Voters are not entirely aligned with either side on this issue. But there is a big opening for the GOP to persuade a majority.
Voters are not entirely aligned with either side on this issue. But there is a big opening for the GOP to persuade a majority.
B y most accounts, American views on abortion sit somewhere between the two parties. While “abortion supporters often cite polls showing that about seven in ten Americans say they don’t want Roe overturned,” Alexandra DeSanctis noted earlier this week, “public opinion on abortion is far more complex than they want to admit.” Some of this stems from a basic confusion about what Roe does: Incoherently, some polls that show that a significant majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe simultaneously show that Americans are more or less split on whether abortion should be legal.
It gets even more complicated when you drill down into the details of when abortion should be legal — and when it shouldn’t. DeSanctis writes:
A Gallup poll from a few years back found that only 28 percent of Americans favor allowing abortion in the second trimester, and only 13 percent of Americans favor allowing it in the last three months of pregnancy — compared to 60 percent who would allow it in the first trimester.
Polling from Marist likewise suggests that most Americans tend not to support elective abortion later in pregnancy.
Notably, the “hard cases” are an infinitesimally small portion of abortions in America. Even according to studies from pro-abortion-rights groups, the vast majority of abortions are elective — according to the highest estimates of “hard cases,” a rape and incest exemption would still ban some 98 percent of abortions.
In other words, American opinion on abortion rights is highly fluid, and many voters are up for grabs. In the now seemingly likely event that Roe is consigned to the ash heap of history, abortion will reenter the political process in a way that has not been seen for just shy of a half century. Republicans, who have long had the luxury of defining their position on abortion with vague hand-waving about Roe and pro-life judges, will have to answer difficult questions about how far they’re willing to go on the issue. But so will Democrats. And given that voters are not entirely aligned with either side, the party with a better message will be the one that ultimately prevails.
It’s true that the Republican platform’s official position on abortion — which calls not just for overturning Roe, but for a pro-life amendment to the Constitution — represents a minority view. And if abortion law is freed from the constraints imposed by Roe, the GOP will also find itself in a delicate balancing act between the pro-life activists in its base and the moderates it needs to cobble together to sustain a national coalition. Purple-state Republican congressional candidates will no doubt be pressed on whether they favor national restrictions or bans. Red-state legislators will need to wrestle with how far their pro-life laws are willing to go: Heartbeat bills, which ban abortion at around six weeks of gestation and have been passed in a large swath of the South? Or 15-week bans, like the Mississippi law in question in Dobbs? “Hard case” exceptions, like Idaho’s heartbeat bill? Or blanket bans, like the one Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson signed in 2019?
Democrats will press these questions again and again in the months and years ahead. They will try to define their opponents in the context of their least popular positions on abortion. In response, Republicans need to get out ahead on the issue and define the terms of debate early and often. If they don’t, the GOP could be caught flat-footed in a post-Roe America. The party must go on the attack.
The modern Democratic Party’s line on abortion is at least as out of step with public opinion as that of the GOP. Bill Clinton’s famous adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” is now a thing of the past. Despite the fact that Andrew Yang supported legal abortion on-demand up until the point of birth, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate was pilloried by his fellow partisans for arguing that Democrats “have to get back to the point where no one is suggesting that we be celebrating an abortion at any point in the pregnancy.” And it’s not just rhetorical — as I wrote yesterday, Democrats today hold the most unapologetically radical line on abortion of any major political party in the Western world.
In the hysterical post-Roe scramble, Democrats are sure to show their hand on this radicalism. Earlier this week, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) announced that the upper chamber would hold another vote on the radical Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy nationwide. As David Harsanyi wrote yesterday, “passing Schumer’s bill would likely translate into thousands of viable babies being dismembered for nothing more than convenience (well, thousands more than the approximately 10,000 already killed yearly in late-term abortions).”
Even the ostensibly moderate members of the Democratic coalition are hostages of the party’s activist base on this issue. Just this week, Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman who is running for Ohio’s open Senate seat in 2022, refused to endorse any restrictions on abortion whatsoever, telling Fox News’ Bret Baier that “you got to leave it up to the woman.” Democrats who are willing to push back against their party’s abortion radicalism are few and far between these days. One of the last genuinely pro-life Democrats in the House, Dan Lipinski, lost his suburban Chicago seat to a well-funded primary challenger in 2020. His pro-abortion-rights opponent, who narrowly fell short of unseating Lipinski in her first primary challenge in 2018, netted $114,550 from the pro-abortion-rights group Emily’s List — her top donor — over the course of the last two campaign cycles. Already, abortion activists are working themselves into a frenzy about the Democratic Party leadership’s decision to back Representative Henry Cuellar (D., Texas), the only House Democrat to vote against the codification of Roe and Casey last year.
Abortion on demand, for any reason, up to the point of birth is now the Democratic Party’s de facto position. Republicans should be sure to point that out, regularly and loudly, in the fight ahead.