Analysis of Viewpoints on Abortion Policy in Gallup Polling: Abortion is Not a "Magic Bullet" for Democrats

Majority Voters versus Polar Voters in the United States

The most obvious way to win an election when there is a popular vote is to find out what policy position a majority of voters in the electorate support and to campaign on that. Let us call this the “majority voter strategy.” If there were only one issue, and if there were a majority position on this one issue, and if a candidate for public office were to campaign on the majority position, then it seems like a safe assumption that the that candidate would win.

For instance, suppose there were only one issue, and on this issue 34% of registered voters support Policy A, 51% support Policy B, and 13% support Policy C. If you were a political candidate who wanted to win an election, it seems like Policy B would be the best platform. Even if all of the supporters of Policy A and Policy C voted for an alternative candidate, you would still get 51% of the vote and win the election.

However, there is a tacit assumption here that all registered voters will vote. This is simply not the case in the United States. Voter turnout in the United States is actually quite low. It is higher in elections that include voting for the President of the United States, but in elections that do not include a vote for President, voter turnout is particularly low.

To use a concrete example, the official voter turnout for Ohio’s 2023 general election, in which there was not a vote for President, was 49.63%. (Ohio Secretary of State n.d.b) A minority of registered voters actually voted in the 2023 Ohio general election. (If you were to quantify the proportion of eligible voters who actually voted, it would be even lower.)

This phenomenon is what allows political polarization to thrive in the United States. You can win an election in the United States by campaigning on a platform that is a minority position, provided that the minority is excited enough about the position that turnout will be higher among the minority than among the rest of the electorate. Let us call this the “polar voter strategy.”

For instance, suppose that those who support Policy A in the thought experiment are very excited by a candidate campaigning on Policy A, but supporters of Policy B and of Policy C are less excited about their respective positions and so are more inclined to spend the election day pursuing something else besides voting.

If the difference in turnout is drastic enough – say, 80% turnout for supporters of Policy A compared with 40% turnout for supporters of Policy B or Policy C – then a candidate running on Policy A will win the election, even though Policy A is actually supported by a minority of the electorate. In such a scenario, voter turnout would be only \((80\% \times 34\%) + 40\% \times (51\% + 13\%) = 52.8\%\), and \(\frac{(80\% \times 34\%)}{58.8\%} = 51.5\%\) of voters who showed up to the election would vote for Policy A, even though only 34% of the electorate actually support Policy A.

This is how running on minority positions succeeds in elections in the United States and is a large part of why political polarization is so abundant in the United States.

This is, also, how Democrats win elections by campaigning on abortion. To put things in perspective, 56.78% of voters in the 2023 Ohio general election voted for Issue 1. (Ohio Secretary of State n.d.b) Because the official voter turnout was only 49.63%, this means that only 28.18% of registered voters in Ohio voted for Issue 1.

Judicial Activism

With Roe and Doe, the answer is obvious. The Roe and Doe policy was instituted by just a half dozen unelected judges⁵ who were not subject to popular vote and hence public opinion.

You could read numerous papers and books of arguments for and against doctrines labeled “substantive due process” and “selective fourteenth amendment incorporation” on which the validity of Roe and Doe turn. You could also read numerous papers and books on the validity of the specific arguments and circumstances of the Roe and Doe decisions. This legal aspect of the validity of the Roe and Doe decisions is beyond the scope of this article.

What is not controversial, however, is that the judiciary in the United States is very much by design not subject to popular opinion. Therefore, the use of the judiciary to achieve policy changes, regardless of whether you think it is valid or invalid, explains how the abortion lobby succeeded in achieving its policy goals, despite representing a minority viewpoint, for the time period of 1973 to 2022.

Polarization

Unlike Roe and Doe, Ohio’s Issue 1 was put to a popular vote. Up until now, we have been discussing Gallup polling of a representative nation-wide sample of the United States. The federal system of government in the United States entails that voting such as what was done for Ohio’s Issue 1 is done on a state-by-state basis. Any one given state may have a different distribution of public opinion about abortion than what is observed nationally.

However, 62.41% of voters in Ohio’s 2022 general election voted for current Republican governor Mike DeWine, who is against abortion, compared with just 37.38% for the Democrat running against him. (Ohio Secretary of State n.d.a) Furthermore, the general election occurred on November 3, 2020, a few months after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe and Doe. If more Ohioans support legal abortion under any circumstances than do Americans generally, then we would expect this to have affected the 2022 gubernatorial election in Ohio. Therefore, this is unlikely to be the case.

Issue 1 passed in Ohio because different people turned out to vote in the 2023 general election than did in the 2022 general election. Exit polling confirms that only 35% of voters in the 2023 Ohio general election were Republicans, the lowest proportion since 2012, and self-described “liberals” accounted for 34% of voters in the 2023 elections, compared with 20% in the 2022 elections. (Filer, Langer, and De Jong 2023)

In short, the abortion lobby succeeded in the 2023 Ohio general election by using the polar voter strategy. As discussed in the preceding, only 49.63% of registered voters participated in the 2023 Ohio general election, and only 28.18% of registered voters in Ohio voted for Issue 1.

The polar voter strategy only works in elections in which turnout is relatively low. Next year, the 2024 general elections will include voting for President of the United States, and such elections historically have had higher voter turnout. This is why Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira commented on a recent podcast that Democrats risk becoming “low turnout election specialists” should they continue to emphasize issues like abortion.

And we should always remember that, I mean, people are moderately pro-choice but are actually very leery about abortions after the first trimester, and then in the third trimester, they’re just flat out against it. So, the real hardcore activist position on abortion rights, which obviously has a real presence to the Democratic Party, is abortion at any time for any reason, at will. That is not the position of the median voter who is quite a bit more conservative on this issue. They want abortion rights in some form maintained, but they don’t want a sort of at will anytime kind of approach to abortion.

So, that may eventually come to be a bit more of a conflict and a problem for the Democrats. So far, they’ve been able to leverage the issue pretty easily in their favor by basically saying Republicans want to ban it completely. So, we’ll see what happens with that, but even as it’s played out so far, it hasn’t been quite the magic bullet people think, and as I argue in a piece that’s just about to come out from the [Washington] Post, another important thing to remember here is Democrats are now in a sense low turnout election specialists. Right? Their coalition is engaged. It’s more educated. It’s more animated by an issue like abortion, and they’re actually likely, because of the structure of their coalition, to do particularly well in off-year and special elections. And it’s much more of a challenge in a big presidential election when the peripheral voters come out of the woodwork. (“WTH Have All the Democrats Gone? With Ruy Teixeira” n.d.)

Lack of Understanding of Actual Policy

It is clear that a sizable number of people in the United States do not know what it means for abortion to be legal for any reason up until the point of fetal viability, which is the policy of Roe v. Wade and of Ohio’s Issue 1. As we have seen, during the time Roe v. Wade was in force, a large majority of Americans thought (and still think) that abortion in the third trimester should be generally illegal and smaller majority thought (and still think) that abortion in the second trimester should be generally illegal. At the same time, a majority of Americans did not support overturning Roe v. Wade.

Figure 5: Distributions of responses over time to question ‘Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision concerning abortion, or not?’ or in 2023 ‘Do you think overturning Roe versus Wade was a good thing or a bad thing?’ (Gallup n.d.b)

The proportion of respondents that did not want the Supreme Court to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision fluctuated between 1989 and 2022 with a low of 52% and a high of 66%. As of May 2023, 61% of respondents thought that overturning Roe v. Wade was a bad thing.

How can a majority of Americans support Roe v. Wade, which legalizes abortion for any reason into the early third trimester, and at the same time, a majority of Americans think that abortion in the second and third trimester should be generally illegal and that abortion should only be legal in certain circumstances?

The only way this can be the case is for some nontrivial number of Americans to be in a state of self-contradiction, both supporting policies that legalize second and third trimester abortions and supporting the general prohibition of second and third trimester abortions. This indicates that there is a nontrivial number of Americans who either do not understand that Roe v. Wade implies abortion is legal for any reason up until fetal viability or do not understand what legal abortion for any reason until fetal viability means.

Capture of Democrats

While those who think abortion should be legal in all circumstances constitute a minority of Americans, something important for how politics in the United States has occurred in recent years.

Figure 6: Proportions of Democrats, of Republicans, and of all Americans who responded ‘abortions should be legal under any circumstances’ to Gallup polling. (Gallup n.d.a) (Gallup n.d.b)

From the time Gallup polling on the topic began in 1975 to the early 1990s, there was no practical difference in the proportion of Democrats and Republicans who thought abortion should be legal in all circumstances. However, from 1998 on, there has been a steady divergence such that more and more Democrats and less and less Republicans think that abortion should be legal in all circumstances, with the proportion of all Americans who think so roughly splitting the difference.

Figure 7: Proportions of Democrats who responded either ‘abortions should be legal under any circumstances’ or ‘legal only under certain circumstances’ to Gallup polling. (Gallup n.d.a)

From 1975 to 2010, a majority of Democrats thought that abortion should be legal only in certain circumstances, and a minority of Democrats thought that abortion should be legal in all circumstances. (Figure 7) This was similar to the distribution of viewpoints of all Americans. (Figure 1) However, between 2010 and 2020, the proportions of Democrats who took either position began to switch. From 2021 on, the majority of Democrats think that abortion should be legal in all circumstances.

In this way, Democrats as a party have been captured by what is a minority viewpoint among all Americans. Approximately 60% of Democrats think that abortion should be legal in all circumstances, compared with only 34% of Americans who think that abortion should be legal in all circumstances.

A similar capture has not occurred among Republicans.

Figure 8: Proportions of Republicans who responded either ‘abortions should be legal only under certain circumstances’ or ‘illegal in all circumstances’ to Gallup polling. (Gallup n.d.a)

During the entirety of 1975 to present, a majority of Republicans have thought that abortion should be legal only in certain circumstances, just like a majority of Americans. The viewpoint that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances is a minority viewpoint among Republicans, similarly to how it is among all Americans.⁶

Thus, while the viewpoint that abortion should be legal in all circumstances is a minority viewpoint among Americans, this viewpoint now dominates the Democrats. Republicans, on the other hand, have not been captured by a minority position. Since there are only two political parties in the United States that regularly win elections, the platform of the abortion lobby has an oversized impact on American politics because it controls one of the two main political parties, even though only a minority of Americans actually support such a platform.

Reject an All-or-Nothing Framing

A tactic that the abortion lobby has been successful in using is to frame the abortion issue as an all-or-nothing question between abortion being illegal in all circumstances or abortion being legal in all circumstances. As Gallup polling indicates, a minority of Americans think that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Indeed, a minority of Republicans think that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

However, if abortion policy is framed to voters as choice between abortion illegal in all cases or abortion legal in all cases, then the abortion lobby can cobble together a majority to vote for abortion being legal in all circumstances. However, a minority of Americans actually want abortion to be legal in all circumstances. The vast majority of Americans want there to be at least some restrictions on abortion.

Politicians campaigning for the majority voter must be very careful, therefore, not to allow the issue to be framed as whether abortion should be legal or illegal, with no further qualification. Instead, they must frame abortion policy as being a question of under what circumstances abortion is to be legal and under what circumstances it is to be illegal.

Find the Majority Voter

This leads to the next important point. It is imperative for politicians campaigning for the majority voter on abortion policy to discover under what circumstances a majority in their electorate wants abortion to be illegal. Since abortion policy is made by the legislatures of the several states in the United States, this must be done at the state level.

The Gallup polling discussed in this article pertains to nationally representative samples of Americans. It can only be used as a rough guide for states that are near the median of American public opinion. Those running for political office must be careful to discover what the viewpoints are in their particular electorate.

This is admittedly more challenging than the all-or-nothing framing that is working for the abortion lobby, but it can be accomplished simply by taking a survey of a representative random sample of registered voters in a given state. Furthermore, polling at the national level can give a political campaign an indication on where to begin. Since a majority of Americans think that second and third trimester abortions should be generally illegal, it is likely that the electorate in most states want some kind of gestational age limit on abortion. Therefore, surveys should try to find out the specific gestational age limit that is desired by a majority of voters in a given state.

In addition to prohibiting any restrictions on abortion until fetal viability, Roe v. Wade also overturned any regulations of abortions done in the first trimester, even those intended to protect the health of the mother. When surveying an electorate to discover majority opinions about abortion policy, candidates for political office should also discover what regulations of abortion that a majority of voters in a given state support.

Again, national-level data can help inform these inquiries. For instance, Gallup polling suggests that a policy requiring abortion providers to provide information about alternatives to abortion has historically been quite popular at the national level in the United States. (Gallup n.d.b) There are probably numerous regulations of various kinds that would be found to be popular in any given state.

Create Simple Messaging

The abortion lobby has a stupidly simple message that they are promulgating that abortion is a “right” and that nefarious evildoers want to “take away your rights.” This is an easy message on which to campaign. On the other hand, the Combined Argument and Explanation Against Issue 1 included in the Ohio ballots was scattered and unfocused. (Ohio Secretary of State 2023) Campaigning for the majority voter on abortion policy points the way to a much more streamlined message.

This message should be something to the effect of, “The majority of voters in the state of ______ want the following policies with regard to abortion…. I, as a candidate for ______ office, will fulfill my duty to represent the people of the state of ______ and enact these policies.”

Knowledge of the circumstances under which the majority of voters in a given state want abortion to be illegal and of regulations approved by a majority of voters, as discussed in the previous section, should be used to substantiate this message. This message, in order to be effective, should be delivered directly and without apology or the hemming and hawing about things the electorate does not care about.