The advantage of intensity in the abortion debate has always been on the side of forced birthers in the United States. The zealots hammered away at it for decades, making incremental progress toward eroding the fundamental human right of bodily autonomy, while the rest of the population couldn’t imagine that they could ever win, that the status quo in which at least some legal access to abortion would always be available just couldn’t be toppled. The wake-up call for America, delivered by the Trump-packed Supreme Court, has been profound and the reverberations from it seem to be growing in strength.
That’s the message from a brand-new New York Times/Siena College poll. The poll found that 52% of voters strongly oppose the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning Roe v. Wade, while another 10% just oppose it. Just 19% said they strongly support it, and another 11% sort of support it. Among women, where new voter registrations have surged, 57% strongly oppose the ruling, vs. 15% who strongly support it.
While voters remain concerned about the economy, and Republicans lead on that issue by a 14-point margin, 52 to 38%, Democrats have a 73% to 18% lead over Republicans among voters who said “societal issues” like abortion or threats to democracy are the most pressing issues for them this November.
Jeanine Spanjers, a Wisconsin voter, is upset at inflation and made that Democrats have been handing out “all this free stuff” to people during the pandemic. She says it “disincentivizes people to go out and do something” and Republicans would never let that happen. But, and it’s a big but, abortion is her top issue.
“I had made that choice once, and I have two sons,” she said. “There’s people who can’t afford kids and shouldn’t have kids, or just maybe it isn’t the right time in their life.”
She’s inadvertently making a key point Republicans have never addressed. Abortion is an economic issue as much as a social or cultural one. Like millions of people, she made a decision not have a kid when the timing wasn’t right for her.
Mykie Bush, is 19 and works at a car dealership in rural Oregon. She’s a high school dropout and says “the costs of inflation are really affecting me.” She said she’s voting Democratic this November because of the larger issues: abortion, immigration, and LGBTQ rights. “At the end of the day, we’re not fighting over politics. We’re fighting over our human rights.”
At the other end of the age spectrum, 83-year-old registered Republican James Moran, from New Rochelle, NY, says the end of abortion rights “is unacceptable to me,” and he’s going to vote Democratic this year. Republicans, he said, have “denied women the ability to control their own bodies. Should there be some limit on that? There’s limits on everything but everything within reason.”
Voters’ concern about the state of our democracy continues. The registered voters in the survey said the word “extreme” better described Republicans than Democrats by a 6-point margin, 43% to 37%. Marvin Mirsch, 64, a self-identified independent from Minnesota is one of them. He’s voting for Democrats this November.
“I think that every person in the nation should work hard to purge Donald Trump from the Republican Party in one way or another,” Mirsch said. “Because we need a healthy Republican Party, and it’s not right now—it’s sick.”
Trump toady Sen. Lindsey Graham provided just how sick Republicans are this week, by introducing his national abortion ban, to the chagrin of plenty of Republican strategists who have seen polls like this one.
It’s still going to be a very difficult election for Democrats. President Joe Biden is still facing headwinds in his approval rating. But it’s abundantly clear that Republicans have overplayed their hand in dictating to Americans what kind of society we can have.
They’re apparently counting on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and captured courts to get and keep power. That’s what makes this midterm election the most important yet, equally as important as the one that ousted Trump. Because if Republicans regain the Congress, if they get more state legislatures and state courts and governorships, they’re going to make it impossible to get our democracy back.