Democrats believe that abortion is a big issue and that will give them a “Roevember” win in the midterms, because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
That’s the reason why — when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was asked about the importance of abortion, given polls that showed inflation and crime were the most important issues to Americans — she balked. Pelosi said she dismissed that, that “women’s freedom” was going to weigh heavily in the election. Joe Biden made similar remarks when he was asked by Fox’s Peter Doocy what his top domestic priority was — abortion or inflation. Biden gave a weaselly response, saying all the issues were important, and he insulted Doocy into the bargain.
Abortion doesn’t come up in the top three issues in most polls — it’s generally far down the list. Voters think Democrats are focused on Jan. 6, abortion, and climate change. That isn’t helping them, that’s hurting them, because voters don’t think they’re focused on the right things.
But even if Democrats think that this is an issue that is somehow going to save them, there’s a new poll out that puts paid to their hopes and dreams.
Who do American voters think has the more extreme position on abortion? Democrats are banking that most Americans think it’s the Republicans and that will count against them. But the new poll from WPA Intelligence for the National Review has a surprising result.
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.
That’s by an almost two-to-one difference. This means that Americans are parsing through the nonsense Democrats are pushing and see who the real extremists with abortion are — that’s almost all the Democratic candidates. Almost all of them have bought into the “abortion until birth for any reason” position. It also means that the Republicans’ effort to make that case is resonating with Americans.
Here’s an example that we covered in the debate between Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) and J.D. Vance, where Vance showed how to drive that point home.
Now, there’s still more that Republicans can do to counter the misinformation being promoted by the Democrats, as National Review explains.
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.
But if the Democrats thought they were going to be saved by the abortion issue, it looks like the Republicans may have just managed to turn the tables on them and made it one more albatross around their necks that will sink them in the election.