It is clearer than ever that far-right, anti-abortion extremists in the House of Representatives continue to pursue a deeply unpopular agenda to ban abortion nationwide.
A report from Vanity Fairhighlights new DCCC battleground polling that found that abortion is “more likely to drive voter choice than any other [issue]: 36% of voters would not vote for a candidate for Congress if they disagreed with them on abortion rights.”
In this post-Roe hellscape, Republican politicians now dictate the medical care that pregnant women can and can’t have in red states. If anything, losing this right has only convinced more Americans that abortion is health care. Sixty-three percent of US adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center, and new internal polling provided to me by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee speaks to the political reverberations ahead of the November elections that will determine which party controls the White House and both houses of Congress.
The DCCC found in its battleground polling across 67 congressional districts that abortion “is more likely to drive voter choice than any other: 36% of voters would not vote for a candidate for Congress if they disagreed with them on abortion rights.”
That could be problematic for some of the 125 Republicans who sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which defined the term human being to be “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.” Democrats believe that reproductive rights will help them take back the House.
Impact Research president Molly Murphy, who conducted the DCCC poll, said in an email, “We already know that a majority of voters support protecting reproductive freedom. Our data also shows they will vote on it. The public sees extreme Republicans applauding the Supreme Court overturning Roe and their efforts to pass a nationwide ban — and voters are telling us that they feel so strongly about protecting abortion rights, [that] it’s emerged as a top ‘dealbreaker’ issue for voters.”
When it was first reported that Roe would be overturned, in May 2022, one conservative media figure wrote in Politico, “Abortion Might Not Be the Wedge Issue It Used to Be.” Another followed up weeks later, after the decision was public: “Polls Show Americans Don’t Care that Much about Dobbs—and Won’t Base Their Vote on it.” Of course, abortion rights clearly galvanized voters in the 2022 midterms—and again in the 2023 off-year elections. And yet a few days ago I noticed a GOP pollster seeming to downplay the impact of abortion rights in 2024, writing, “At this point in the 2022 cycle, the Dobbs decision hadn’t happened yet. A reminder of just how fresh this was on voters’ minds in 2022 compared to how likely it is to be this year.”
Perhaps the loss of bodily autonomy is not such a big deal to Republicans, who already seem determined to limit women’s rights in other ways, from restricting birth control to IVF. But voters seem motivated to keep the rights they have—and fight for those threatened by the right. To borrow from James Carville’s famous 1992 election tagline, perhaps the choice for voters in 2024 can be summed as, “It’s the autonomy, stupid.”
