Dallas after the election, Sue Liebel, the director of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion group, steered the lawmakers in the audience away from more ballot initiatives. Instead, she encouraged them to focus their energy in upcoming legislative sessions on making it harder for doctors to provide abortion pills and on establishing the strictest possible gestational limits on the procedure.

Tom Oliverson, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, suggested restricting health care tax deductions for companies that help employees access abortion, including through travel reimbursement in states where the procedure is illegal.

Liebel recognized a new state of play after the midterms, noting that the end of Roe v. Wade had brought a new cohort of defenders of abortion rights that anti-abortion groups were not used to having to counteract — in particular, doctors and representatives of hospitals, who publicly complained that new state prohibitions on abortion were interfering with proper medical care.

Last month, the American Medical Association, a historically conservative group, adopted new policies opposing restrictions on abortion, including new ethical guidance explicitly allowing physicians to perform the procedure in keeping with “good medical practice” even in states that ban it.

“It’s easy when we’re opposing Planned Parenthood or the ACLU,” Liebel said at the event.

But James Bopp Jr., the longtime general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee, minimized the importance of abortion in the midterms. A net gain in people voting “doesn’t mean a change in the abortion issue,” he said.

“In every state I’ve seen — and I’ve seen 30 or 40 — the Republicans picked up seats in their statehouse and state Senate,” he added. “So if it was true there was some kind of abortion rights wave, it would have caught all these people. There’s no real evidence that there was a net benefit, or you would have seen the opposite of victories for Republicans in every state.”

Then there was what Bopp called the “enormous net benefit” to the anti-abortion side: Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives — if only narrowly. Had Democrats held their majority, they would have continued to try to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would guarantee a nationwide right to abortion. “They were going to go for the stake in the heart,” Bopp said.