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.
PEW and Andy Kohut had the race right on… with this pre-election prediction release…
check it out peoplepress.org
Not so much horse and buggy huh?
Mady..about Zogby, Kerry had a lead last week. Bush had a lead at the end of last week/ the beginning of this one. Now its tied. Indicates that the race is pretty stable right now in a tie.
ABC WaPo is easy. Look at their registered voter data. A huge change 3 days ago from a pretty even split to about a 6 point spread that is fairly stable over 3 days. Indicates to me a pretty big Bush outlier came on 3 days ago, and since then we’ve had 48-47 or so splits. When that big day rolls off, it’ll move closer to tied again. It’s a 4 day moving average, so I expect one more bad spread for us and then, bam, back to normal.
Mady –
One clear difference between the Washington Post/ABC poll and all other polls whose methods I’ve seen described in sufficient detail is that the Post/ABC poll does not weight respondents for Hispanic origin. Hispanics are, as far as I can tell, lumped in with whites.
I would expect that Hispanics with high school education or less would have an extremely low rate of participation in a poll, because of long working hours and language barrier. (Even if you speak a non-native language reasonably well, do you speak it well enough to feel like doing a 20-minutes telephone interview?) The non-participating low-education Hispanics are replaced, due to the weighting process, with low-education whites who (at least in the income-biased sample produced by polling methods) tend slightly toward Bush.
(Note that the ABC weighting method — I haven’t seen the details of the Post’s — is different from most other polls. I called it “cell-weighting” in an earlier post. The more usual weighting method, which I called “parameter weighting,” will also underrepresent low-education Hispanics in the final results, but they will be replaced by a mixture of low-education whites and blacks and more educated Hispanics. This, I would guess, will also bias results against Kerry, but to a substantially lesser degree.)
I think this will be remembered as the year when polls were shown to be living in the horse and buggy world, while the US had moved on to autos.
The polls are measuring a universe that cannot be measured by phone polls pressed into 2-3 day chunks of time in samples that total 1000 and don’t look remotely like the electorate.
Two items:
1. I was going to ask the same question as a previous post: why is the WP/ABC poll so different? Even on registereds, it showed a 7-point Bush lead today, I think…
2. Any idea how many new folks might come out in FLA on the minimum wage referendum? That’s a huge potential swing for Kerry, it seems to me…
Keep up the good work — love this site!!
eg
Yes.
What’s different is the intensity around the election – it’s so high. We Dems want the polls to reassure us, to give us a moment of hope, a moment of reprieve from this crushing Republican control of the Executive, the Legislative and seemingly the Judiciary.
We fear we will lose in Florida again. We fear that the Supreme Court will decide it all again. We fear that we’ll lose because we didn’t get that one more vote out in Minnesota or Ohio or New Mexico. The closeness of the 2000 election, the division in the country, the obsessive news coverage of the coverage of the coverage of the election and the pundits talking about the polls and the insane number of little instant polls and the blogs and the emails and the talk radio and and and . . . It’s hard to keep positive and to think all of our little-door-knocks and small contributions will add up to getting rid of a horrible, horrible president.
I mean – if Kerry wins, it will be the first time since Paul Wellstone won in Minnesota that I can say it was the work of all of us ordinary people doing what we can in the crevices of our work-a-day lives. That would be a pretty big wish come true –
It’s not that no one cared about Gore or Bush as candidates, no one really cared about the election – until, of course, that final day in Florida when it all blew up and then there was Kyoto and ABM and September 11 and Iraq and we all realized how wrong we had been not to work as hard as we could in Fall 2000.
Kerry in a landslide –
Two things:
First of all, I find it alarming that Kerry has not led at all in any recent Zogby polls. Yes, they do waver, but never to Kerry getting a majority percentage.
Also, could anyone explain the methodology of the Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, and why, in a time when very few polls show results that favor Kerry, but most show a quite close race, the Post has been showing Bush consistently at 50% or over. Today it shows, I think, 51 Bush, 45 Kerry.
Thanks,
Mady
Polling is definitely going through growing pains. You cite a number of reasons why polls vary (clearly, on election day most or all will have been wrong–if by wrong we mean to understand predicting the outcome).
I think the polls themselves may be part of the problem. We have respondent fatigue–not on an individual level, but as a nation. Look at those so-called “undecideds.” I find it odd that their numbers have not declined significantly since June. My guess is that they’re not measuring conviction so much as fatigue. It seems like something between 5-10% of every poll are undecided. Wouldn’t we expect to see that decline as the electorate gets to know the candidates? But it hasn’t. My guess is that this group has just had it with pollsters. They’re decided, but they ain’t tellin’ us.
Also, it’s odd that Andy would make the argument about voter volatility when he himself has measured how strongly convinced so much of the electorate is.