Will media questions about the Alito 5 throwing out Roe v Wade rebound for votes for Democrats?
Will voters care about this over the economy come November?
Will they out vote those who support the High Courts action’s?
Democrats have been gaining on the generic ballot since Roe was overturned.
It’s a sign that voters may be more reactive to events than we give them credit for.
By my count, there have been eight different pollsters who ask about the generic ballot and conducted a poll before and after the Supreme Court found there was no federal constitutional right to an abortion.
Every single one of them found Democrats doing better in their poll taken post-abortion ruling compared with the one taken pre-abortion ruling. The average shift was about 3 points in Democrats’ favor.
This 3-point change may not seem like a lot, and it could reverse itself as we get further away from the ruling. Still, it puts Democrats in their best position on the generic ballot in the last six months.
It also makes some sense that the polls moved. Poll after poll shows that Americans disagree with what the Supreme Court did. A Pew Research Center survey released last week showed that 57% of Americans disapproved of the decision, for example.
And while abortion is not the most important issue on voters’ minds, it’s clearly more important than it has been in any recent election. In May, Gallup found that 27% of Americans said they would only vote for a candidate who shared their views on abortion. This was higher than Gallup has measured in any midterm or presidential election year going back to at least 1992.
Meanwhile, the percentage of voters who said it would not be a major issue was down to just 16%. That’s by far the lowest Gallup has measured in an election year.
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Race rating experts put the GOP on a clear pathway to that gain and more. Moreover, Republicans tend to outperform their generic ballot numbers (see 2006, 2014 and 2020 as prime examples) at the ballot box.
It would be tough for Democrats to hang on to such a small edge when the economy is such an important issue to voters, who see it as weak. (It’s a major reason why President Joe Biden‘s approval rating is so low.)…