Anti-abortion forces are on a winning streak. They’ve convinced the Supreme Court to leave the issue of abortion up to the states, they’ve managed to ban or severely limit abortion in 24 states, and now they’re making progress in preventing abortion pills from being available in America.
If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool anti-abortion purist, you’re very happy. If you’re a Republican politician in a swing district, not so much.
They’ve been polling on abortion since forever, and the evolution of American attitudes toward the issue of abortion can be clearly tracked here and here. Lately, a significant shift in those polls has occurred and voters are now tilting decisively in favor of permitting abortion in most circumstances.
This shift has taken place after last spring’s Dobbs decision, which left abortion up to individual states. This suggests at least some abortion opinion was moved by many states making abortion illegal. Some women didn’t know what they had until it was gone.
America used to be a 50-50 nation on abortion. Not anymore.
Politico:
Now, a four-point question probably best measures where Americans sit on the issue: legal in all cases, legal in most, illegal in all and illegal in most. The 2022 national exit poll used this device, finding that 29 percent of voters believed abortion should be “legal in all cases,” while another 30 percent thought it should be “legal in most cases.” That left 26 percent who thought it should be “illegal in most cases” and only 10 percent who said it should be “illegal in all cases.”
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That leaves roughly six-in-10 voters supporting legal abortion in most cases — with the median voter supporting some restrictions — and just over a third who want it to be entirely or mostly illegal.
“Legal in all cases” does not include late-term abortion, which is rejected by huge majorities. But after the midterm elections, which showed that abortion played a big role in the Democrats’ favor in a dozen races, some Republicans are rethinking their support for a total ban on abortion and are looking for a different approach.
The recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election illustrates the problems many Republicans running in blue or purple districts are going to have.
That helps explain the breadth of Protasiewicz’s victory in a state where five of the past six major statewide races for president, Senate and governor have been decided by three points or fewer. The GOP-backed candidate, Dan Kelly, lost a state Supreme Court race by a similar margin in 2020, but that was driven largely by the Democratic presidential primary, which was held concurrently with the state Supreme Court election. (Then-President Donald Trump, who endorsed Kelly in that race, was the only named candidate appearing on the GOP primary ballot, giving Republicans little reason to turn out.)
Results from Tuesday’s election are still unofficial, but some of the county-level totals suggest younger and more liberal voters were highly motivated. Protasiewicz ran up huge numbers in counties with large colleges and universities, winning 82 percent of the vote in Dane County (University of Wisconsin-Madison), 73 percent in Milwaukee (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette University) and 54 percent in Winnebago County (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh). Those percentages were greater than Evers’ in all three counties, and turnout in Dane and Milwaukee was higher as a share of the statewide vote than in the 2022 midterms.
There is no substitute for that kind of motivation. And unless Republicans can come up with a dynamite solution to their abortion problem, they’re going to end up in the minority — perhaps permanently.
