On the issues moms care most about—women’s rights, gun safety and healthcare—Donald Trump has a problem: his stacking of the Supreme Court.
As summer winds down and kids head back to school, parents have a lot on their minds. They’re coordinating extracurricular activities, signing up for PTA events, timing pickup and drop-off with their work schedules and—oh yes, deciding who they’ll vote for in the fall. So it makes sense that both political parties are focusing on a key constituency: moms.
Whether we gave birth, used a surrogate or adopted—or whether we’re called “mom,” “auntie,” “godmother” or “Momala”—we all have a stake in our children’s futures, and we vote like it. Moms are a key voting bloc that remains persuadable.
This means any road to the White House runs through moms. But new polling from Demand Justice shows that on the issues moms care most about—women’s rights, gun safety and healthcare—former President Donald Trump has a problem: his stacking of the U.S. Supreme Court with extremist justices.
Two-thirds of moms in swing states believe that the Supreme Court was wrong to overturn Roe v. Wade. Another two-thirds disagree with the Court’s recent decision to overturn a 100-year-old gun safety law in New York. And 60 percent are “very concerned” with the Court’s decision this term not to guarantee access to emergency abortion care.
Whether we gave birth, used a surrogate or adopted—or whether we’re called ‘mom,’ ‘auntie,’ ‘godmother’ or ‘Momala’—we all have a stake in our children’s futures, and we vote like it.
While the Supreme Court has wreaked havoc on issues that matter to women and families, many people, including many moms, aren’t connecting the dots on who is responsible for the Court’s extremism—and that’s where we come in. A stunning 46 percent of moms surveyed in swing states either believed that Joe Biden was responsible for the Court overturning Roe, or weren’t sure who was responsible.
If so few moms know Trump-appointed justices produced the decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion—a watershed moment that received enormous media, political and cultural attention—then imagine how few know what other impacts the MAGA Court has had on their lives.
This information gap is extremely troubling given future presidents will appoint justices who can push their extremist views knowing they won’t be held accountable for the damage the Supreme Court causes. But it’s also a voter education opportunity. When moms head to the ballot box this November, we want the Supreme Court to be top-of-mind when comparing candidates.
While advocacy is our day job, we’re moms first. Our families’ futures are intertwined with our work. In many ways, we are advocates because we are moms—and this radical Supreme Court majority has put our lives, families and communities at risk. That’s why we’re excited to be part of a new campaign, Moms for a Fair Court, to ensure moms across America have access to information about the Supreme Court and all of our courts, including the role our elected leaders can play in making sure our courts are fair and work to protect our fundamental freedoms.
This summer alone, the Trump-appointed justices radically reshaped decades of Supreme Court doctrine to fit within a new MAGA framework.
They refused to definitively rule that everybody has the right to bodily autonomy and emergency abortion care. This left people in states with abortion bans in limbo, leaving an untold amount of people to face medically dire situations where their health and lives will be on the line.
The Court also overturned the 40-year-old framework for how courts review regulations, threatening health, climate and labor protections that have existed for generations endangering our kids’ futures.
And they overturned a bipartisan ban on bump stocks, a device used in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre that turns a gun into an automatic weapon.
After receiving information about how certain justices on the Supreme Court have put families’ futures at risk, the number of moms in swing states who say the Court will be ‘very important’ to their decision in November increases by 16 percent.
Moms deserve to know who was responsible for those decisions. The constant barrage of information and misinformation, combined with managing the stresses of daily life, makes analyzing the Supreme Court difficult. However, when moms have the whole story, data shows they make the connection. After receiving information about how certain justices on the Supreme Court have put families’ futures at risk, the number of moms in swing states who say the Court will be “very important” to their decision in November increases by 16 percent.
That’s why we’re calling on moms like us to demand a Court that protects our kids’ rights—not reverses them. To talk to other moms about what this Court means for their families.
There’s perhaps no issue on which the stakes are higher for our families and loved ones than the Supreme Court. That’s not a warning—it’s a rallying cry. We know that moms can do anything and everything when their kids’ futures are on the line. So we’re determined to make sure they have the information they need to do just that.
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