At this point, the result obviously isn’t super surprising, but recent polling has yet again shown large portions of the U.S. population in opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to undo the national legal protections for abortion that had been established in Roe v. Wade.
With Republicans often tying themselves so closely to the issue of abortion, it’s difficult to see how all of this wouldn’t result in electoral impacts for the party come 2024. Trump consistently and predictably claims to be dominating Joe Biden and any other relevant opponents in polls, but that just isn’t true. Surveys measuring prospective voters’ opinions in a 2024 match-up for the general election that would be a redo of 2020 — meaning Trump and Biden again — have the two close, just single digits apart, though the national total isn’t the clincher since presidential elections are presently decided state by state.
The new polling was done by YouGov for The Economist and stretched across the first five days of this month. Across all respondents, only 36 percent said they either strongly or somewhat approved of the court’s decision to overturn Roe, while 51 percent expressed disapproval. Among women, approval was down to 30 percent, and disapproval was up to 54 percent. And that’s just all women whose responses were collected for this question, meaning even the predictable sway from including Republicans wasn’t enough to offset at least somewhat of a bounce in the level of opposition.
Among independents, another group whose responses carry a particularly compelling level of political relevance, only 30 percent approved of the Dobbs decision in this polling. A potentially seriously damaging problem for Republicans is that many of their prominent political leaders, including leading presidential candidates, have expressed interest in going further with abortion restrictions, possibly further distancing them from everyday Americans. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor trying to nab the GOP nomination, already signed a six-week abortion ban into law in his chief executive position in Florida.
