Exclusive: On Abortion, Voters View Democrats as More Extreme Than Republicans by Two to One

U.S. voters believe that the mainstream Democratic Party’s position on abortion is “more extreme” than the mainstream Republican position by a nearly two-to-one margin, according to a new survey from Republican polling firm WPA Intelligence.

The poll of 1,000 voters, which was conducted on October 6–10 and provided exclusively to National Review, presented respondents with two options: “allowing abortions up until 9 months of pregnancy for any reason,” or “restricting abortions to only in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.” When asked which of the two was “more extreme,” 57 percent of respondents chose “allowing abortions up until 9 months of pregnancy for any reason,” as opposed to just 29 percent who chose “restricting abortions to only in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.” Fourteen percent said they were unsure which of the two positions is more extreme.

The new survey may help explain at least part of the reason why the GOP’s post-Dobbs political slump appears to be in the rearview mirror. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, with the six Republican-appointed justices in agreement, conventional wisdom dictated that the abortion issue would be a millstone around the neck of Republicans running in competitive races in the midterms. But just a few months later, the GOP appears to be surging back to pre-summer levels of red-wave momentum: “Not long ago, President Biden and congressional Democrats were riding high,” Matthew Continetti wrote earlier this month. “Now it’s autumn, and there is a chill in the air and a change in the political temperature. Republicans, the polls suggest, have a path to a Senate majority. They are on track to take the House. The GOP has recovered from its summer swoon.”

Much of this has to do with the elevation of other issues — crime, inflation, the border and so on — over abortion; in fact, abortion consistently ranks lower on most voters’ list of priorities than kitchen-table, quality-of-life concerns. But it also has to do with the GOP’s having found its footing, after three months of wandering in the wilderness, when it comes to abortion messaging. Republicans running in once-tight Senate races, like J. D. Vance in Ohio and Marco Rubio in Florida, have stuck the landing when the issue has arisen in recent debates — and their polling leads look increasingly comfortable.

The GOP was momentarily flummoxed by the surge of Democrat attacks following the overturn of Roe. But once Republicans recovered from their defensive crouch on the issue and began going on the attack, pointing out that even the ostensible moderate Democrats running in right-leaning areas refuse to support any restrictions on abortion, left-wing attempts to paint the GOP as extreme lost their potency. The shift drives home the broader point that, in contrast to conventional wisdom in certain segments of the Republican consultant class, the way to win on abortion isn’t to avoid or minimize the issue — it’s to go on the attack. Fifty-seven percent of voters see the stance on abortion held by all but one of the candidates in the 2019 Democratic presidential primaries as more extreme than the mainstream Republican one. That’s the textbook definition of a winning issue. 

The WPA Intelligence poll also illustrated the need for aggressive Republican efforts to counter Democratic Party messaging on abortion. In the poll, 65 percent of Democratic voters believed that “the United States is one of the few countries in the world that limits abortions,” and 59 percent believed that “fewer than 500 abortions are performed each year after 20 weeks of pregnancy.” Of course, neither of those things is true: As National Review has exhaustively catalogued, America’s abortion laws are far more permissive than most of our counterparts in the developed world, and, as Alexandra DeSanctis noted in 2019, “about 12,000 [abortions] take place after viability,” which “means there are more post-viability abortions each year than gun homicides, according to the most recent FBI estimates.”

“As our research shows, one of the reasons why the abortion debate has become so distorted is that the underlying assumptions most Democrats hold about abortion are factually wrong,” WPA Intelligence vice president and director of analytics Matt Knee told NR in a statement. Insofar as the abortion issue could be a weakness for the GOP, it’s often because Republicans have yet to break the left-wing misinformation machine: “Even with strong majorities supporting limits after a certain point, it is harder to find common ground on abortion when the majority of one half of the country believes elective late-term abortion is a myth and that most nations around the world hardly regulate the practice,” Knee said. It’s not that voters are on the Democratic Party’s side — it’s that they’ve been routinely lied to about what Democrats actually believe.