Amidst all the talk about the impact of a likely reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, I thought a history lesson was in order, so I wrote one at New York:
Last week, the Womenâs Health Protection Act, which would have codified abortion rights, died in in the Senate by a vote of 51 to 49. All 210 House Republicans and all 50 Senate Republicans voted against the legislation. This surprised no one, but itâs actually odd in several ways. While Republican elected officials are almost monolithically opposed to abortion rights, pro-choice Republican voters didnât entirely cease to exist, and this could become a problem for the party if, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the right to abortion at the end of this term.
Though polling on the issue is notoriously slippery, our best guess is that a little over a third of Republicans disagree with their party on whether to outlaw abortion (while about one-quarter of Democrats disagree with their party on the topic). These Americans have virtually no representation in Congress with the limited exceptions of Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (both GOP senators support some abortion rights, but they are still opposed the WHPA and are against dropping the filibuster to preserve abortion rights).
Ironically, abortion rights as we know them are, to a considerable extent, the product of Republican lawmaking at every level of government. The most obvious examples are the two Supreme Court decisions that established and reaffirmed a constitutional right to abortion. Of the seven justices who supportedÂ
Roe v.Â
Wade, the 1973 decision thatÂ
struck down pre-viability-abortion bans, five were appointed by Republican presidents, including the author of the majority opinion, Harry Blackmun, and thenâChief Justice Warren Burger. All five justices who voted to confirm the constitutional right to pre-viability abortions in 1992âsÂ
Planned Parenthood v. Casey were appointed by Republican presidents as well.
These pro-choice Republicans werenât just rogue jurists (though their alleged perfidy has become a deep grievance in the anti-abortion movement). Todayâs lock-step opposition to abortion rights among GOP elected officials took a long time to develop. Indeed, before Roe, Republicans were more likely to favor legal abortion than Democrats. In New York and Washington, two of the four states that fully legalized pre-viability abortions in 1970, Republican governors Nelson Rockefeller and Daniel Evans were at the forefront of abortion-rights efforts. They werenât fringe figures; Rockefeller went on to become vice-president of the United States under Gerald Ford. Pre-Roe, various other Republican officials supported more modest efforts to ease abortion bans; among them was thenâCalifornia governor Ronald Reagan, who signed a bill significantly liberalizing exceptions to an abortion ban in 1967.
The anti-abortion movementâs strength in the Republican Party grew steadily after Roe in part because of a more general ideological sorting out of the two major parties as liberals drifted into the Democratic Party and conservatives were drawn into the GOP. To put it another way, there has always been ideological polarization in American politics, but only in recent decades has it been reflected in parallel party polarization. But that doesnât fully explain the GOPâs shift on abortion policy.
Beginning in 1972 with Richard Nixonâs reelection campaign, Republicans began actively trying to recruit historically Democratic Roman Catholic voters. Soon thereafter, they started working to mobilize conservative Evangelical voters. This effort coincided with the Evangelicalsâ conversion into strident abortion opponents, though they were generally in favor of the modest liberalization of abortion laws until the late 1970s. All these trends culminated in the adoption of a militantly anti-abortion platform plank in the 1980 Republican National Convention that nominated Reagan for president. The Gipper said he regretted his earlier openness to relaxed abortion laws. Reaganâs strongest intraparty rival was George H.W. Bush, the scion of a family with a powerful multigenerational connection to Planned Parenthood. He found it expedient to renounce any support for abortion rights before launching his campaign.
Still, there remained a significant pro-choice faction among Republican elected officials until quite recently. In 1992, the year Republican Supreme Court appointees saved abortion rights in Casey, there was a healthy number of pro-choice Republicans serving in the Senate: Ted Stevens of Alaska, John Seymour of California, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, William Cohen of Maine, Bob Packwood of Oregon, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, John Warner of Virginia, and Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. Another, John Heinz of Pennsylvania, had recently died.
Partisan polarization on abortion (which, of course, was taking place among Democrats as well) has been slow but steady, as Aaron Blake of the Washington Post recently observed:
“In a 1997 study, Carnegie Mellon University professor Greg D. Adams sought to track abortion votes in Congress over time. His finding: In the Senate, there was almost no daylight between the two parties in 1973, with both parties voting for ‘pro-choice’ positions about 40 percent of the time.
“But that quickly changed.
“There was more of a difference in the House in 1973, with Republicans significantly more opposed to abortion rights than both House Democrats and senators of both parties. But there, too, the gap soon widened.
“Including votes in both chambers, Adams found that a 22 percentage- point gap between the two partiesâ votes in 1973 expanded to nearly 65 points two decades later, after Casey was decided.”
By 2018, every pro-choice House Republican had been defeated or had retired. The rigidity of the party line on abortion was perhaps best reflected in late 2019, when a House Democrat with a record of strong support for abortion rights, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, switched parties. Almost instantly, Van Drew switched sides on reproductive rights and was hailed by the hard-core anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List for voting âconsistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants.â
With the 2020 primary loss by Illinois Democratic representative Dan Lipinski, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, thereâs now just one House member whose abortion stance is out of step with his party: Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who is very vulnerable to defeat in a May 24 runoff.
If the Supreme Court does fully reverse Roe in the coming weeks, making abortion a more highly salient 2022 campaign issue, the one-third of pro-choice Republican voters may take issue with their lack of congressional representation. Will the first big threat to abortion rights in nearly a half-century make them change their priorities? Or will they still care more about party loyalty and issues like inflation? Perhaps nothing will change for most of these voters. But in close races, the abandoned tradition of pro-choice Republicanism could make a comeback to the detriment of the GOPâs ambitious plans for major midterm gains.
NEWSWEEK/TIME POLLING IS A JOKE.IT MAY AS WELL BEEN DONE BY THE RNC.38%REPUBLICANS WERE POLLED,31%DEMOCRATS AND 31%INDEPENDENT.THAT IS DICTATING AN OUTCOME.
It excludes the indigent who don’t have internet access or email accounts. Although, most of them are probably more likely to vote for Kerry anyway…
The only surprise here is Iowa — for Bush?
Isn’t it more likely for Dems to have internet?
I doubt it. Isn’t the Internet more likely to be used by the more wealthy, and doesn’t that mean Republicans?
Like xdog and John Mcc, I’m on Zogby’s email polling list.
xdog gave a good description of what we see when we respond.
I’ll note, as I have a couple times previously on this board, that the answer options to the Zogby question on party identification don’t include the Democratic party. Instead, Zogby lists that mythical dittohead creation, the “Democrat” party.
I’ve emailed several zogby contact names several times on the error, with no respons. This last time, I included a Google search URL for “Democrat party” on rushlimbaugh.com.
I’ll be curious to see if the error is corrected in the next poll. Maybe I accomplished nothing more than getting my email removed from the list.
Gore’s speech is getting news airtime. MoveOn might want to replay it in its entirety to take advantage of the publicity. CNN played a decent soundbite of it this morning.
Pelosi, Gore. The language of condemnation is getting stronger. What is needed is a Republican voice to speak as strongly along the same lines so as to take the partisan onus off the words. Of course, anyone who did so would be immediately ostracized from the GOP, but then if Zel Miller can shill for the GOP, someone in the GOP can find enough integrity to call Bush out on his ineptitude. I think it would have to be a CA Republican. There’s got to be a CA Republican with a liberal enough constituency who could make this move without putting his seat too much on the line.
I just finished watching Al Gore’s speech at NYU on the C-span. Wow! It was a beaut. Gore hit Bush about as hard as anyone has.
I hope Move-on.org which sponsored the event finds a way to play it again and again over the next few weeks. It will really help Kerry. Its the kind of surrogate help that Kerry has needed.
If you check out the National Council on Public Polling’s website (www.ncpp.org/poll_perform.htm) you will see that in the 2000 election the closest results were from, believe it or not: Harris Interactive!! Harris Interactive, if I’m reading the results correctly, came closer than any other pollster (including Zogby and CBS) except maybe the regular Harris polling. Maybe there is something to this interactive polling.
xdog – I’m no pollster, but from my understanding of probability, it’s not a factor of 2, but of squareroot(2) =~ 1.41
You’re right angry moderate. I see that happen all over the place, but am a bit suprised to see it here.
Ruy – Ohio isn’t outside the MOE. Aren’t you supposed to double the reported MOE for two-person contests because the MOE is for each individual number, i.e. +/-3 for Kerry individually and Bush so margin would have to be over 6 to be 95% certainty that Kerry is leading. I’ve read this in numerous places including an SSRC guide to interpreting polls so assume it must be true. Did you let down your guard here?
I’ve participated in Zogby on-line polls for a couple of years. He leads with a few questions to determine past voting preferences, party registration, union membership, and the like before getting to the issue at hand (usually national politics although the last was nano-tech–I passed) and closing with demographic questions.
I’m in GA, which is far from being in play.
I realize that Zogby isn’t about to explain the methodolgy but just as with Robo polls the results a can be compared to random sample phone interview polls run contemporaneously.
I receive my email notices during roughly the same period as the Zogby telephone polls
I am in the Zogby internet polling population though
DEFINITELY not in a battleground state (Kerry +15 in CA..Field Poll)..
I have been doing this for 3 years or so but thought that the project was experimental.
Is this not still the case?
AND
What are the methodolgical probems
The methodology page on the “interactive version” says as much:
“Slight weightings were applied to ensure that the selection of participants accurately reflects characteristics of voting population, including region, party, age, race, religion, and gender.”
I imagine that you list your party affiliation and other demographic info, and then John Zogby takes the data, and tweeks the sample based on party affiliation.
For example, say in state A, 75% of the respondats were Dems, 15% were Indys, and 10% were Repubs. However, the actual party registration breakdown in state A is 45% Dem, 40% Repub, and 15% Indy. So, JZ would just do a sample dist of 45% D, 40% R, and 15% I.
Ya, but Republicans tend to stuff the ballots more than Dems đ
My question is, how does responding to an email make the process more accurate? I mean, unless Zogby has some sort of vetting process…
Isn’t it more likely for Dems to have internet?