Also in the Wall Street Journal poll that both Noah and I wrote about this morning was this little nugget:
A six-week abortion ban, which he signed into law last week, is overwhelmingly popular with Republicans but opposed by 53% of voters overall, including 64% of white suburban women, a coveted swing group.
The “he” in that sentence is Governor DeSantis of Florida. But the Journal’s poll is national. And the question is not whether Florida’s law is good, but a more general, “Do you favor or oppose banning all abortions after 6 weeks except in the cases of rape, incest, and life of the mother?” Per the crosstabs, the breakdown of responses comes out at 41 percent favor, 53 percent oppose, 6 percent don’t know/refused.
Which, if true, is pretty encouraging! Historically, the public has drawn a sharp distinction between the first trimester and the second and third trimesters. Gallup has been polling this issue nationally for years, and while the numbers have fluctuated a little, the trend has remained pretty clear: Around two-thirds of Americans thought that abortion should be legal in the first trimester, but, after that, support dropped off a cliff. If we average out the responses that Gallup obtained between July 1996 and May 2022 (which, weirdly, was the last time Gallup asked the same set of questions), we see 64 percent of Americans believing that “abortion should generally be legal” “in the first three months of pregnancy,” with 31 percent of Americans thinking that it should be “generally illegal” during that time. Whereas, in the second trimester, the averaged “generally legal” percentage was 27, while the averaged “generally illegal” percentage was 65, and, in the third trimester, the averaged “generally legal” number was 13 percent, while the averaged “generally illegal” number was 81 percent. The high-water mark of support for abortion in Gallup came in May 2022 — presumably in response to the Dobbs leak. The low-water marks for support came in March 2000 for the second and third trimesters, and in May 2018 for the first trimester.
Which means that, if the Wall Street Journal‘s poll is correct — a big if, I’ll grant — something important has changed. At no point in the history of Gallup’s polling on this issue did it find 41 support for a ban on abortion before twelve weeks. The closest Gallup ever got to that was 35 percent, in 2011. If, indeed, more than four in ten Americans now support bans at six weeks — half of the previous threshold — then the Overton Window has been shifted and we’re into a whole new phase of the debate.