Deep doo-doo
They finally caught the car. Meaning Roe v. Wade. Republicans campaigned on repealing it for decades. It was a reliable cattle prod for turning out their voters, especially the religious right. You had to wonder if they ever wanted to lose abortion as a campaign issue. But they promised to overturn it, campaigned on it, and thanks to Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s help in hijacking the Supreme Court, last June they undid 50 years worth of women’s constitutional rights. Extremists in the states had already prepositioned abortion bans to go into effect the minute that happened.
Then what? Then a month later came the voter smackdown of an anti-abortion amendment in Kansas.
Republicans find themselves in deep doo-doo, as Bush père put it. Even with other Republicans.
Greg Sargent reports in the Washington Post:
It was a long-accepted rule in U.S. politics: Yes, a majority of Americans are pro-choice, but on the antiabortion side, there is a lopsided intensity of feeling. That notion has often been given great weight in parsing the politics of abortion.
But a new poll from the New York Times and Siena College provides another reminder that the rule might be obsolete. If that’s right, it could scramble expectations about the midterm elections.
After the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June, Republicans and some pundits remained confident that political intensity would ultimately be driven by “real” concerns, such as inflation and crime. But a solid majority now appears to feel pretty intensely about preserving abortion rights.
Specifically, the Times-Siena poll finds that 62 percent of registered voters oppose the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, while 30 percent support it. But the poll also asked how strongly people feel about it, and this was the result:
● 52 percent of registered voters strongly oppose the ruling overturning Roe, vs. only 19 percent who strongly support it
● 57 percent of women strongly oppose the ruling, vs. 15 percent who strongly support itThe poll offers other grounds for concluding abortion is shifting our politics. It finds that 62 percent of voters favor keeping abortion always or mostly legal, versus only 31 percent who think it should be mostly or always illegal.
What’s more, the poll finds Democrats with a slight edge in the generic House ballot matchup, 46 percent to 44 percent. This is the case even though Republicans still enjoy sizable advantages on such issues as the economy — and a plurality of voters say the economy is most important to them.
But what voters say is not as important as what they do in November. That intensity gap threatens to swallow up Republicans’ 2022 ambitions.
Polling suggests “Women are so clearly more engaged than men in this election. Especially younger women,” says Tom Bonier of TargetSmart. They are outpacing men in voter registration in states where reproductive rights are most at risk.
In fairness, not all data shows this intensity gap. A Post-Schar School poll in July found that higher percentages of Americans who want abortion to be illegal are certain to vote this fall. But that poll also found that a whopping 65 percent view the ruling as a major loss of women’s rights.
Meanwhile, other recent polls have found that Democrats are more motivated to vote by the ruling, that disapproval of the decision is overwhelming and that support for keeping abortion legal is at new highs. And as my Post colleague David Byler has detailed, recent special elections offer clear evidence that Democratic turnout has been “supercharged.”
Bonier points out that this pro-abortion-rights intensity gap could mark a deeper shift in our politics. He notes that intensity has long been on the antiabortion side precisely because pro-choice constituencies didn’t actually believe the court would end abortion rights.
Justice Samuel Alito settled that question in late June.
Since then, and especially since Kansas, Republicans have furiously tried to change the subject. To the point of two GOP governors inviting kidnapping or human trafficking charges this week.
Republicans fucked around. In a few short weeks we’ll have a better idea what they found out.
Help educate them when voting begins, won’t you?
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