Polls showing that inflation will be the dominant issue in the upcoming election miss the potency of women’s anger over abortion—and their massive influence within the electorate.
Abortion rights were guaranteed by the Supreme Court in 1973 and that was that. At least that’s what supporters thought for nearly five decades. And so, when they went to the polls, they based their votes for presidents, Congress members and other elected officials on issues they considered to be more pressing.
But after the Supreme Court’s unprecedented 2022 decision to revoke a constitutional right, abortion changed the course of elections for two years running. As the nation approaches the first presidential election of the post-Roe era, Democrats—who are fielding a woman presidential candidate who champions abortion rights—are banking on the issue to bolster them again.
Many public polls predict it won’t.
While the vast majority of Americans favor abortion rights, numerous public opinion polls conducted for media organizations suggest the topic has lost its potency, even among women. If any one thing will sway them, these polls say, it is the economy (and, more specifically, inflation).
That would be bad news for Democrats and their new standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris. Women are the backbone of the party. Without their strong support, many Democratic candidates for office—from Harris on down—surely will lose.
But are these polls right?
Not so much, say numerous polling experts, most (but not all) of them partisan. Media polls on issues, they say, are greatly flawed because they fail to ask questions that could predict what will move voters to back one candidate over another. The polls find that the economy is top of mind among the people interviewed—usually based on how they rank a list of issues—but not whether it will influence their votes. And there are many reasons to think it will not.
This article was produced in collaboration with The Fuller Project. It appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms., which hit newsstands Sept. 24. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
In essence, experts told Ms., “it’s the economy, stupid” made sense when James Carville scribbled it on a whiteboard in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign war room, but the slogan’s salience 32 years later is less assured.
For one thing, today’s presidential nominees are further apart in both policy and persona than were George H.W. Bush and Clinton (and even independent candidate H. Ross Perot). Harris and former President Donald Trump stand in stark contrast to each other in substance, style, identity and experience. The American public is much more polarized than it was in the days when Democrats and Republicans could discuss politics without destroying lifelong relationships or disrupting Thanksgiving dinners. All but a sliver of the electorate is set in its ways, destined to vote for the party that it backed four years ago, experts say. That means relatively few voters are up for grabs.
On top of that, the economy is rather amorphous and difficult to comprehend, unlike immigration or gun rights or trans rights or any of the other culture-war issues du jour.
And very much unlike abortion.
In contrast to the economy, abortion evokes visceral reactions. Either you believe that women should be able to make decisions about their bodies, or you don’t. Either you believe that abortion is murder, or you don’t. You might support some exceptions, or you might not, but you probably have a position—a deep-seated belief—that doesn’t change with the Dow or the wind or the makeup of the Supreme Court.
You might not know what to think when the Federal Reserve raises or lowers interest rates, but you probably had an instant reaction when the Court overturned Roe v. Wade. You probably remember what you thought when the Arizona Supreme Court let stand a Civil War-era abortion ban or when Alabama, even briefly, outlawed in vitro fertilization. You probably felt something when the Texas attorney general effectively blocked Kate Cox from ending a dangerous pregnancy, though the fetus could not survive; when Ohio police arrested Brittany Watts following a miscarriage; when an Indianapolis doctor said she had performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim who had been denied medical care in her home state of Ohio; or each time you heard that a pregnant woman was turned away from an emergency room.
Whether you support abortion rights or not, you probably know how you felt when you learned about each of those incidents.
Especially if you’re a woman.
The American dream is freedom to choose—except for one group of people.
Anna Greenberg, pollster
The effect is particularly profound in states that have restricted abortion access, says Rachael Russell, associate director of polling and analytics at Navigator Research, which uses its polls to help craft Democratic messaging.
“People are actually seeing people suffer under these bans. And I don’t see that changing, especially when you have the Republican nominee saying it should be up to the states. Women and men say, ‘That could be my daughter, that could be my friend, that could be my relative,’” she told Ms. “It’s galvanizing when people see it in personal terms.”
That’s exactly what Democrats are counting on—not only to retain the White House but also to keep control of the Senate and perhaps take over the House of Representatives. Both chambers are narrowly divided, and one or both could change hands. The closer we draw to Election Day, the more pollsters and political experts expect Democratic candidates at every level to talk about abortion, contraception and women’s rights.
That stands to reason: A poll conducted by Lake Research Partners for Ms. and the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2023 found that voters are overwhelmingly in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. While abortion and the ERA are, individually, strong draws for voter turnouts, talking about the two issues together is even more powerful, the poll said.
“Harris’ best chance for winning is if abortion rights are central to voters when they make their choice between her and Trump,” says Democratic pollster Jim Gerstein.
Democrats’ advantage on the issue intensified when Harris became the presidential nominee. Unlike President Joe Biden, an observant Catholic who began his political career opposing abortion rights, Harris has been vocal and robust in her support. She is the highest elected official ever to visit a Planned Parenthood clinic, and has been the administration’s point person on the issue.
Her inherent strength on abortion was apparent in a Wall Street Journal poll conducted in late July, just four days after Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed her. Asked who is “best able to handle” abortion, 51 percent of respondents said Harris and 33 percent said Trump, a yawning gap that dwarfed the 12-point advantage Biden had over Trump in a Journal poll conducted in seven battleground states four months earlier. In both polls, Trump dominated on the economy, though Harris fared better than Biden.
Gerstein, whose firm conducts polls for the Journal in addition to several Democratic campaign committees, says it took some time for party strategists to come to terms with the importance of abortion rights in campaign messaging because it has not been prominent in the past.
“Reiterating this argument has been a driving force for myself and other strategists ever since it was clear that the Dobbs decision completely transformed the political environment two years ago,” Gerstein says, referring to the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “We also had to overcome the traditional tendency of campaigns to prioritize economic and other issues.”
Sure, the economy remains at or near the top of most poll respondents’ lists. Inflation, in particular, is something they deal with day in and day out. But “when you ask what issue is dispositive, it’s abortion,” Gerstein says.
The Harris team understands this. On the day after Labor Day—the traditional kickoff for the round-the-clock race to Election Day—the campaign launched a 50-plus stop “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour through key states. The starting point is Palm Beach, Fla., home to Donald Trump. The first-of-its-kind bus tour illustrates the profound shift in abortion politics since Roe fell.
In a Wall Street Journal poll completed in early July, respondents were given a list of issues and asked to rank their importance in the presidential election. They ranked immigration first (19 percent) and the economy second (16 percent). Democracy and abortion each came in third (9 percent).
And yet, when asked to identify “the one issue” on which they could not vote for a candidate they disagreed with, the largest chunk of respondents—24 percent—named abortion. Another 19 percent said immigration is their make-or-break issue. Only 6 percent named the economy.
“They’re voting on the thing that’s pissing them off,” says Democratic pollster Jill Normington.
(Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College)
It’s that anger, that upset, that intensity of feeling that often gets lost when media pollsters run down a list of issues and ask participants to rank them.
Partisan polls pose different questions than media polls, in part because they serve a different purpose, Normington notes. Democratic and Republican pollsters aren’t simply taking the temperature of a race, they’re figuring out how to influence it. They ask a series of questions aimed at determining which topics resonate most, what messages participants are receptive to and what candidates can do to appeal to them. They also conduct focus groups, small gatherings in which they ask open-ended ended questions that allow participants to discuss and frame their opinions in their own words.
“When you talk about abortion as an issue in a list, it kind of obscures that something much more fundamental is going on,” says Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. “You talk about what would happen if Trump is elected. To women, it’s happening right now. It underrepresents how fundamentally disturbed women are.”
Women are “much more focused on abortion than men,” Greenberg says.
“I feel like we’re going to win on the abortion issue,” which, she adds, is “existential” for women and linked to threats to democracy. “The women I talk to in focus groups say, ‘They’re taking away our rights.’ That’s huge. The American dream is freedom to choose—except for one group of people.”
Polls reflect that while the majority of men and women back abortion rights, there is a significant gender gap as women voice stronger support nationwide and in the handful of battleground states expected to decide the presidential race. In polls of likely voters in six such states conducted in May by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College, 64 percent of respondents said they believe abortion should be always or mostly legal—including 70 percent of women and 58 percent of men, a 12-point gender gap. Only 27 percent (25 percent of women and 29 percent of men) said abortion should be always or mostly illegal.
Women are much more likely than men—and more likely than at any time in nearly three decades—to call themselves “pro-choice,” according to a May poll by Gallup, a nonpartisan polling firm. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of women used the pro-choice label compared to 45 percent of men.
It goes without saying that the people who will have to live with the Court’s decision longest and more personally are young. It’s unclear whether those under 30 will flock to the polls at the same rate they did four years ago.
That year, young voters cast ballots in greater percentages than in any year since 1972, just one year after 18-year-olds won the right to vote. And they voted disproportionately for Biden.
This year, polls showed young voters souring on the president. But within just 48 hours of Harris entering the race, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote—83 percent of them in the 18-to-34 age group, according to the nonprofit Vote.org.
The well-regarded Harvard Institute of Politics poll of people under 30 showed this spring that their concerns mirror those of their elders. Asked which issues concerned them most, the largest group—27 percent of respondents— said economic issues, followed by 9 percent who named immigration and 8 percent who said foreign policy or national security. Abortion and reproductive rights topped the list for 6 percent of respondents. However, when asked to make head-to-head comparisons of 16 issues, the young respondents said inflation was more important than any other issue except one: women’s reproductive rights. Not surprisingly, women under 30 ranked the importance of their reproductive rights compared to all other issues higher than did their male counterparts, 58 percent to 42 percent, respectively.
“There’s nothing more tangible than whether a young woman has authority over her own body,” says John Della Volpe, the Harvard institute’s polling director. In discussions, he says, some young people have told him they are reluctant to live or attend college in states that have restricted abortion access or banned it altogether. “That’s why it has the potential to be very powerful [in the election],” he adds.
People who say abortion will affect how they vote could be on either side of the issue. But it’s clear that more of them will support abortion rights. Gallup reported in June that nearly one-third of voters—a record high—said they would vote only for candidates whose views on abortion are the same as their own. Nearly twice as many of these voters (40 percent) said they support abortion rights as those who said they oppose them (22 percent). By comparison, 20 years ago Americans who identified as antiabortion were nearly three times as likely as abortion-rights supporters to say they would vote only for candidates with whom they agreed on abortion, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
The narrative was reversed in June 2022, when the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs, the first and, for now, only ruling to repeal a constitutional right. Abortion-rights advocates got to work, quickly tapping into the fury that the ruling unleashed nationwide.
Their strategy was successful. They took abortion to the voters and won every state initiative and referendum on abortion rights, enshrining access in some state constitutions and blocking attempts to prohibit access in others. In the 2022 midterm elections, just months after the Dobbs ruling, Democrats spent half a billion dollars campaigning on abortion on network TV alone, says Melissa Williams, executive director of a super PAC for EMILYs List, which recruits, trains and sponsors Democratic women who support abortion rights. Even as the media predicted a tsunami of GOP victories, Democrats’ internal polling suggested something else—the efficacy of abortion rights— particularly among voters under 35.
“It has been a fundamental shift in paths to victory for Democrats since Dobbs,” Williams says.
This year, advocates have been working not only to elect specific candidates but also to place abortion-rights initiatives on the ballots of several more states, a move that may drive up turnout. This comes at a time when, Williams notes, 58 percent of voters under 35 and 51 percent of all voters say abortion is more important to them than it was in past election cycles.
“That’s unheard of. That’s a marked finding,” she says. “People are very rarely single-issue voters, and what they care about over time, of course, changes because your life changes and the world changes around you. But to have that for two years in a row, that a majority of people would care more about a single issue, then to have Democrats overperforming on that issue, I think it’s very telling.”
And so, she says, “abortion is a critical component of any campaign that we are running, and that is because Republicans have proven themselves to be out of step with Americans.”
Where Republicans and Trump dominate, and have for quite some time, is among men. Democrats definitely need the support of women, but Republicans already have the support of men. Therefore, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, “We need to win women by more than we lose men.”
Starting in 1980, women have consistently voted for Democrats in greater proportion than have men, creating a notable gender gap. It wasn’t until 1996, when then-President Clinton was running for reelection, that women changed the outcome of a race by voting Democratic in such great numbers that they overcame men’s preference for Republican nominee Bob Dole. Since then, a majority of women have voted Democratic in every presidential race.
Men, on the other hand, usually favor Republicans (except in 2008, when they split almost evenly between Barack Obama and John McCain).
It is often said that women (like any other group) are not a monolith. That’s an understatement. Just ask any woman if she’s interested in only one issue. The entire electorate comprises individual voters with myriad concerns about the future of this country. Women, however, are a majority of the population. They also vote in greater percentages than men, making them a potentially powerful demographic. So it is reasonable to think that if most women coalesce around one candidate or even around one issue, they will prevail. This year, abortion is the dominant issue for many women. But will that give the Democrats the boost they need?
It could turn out to be one of those seminal issues that gets people in their guts and rises above quotidian concerns about the price of milk or even housing. Advocates say that’s what the media often overlooks.
“The people who too often frame our conventional wisdom—so this is, to some degree, the pundits; this is, to some degree, the news directors and so on—still seem amazed that this is an issue that matters, and still seem amazed that the answer isn’t just to compromise, to find a number of weeks,” says Christina Reynolds, a spokesperson for EMILYs List. “And our take, writ large, and that of our candidates, is this is not a question of how many weeks—it’s a question of who gets to decide.”
“And voters are in the same place,” Reynolds continues. “What they very clearly understand is that whether or not they would ever have an abortion, whether or not they want one, etc., whether or not they are of childbearing years or anything like that, they understand that putting government in charge of these decisions is not where they want to be.”
Republicans acknowledge that the electoral power of abortion now works to the advantage of Democrats. That explains why Trump has struggled to position himself on the reproductive rights spectrum. In the spring, he landed on “states’ rights,” meaning each state should continue to establish its own laws on whether and under what conditions abortion is legal. It’s a divisive position among the staunchest abortion opponents, who believe no one should have the right to terminate a pregnancy. (That’s what Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, espoused before he joined the GOP ticket and adopted new verbiage.)
The people who too often frame our conventional wisdom … still seem amazed that this is an issue that matters, and still seem amazed that the answer isn’t just to compromise, to find a number of weeks. … This is not a question of how many weeks—it’s a question of who gets to decide.
Christina Reynolds, EMILYs List
And it plays into the hands of Democrats, who need only point to the current legal patchwork that has prompted hospitals in restrictive states to turn away pregnant women; forced people across a wide swath of the country, particularly in the South, to travel to other states to obtain abortions; and led to heart-wrenching stories from sympathetic women and girls that make people angry enough to want to do something about it. Against that backdrop, Trump told reporters in August that abortion as an issue has “tempered down.”
“It is still going to be a relevant issue because, quite frankly, it is about the only issue Democrats have an advantage on in this election,” Republican pollster Nicole McCleskey concedes. “They will continue to make it a relevant issue.”
But McCleskey believes the “shock value” of the Supreme Court’s decision to take away the constitutional right to abortion has faded. So while she agrees with Democrats that abortion has an “emotional impact,” she, like Trump, downplays its potential to influence voters.
“The two dominant issues are the economy and inflation, and immigration and border security,” McCleskey says. “And those issues are entirely dominated by Republicans, and voters believe that Republicans will handle those issues better.”
That’s what most polls predicted two years ago—when conventional wisdom had Republicans clobbering Democrats in Congress—but voters had something different in mind, notes Diana Mutz, director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the University of Pennsylvania. Democrats did lose the House, but the divide is slim, and they won a seat to secure a majority in the Senate. Since the party that occupies the White House routinely loses power during midterm congressional elections, Democrats took 2022 as a big win.
In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mutz and a coauthor reviewed 2020 and 2022 surveys of the same individuals to see how they voted each year. Most, she says, voted for candidates of the same party in both elections. But following the Dobbs ruling, a number of people who support abortion rights moved into the Democratic camp just as those who oppose abortion moved into the Republican camp. The study concluded that a large proportion of people who did not vote in 2020 but did two years later were “highly motivated by abortion.” Since more Americans favor abortion rights, Democrats had the edge.
As for inflation, which by November 2022 had hit its highest point in four decades, Republicans blamed Democrats and Democrats blamed Republicans, Mutz notes. Independent voters blamed both or neither. Why were the results so muddied? Many respondents didn’t understand the economy and couldn’t answer “basic factual questions,” such as whether unemployment had risen or declined, Mutz says.
Her study concluded that the economy—even inflation—did not change votes. “The only thing that seemed to matter,” Mutz says, “was abortion.”
What does that mean for 2024? “If they don’t try and make abortion salient before the election, that would be very silly on the part of Democrats, because it does help their cause,” Mutz says.
The lesson is not lost on Democrats and abortion-rights advocates.
“This is an issue that resonates with people all over the country,” EMILYs List President Jessica Mackler said at a press conference in late July. “And we are going to win in November by talking about this issue.”
Up next:
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