An Epic/MRA poll of “active voters” conducted from August 4-10 reports a 49-42 advantage for John Kerry in Michigan, with 3 percent for Nader, and 6 percent “unsure.”
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 19: Will Abandoned Pro-Choice Republican Voters Flip?
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 Women’s 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 it’s actually odd in several ways. While Republican elected officials are almost monolithically opposed to abortion rights, pro-choice Republican voters didn’t 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 supported Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that struck down pre-viability-abortion bans, five were appointed by Republican presidents, including the author of the majority opinion, Harry Blackmun, and then–Chief Justice Warren Burger. All five justices who voted to confirm the constitutional right to pre-viability abortions in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey were appointed by Republican presidents as well.These pro-choice Republicans weren’t just rogue jurists (though their alleged perfidy has become a deep grievance in the anti-abortion movement). Today’s 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 weren’t 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 then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who signed a bill significantly liberalizing exceptions to an abortion ban in 1967.
The anti-abortion movement’s 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 doesn’t fully explain the GOP’s shift on abortion policy.
Beginning in 1972 with Richard Nixon’s 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 Evangelicals’ 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. Reagan’s 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 parties’ 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 “consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants.”
With the 2020 primary loss by Illinois Democratic representative Dan Lipinski, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, there’s 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 GOP’s ambitious plans for major midterm gains.
“This is going to get ugly in the very near future.”
When John McCain bested Bush in NH back in 2000 and became the darling of Dems, independents, the media and others hungary for authenticity, Bush, feeling cornered, turned to his base in SC; and boy did it deliver.
Look for that again. As Bush and his far right sponsors begin to sense that things are slipping away, we can expect an avalanche of vitriol from those wonderful people who gave us Bob Jones Univ. and the sludge about McCain’s family. Don’t be surprised when Repubs start talking about Gov. McGrevey being palsy with Kerry.
These people have no shame when it comes to winning elections. Its going to get very ugly.
Kerry is kicking off two weeks of economy focused campaigning, and I’m sure he’ll be going to Ohio quite a bit. Ohio does offer one of the best contrasts between what GW says about the economy and what is actually going on. I’m sure the Kerry people would also like to strengthen and secure that 9 point swing ARG is reporting.
I think the cross-country whistlestop tour was a great thing to do between the convention and the olympics, but now its time to get back to the battlegrounds.
Kerry needs to build on Ohio.
This is going to get ugly in the very near future.
It would be nice if the Kerry team could use Bush’s need to go intensley negative against him. Bush is in a corner, and there should be a way to play that to Kerry’s advantage – perhaps by giving the media a narrative about what Bush is being forced to do. If we can get the media to start throwing around terms like ‘desperate’ when they cover Bush attacks, it would help.
Anything that forces Bush to spend more resources on ground that was assumed to be already his, is a good thing as long as Kerry doesn’t spend too many of his own resources.
Just got off the phone from a long conversation with a high school friend from SW Ohio — much of it talking Politics. Look — Kerry needs to get back there and talk Economics and Jobs — but he should also send Wes Clark in to talk Military talk — particularly around Dayton. (They love him in Dayton because of the Dayton Agreements forged at Wright Patterson.) Edwards needs to visit Hamilton and Middletown, both of which are near bankrupt because of the loss of the steel fabricating industry. They won’t win a majority in that neck of the woods — but apparently there are lots of pick-up votes to be had.
Everyone has been assuming that OH would be secure for Bush so the latest ARG poll is very encouraging. Kerry can pin him down there for a long time. It will also be interesting to see if there is any bounce from the winger-lite convention or whether voters are further alienated by smirking Bush, sneering Cheney and the Swift boat attacks. So far the trend is promising. As the election gets closer swing voters appear to be more comfortable with a president Kerry.
With any luck JK will have the blue states sewed up by Labor Day. That leaves two months to take some states Bush won in 2000. Best bets: NH, NV, WVA, MO, & (drum roll) FL.
Now something else! I wonder how this resignation of New Jersey’s Governor Will affect the Polls? The Right Wing is really starting to through the XXXX now.
American Research has posted a poll for Ohio, taken from 8-9 through 8-11. It has Kerry at 48% Bush 45% Nader 2% Undecided 5%. On the heals of the new Florida polls that have Kerry up 6 and 7 points, things are looking pretty damn good!!
I hate to see EDM engaging in this semantics game (even though it was probably unintentional).
A seven point advantage in Hawaii is a ‘strong lead,’ but the same advantage in Michigan means the state is only ’tilting towards’ Kerry.
I think in these times a seven-point lead is a pretty strong no matter what state you’re talking about.
According to Salon.com GWB, while in Florida, said that a national sales tax is “an interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously.”
Yahoo! says that JK is about to start a two week capaign push on the economy and taxes.
I believe this is the break we need. Team Kerry needs to go to the juglar with this comment from Bush. And if he does, I believe, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado will be ripe for the picking. And that would create an insurrmountable electoral lock.