Republicans Are About To Be Swept Away By An Avalanche Of Pro-Choice Voters
A new Gallup shows exactly why Republicans should be worried about abortion and the number of pro-choice voters mobilizing against them.
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Single Issue Voters Are Back, But Now They Are Pro-Choice
The Republican Party was dominated for decades by social conservatives, and within that subset of the party was an even more powerful group of anti-choice, single-issue, anti-abortion voters. Those voters within the Republican Party have been pushing an anti-reproductive rights agenda that is known for its extremism. That extremism was unleashed at the state level after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.
Republican-controlled state governments have embraced anti-freedom and anti-liberty big government managing the bodies of women policies.
Those policies led to something else happening.
There is a new wave of single-issue voters. They have made their presence felt in elections over the years since Dobbs, and now, thanks to Gallup, we have a measure of their size.
Gallup has gauged the importance of a candidate’s views on abortion among U.S. registered voters at least once during each presidential election cycle since 1992. The current 32% who say they will only vote for a candidate who shares their views is up four percentage points since last May and eight points since 2020.
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An examination of voters’ responses to this question based on their stance on abortion shows that pro-choice candidates stand to benefit more than pro-life candidates from single-issue abortion voters. Specifically, nearly twice as many pro-choice voters (40%) as pro-life voters (22%) say they will only vote for a candidate who agrees with them on abortion. This is the third consecutive year that abortion-centric pro-choice voters have outnumbered abortion-centric pro-life voters in the U.S., marking a reversal of the pro-life advantage between 1996 and 2020.
As a result of these changes, the 32% of all registered voters who say they will only vote for candidates who share their views on abortion now includes 23% who are pro-choice and 8% who are pro-life. (Another 1% don’t identify with either label.)
It is fair to ask if anyone outside of Democrats understands how big this change is. The media, mostly run by white men, the pollsters, mostly white men, and the Republican Party, mostly white men, all continue to claim that abortion is a lesser issue in the election, but voters are telling a different story, and we will discuss the collision of the two below.
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