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.
Gallup interviewed too many conservatives… if you correct for that error… Bush leads by 1. Zoby has the best poll. Rasmussen is pretty good, too.
Gallup Sample of likely voters vs. 2000 Election
By Political Ideology:
Conservative: 41% (29%)
Moderate: 41% (50%)
Liberal: 18% (20%)
Party ID:
GOP: 39% (35%)
Dem: 35% (39%)
Ind: 25% (27%)
Income:
Over $75,000: 32% (28%)
$50-75,000: 16% (25%)
$30-50,000: 26% (24%)
$20-30,000: 11%
Under $20K: 9%
Race:
White: 85% (81%)
NonWhite: 15% (19%)
Black: (a subset of NonWhite) 8% (10%)
You might be interested in the polling graphic at our web site, http://www.democratsforum.com. We average the national polls (job approval) and graph them. We started in 2000 so you can get a long trend line from it.
The flap over Mary Cheney is ridiculous. When John Edwards referred to her in the debate with her father, Cheney thanked him for his graciousness. This is more Republican hypocrisy as they try to divert attention from the real issues.
JY
In response to a previous comment, I have problems with the very idea of making likely voter models based on previous election turnout levels, regardless of what the results are. Assuming voter turnout similar to 2000 is not a good idea, as time does not stand still. But assuming it similar to 2002 is even worse, as presidential elections naturally attract higher turnout than off year elections.
Add in the massive upsurge in new registrants, plus the question of who is motivated to vote (with so much new registration, there may be a lot of highly motivated first time voters who don’t show up in likely voter models) and the likely voter models are nearly useless as accurate predictors of this year’s vote.
Gallup has become America’s faith-based pollster.
In response to the person who asked about the response to the ‘who did you vote for in 2000’ question: isn’t it the case that only a few weeks after the election, polls showed a majority for Bush that had no bearing on the popular vote totals? I certainly remember hearing something along those lines.
In any case, I don’t think it’s an oversampling so much as people not wanting to disclose that they backed the losing candidate in 2000.
I got the Gallup internals tonight, posted over at my blog.
I suspect there is more truth to em hansen’s opinion that any of us would like to believe. The crux of that issue is not, as the Cheney’s are claiming, that Kerry ‘politically used’ Mary’s lesbianism. It is that a large number of Americans still feel that, while that Ellen has a pretty good talk show, it’s just unseemly to bring up this lesbian in the Veep’s closet yet again, when it could have been avoided.
I think many people still feel that, like alcoholism and mental illness and maybe disfiguring neuromuscular diseases, you just don’t talk about the gayness of individuals in someone’s family in public. When Edwards brought it up, Cheney was right there — it was seen as more relevant, and more ‘manly’ to do it to his face. But enough was enough. To bring it up again on national TV was crossing the line for some people, and that’s what Kerry did.
The embellishments Cheney has added to his ‘outrage,’ such as the ‘Kerry will say anything to get elected’ line, do not stick here. But the ‘why did Kerry have to go and try to embarass the Cheneys by talking about their, you know….’ may hang around a bit.
I would have to challenge you on one thing. In 2000, I checked in to the Gallup, Zogby, Rasmussen, and Battleground 2000 polls every single day in the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign and I don’t remember Gallup having Bush ever being ahead by more than thin margins in the closing weeks of campaign 2000. I remember Battleground had him that far up, and Rasmussen had him up but only slightly, whereas Zogby and Gallup both pegged it pretty close to accurate (Zogby closest of all, but Gallup well within the margin of error, erroneously having Bush up by perhaps a point or two but, as I say, well within the margin of error and clearly “too close to call.”).
I’d like to hear what Ruy thinks about Mickey Kaus’s musings on the “landslide factor” possibly introduced by poll results.
JY
Could it possibly be the media’s obsessive focus on the lesbian comment? Sensible minds say no, but we also thought the swift boat campaign in August wouldn’t amount too much and look what happened with that.
That makes no sense. I wonder if the phrasing of the question didn’t confuse people. Perhaps the following explains it:
Without their candidate on the ballot, many of the supporters of Nader and other candidates move to Kerry, which is what you’d expect (although I think 54% high). But fully 30% of all respondents are now either undecided, inclined to “other,” or refuse to answer the question.
I wonder if many Bush supporters weren’t confused. Concluding that somehow Bush was no longer on the ballot, they had trouble dealing with the question. “Other” (10%) and “refused” (7%) may be code words for “I won’t vote.” This rationale, of course, doesn’t explain why Kerry’s people would not have had the same problem. But I think something like this must be at work. Taking other candidates off the ballot should have had no effect on either candidate’s core support.
I think most polls will probably show Bush in the lead from here on. This is just a function of the assumptions and methods traditional pollsters have relied on for decades. The Democrats’ main challenge will be to keep their voters motivated in the face of the daily media drone of “Bush has it wrapped up”. I thought many weeks ago that the DEmocrats should have moved aggressively to discredit polls like Gallup, but I think we got distracted by the debates and the evening up of the polls. It is too late for that now.
One way to do something would be to get higher visibility for polls that do show the race tied or Kerry ahead. For example, if every Kerry-supporting talking head had upto date talking points on polls such as the DC (as well as the shortcomings of the Gallup, ABC etc.), they could keep things relatively even by mentioning these polls at every opportunity. Otherwise, CNN et al. are going to run away with this. My biggest concern is that if the “Bush is ahead” meme gets established, a Kerry win on election day could be demagogued successfully into controversy by Republicans.
I would also like to say that, given the recent results from several polls, there does seem to have been a tick up for Bush over the last few days — not the 10 point swing shown by Gallup, but probably a 2-point blip which is now subsiding. I think it can be attributed almost entirely to a widening of Bush leads in solid red states, but this is just a hunch.
Let’s see what the Fox News poll shows. Paradoxically, I find that poll to be the least hysterical and therefore most credible among the media polls.
We’ve been in the survey business for 20 years, during which time the Gallup organization has degnerated from a respected, serious research firm to a shoddy polling company focused mostly on currying favor with broadcasters. The last time we looked, their custom research business was in the toilet. Real companies wanting real insight about consumer opinion do not vote for Gallup with their pocketbooks.
I think I’ve come up with a new term now. Whenever someone tries to reinforce their position within a particular argument or discussion with reference to some-such poll. I’ll just respond: Are you trying to pull a “Gallup” on me?
I am just going to lend my voice to the chorus to say that I simply don’t believe the gallup poll in the face of Zogby, Newsweek, WaPo, Time, Ramussen, and on and on. Please focs on GOTV – that’s what these last 2 weeks are about- I am doing phonebanking this week- I hope everyone else is etierh doing door to door or phonebanking or some other aspect
I read Chris Suellentrop on Slate talking about Kerry’s downward trend in the polls. He suggests it was because of Kerry’s statement about Mary Cheny in the debate. If that were true, it would seem Kerry’s positives would go down. I haven’t this in any of the few polls I looked at. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
I have refrained so far from joining in the Gallup-bashing, but the information in the USA/Today article, albeit sketchy, is enough to show that their likely voter model is simply indefensible.
They say: “The likely voter model assumes a turnout of 55% of national adults. The likely voter sample is weighted down to match this assumption.”
This approach has all the disadvantages of weighting your sample to party ID and none of the advantages. Weighting to party ID gets rid of most of the systematic errors in the sampling and weighting process, and puts in one big systematic error if party ID has shifted from what you assumed. Weighting to party ID also significantly reduces sampling error in the presidential race (from 3.1% to 2.1% in a sample of 380 Ds, 340 Rs, and 280 Inds with reasonable assumptions about voting preference). Adjusting your likely voter model to an assumed turnout doesn’t get rid of any of the systematic errors and still adds a big systematic error if you guess the turnout wrong. And it doesn’t do anything to reduce sampling error.
Depending how they do it (which we don’t know), Gallup’s “weighting down” of the likely voter model could even enlarge biases. What it seems to mean is that when they score you on several dimensions to decide whether you are a likely voter, you need “more points” to be counted as likely. If being counted a “likely voter” depends less on whether you say you voted in 2000 and more on whether you say you voted in 2002, it could mean that instead of assuming an electorate like 2000 (what CBS/NYTimes does), Gallup is assuming an electorate like 2002, or more precisely somewhere between 2000 and 2002.
Reviewing the DC poll, I had two observations/questions. First, it appeared to me that minorities may have been underrepresented in the poll. Second, in rating the candidates, the questions seemed focused mostly on John Kerry rather than balanced between the two. Are these worthy of comment/explanation?
I found the results very interesting, and for the most part pleasing (obviously I support John Kerry ). I’m still puzzled, with as many people disenchanted as they say they are with Bush, and as much as Kerry leads in so many important aspects, why there are still so many planning to vote for Bush. Is the act of voting, in the end, for many a popularity contest (e.g. who’d be more fun at a party), no matter the reasoned judgments? Or are certain of the wedge issues overpowering the others? Or does it all come down to the terrorism issue?
I’d like to see a more detailed poll about just what concerns people re Kerry vs terrorism. Do people not see him as “tough” enough? Resolute enough? Do they see “war on terror” as strictly or mostly a military matter? Do they understand the homeland security issues and factor that into their assessment? Do they still see criticism of the Iraq war as “being soft on terror”? Are they hung up on–and perhaps misunderstand– Kerry’s long-ago anti-Nam activities? Some analysis of this might be helpful in the campaign. It seems to be the last sticking point with many.
A thought about polls, somewhat analogous to the Heisenberg Principle: does the act of responding to such a poll tend to nudge the respondent into one direction or another? (By this I don’t mean push-polling, just the respondent being forced to examine perceptions and make decisions issue by issue instead of a global “gut-level” response.)
Thank you. I very much appreciate your analyses.
I think it is interesting that CNN, which has their name on this poll as of yet has pubished its results. They continue to run a story about a Time poll showing the race deadlocked. Is it possible this poll is too weird for them to publish?
One really odd thing about the DCorps survey is that it has Kerry +40 for who would win if the election were held today (57 – 17). Can anyone explain this impossible result?
With this latest poll Gallup has lost all credibility. A few days ago they had Bush sinking to new lows of support – now he’s Superman. There’s just no way the third debate gave him an eight point bump.
Gallup is starting to scare me…have they ever responded to Moveon.org’s complaints about their sampling procedures?
Sigh, I guess Gallup is at it again.
Any internals for the Gallup poll? I would guess heavily weighted Republican.
I find it odd that only days after Gallup shows an even race they then show this. I mean could 10 percent of the elctorate change theor minds in only days? And based on what exactly?
Any word on the party affiliation of the latest Gallup poll? I’d guess it’s a 5 to 10 point advantage for the R’s.
The Gallup name has been around for so long that it carries some weight, albeit any credibility it has, based on recent results, is unearned. I believe a campaign to educate people about the Gallup slant is in order. It’s in the same league as Fox, as I see it.
The Democracy Corps Poll, towards the end, asks who they voted for in 2000. There is a significant tilt towards Bush in that response, 51-43. Now the actual vote was close to even, so is this poll oversampling Replublicans and still giving Kerry an edge? Or am I missing something?