This Election, It's Women's Choice
(lengthy, disturbing, thought-provoking read)
This Election, It’s Women’s Choice
PUBLISHED 8/31/2024 by Jodi Enda
Polls showing that inflation will be the dominant issue in the upcoming election miss the potency of women’s anger over abortion—and their massive influence within the electorate.
Demonstrators take part in the annual National Women’s March in New York on Jan. 22, 2023, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision. (Andrea Renault / AFP via Getty Images)
This article was produced in collaboration with The Fuller Project. It will appear in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get the Summer issue delivered straight to your mailbox.
Abortion rights were guaranteed by the Supreme Court in 1973 and that was that. At least that’s what supporters thought for nearly five decades. And so, when they went to the polls, they based their votes for presidents, Congress members and other elected officials on issues they considered to be more pressing. But after the Supreme Court’s unprecedented 2022 decision to revoke a constitutional right, abortion changed the course of elections for two years running. As the nation approaches the first presidential election of the post-Roe era, Democrats—who are fielding a woman presidential candidate who champions abortion rights—are banking on the issue to bolster them again. Many public polls predict it won’t. While the vast majority of Americans favor abortion rights, numerous public opinion polls conducted for media organizations suggest the topic has lost its potency, even among women. If any one thing will sway them, these polls say, it is the economy (and, more specifically, inflation).
That would be bad news for Democrats and their new standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris. Women are the backbone of the party. Without their strong support, many Democratic candidates for office—from Harris on down—surely will lose. But are these polls right? Not so much, say numerous polling experts, most (but not all) of them partisan. Media polls on issues, they say, are greatly flawed because they fail to ask questions that could predict what will move voters to back one candidate over another. The polls find that the economy is top of mind among the people interviewed—usually based on how they rank a list of issues—but not whether it will influence their votes. And there are many reasons to think it will not. In essence, experts told Ms., “it’s the economy, stupid” made sense when James Carville scribbled it on a whiteboard in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign war room, but the slogan’s salience 32 years later is less assured.
For one thing, today’s presidential nominees are further apart in both policy and persona than were George H.W. Bush and Clinton (and even independent candidate H. Ross Perot). Harris and former President Donald Trump stand in stark contrast to each other in substance, style, identity and experience. The American public is much more polarized than it was in the days when Democrats and Republicans could discuss politics without destroying lifelong relationships or disrupting Thanksgiving dinners. All but a sliver of the electorate is set in its ways, destined to vote for the party that it backed four years ago, experts say. That means relatively few voters are up for grabs.
And very much unlike abortion. In contrast to the economy, abortion evokes visceral reactions. Either you believe that women should be able to make decisions about their bodies, or you don’t. Either you believe that abortion is murder, or you don’t. You might support some exceptions, or you might not, but you probably have a position—a deep-seated belief—that doesn’t change with the Dow or the wind or the makeup of the Supreme Court. You might not know what to think when the Federal Reserve raises or lowers interest rates, but you probably had an instant reaction when the Court overturned Roe v. Wade. You probably remember what you thought when the Arizona Supreme Court let stand a Civil War-era abortion ban or when Alabama, even briefly, outlawed in vitro fertilization. You probably felt something when the Texas attorney general effectively blocked Kate Cox from ending a dangerous pregnancy, though the fetus could not survive; when Ohio police arrested Brittany Watts following a miscarriage; when an Indianapolis doctor said she had performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim who had been denied medical care in her home state of Ohio; or each time you heard that a pregnant woman was turned away from an emergency room.
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https://msmagazine.com/2024/08/31/women-vote-abortion-pro-choice-elections-motivate/
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