Do Americans Support Abortion Rights? Depends on the State. – The New York Times

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The poll question used here — whether the respondent believes abortion should be legal in most or all cases, or illegal in all or most cases — offers only a general sense of a voter’s attitudes on the issue. It may not align exactly with whether a voter or a state electorate would support any particular restriction.

Voters who support abortion in “most” cases might accept a ban on abortions after the first trimester, like the one recently enacted in Florida, which would be at odds with Roe v. Wade but affect only about 8 percent of abortions. Conversely, voters who believe abortion should be illegal in most cases might still support allowing abortion in cases of rape or incest — or perhaps even without conditions in the first trimester.

The opponents of Roe have long said they wanted to leave the issue to the voters of each state, and the data suggests that abortion restrictions may cut very differently across the dozen or so states where the issue is likeliest to be in play in the months ahead.

In Texas, which has put into action the most stringent abortion restrictions so far, there are few signs of a fundamental transformation of the state’s politics.

Texans roughly split on abortion overall, making abortion rights more popular there than in the typical state with a trigger law. But abortion was almost a nonissue in the state’s primary in March, with candidates staying focused on the pandemic and immigration. Only 39 percent of Texans said the state’s abortion laws should be “less strict” in a poll in February, several months after the passage of the law, which effectively bans abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy.

Abortion-rights advocates might be on more favorable political terrain in the more traditionally competitive Midwestern states. A modest majority of voters say abortion should be mostly legal in states like Ohio, Michigan and Iowa, where evangelical Christians represent a far smaller share of voters than in the South. The figures are similar in other battleground states, like Arizona and Florida.

It’s unclear if the abortion issue will be enough to redraw the political map. Perhaps it will fade, as it seems to have in Texas. But the stakes are not small for Republicans in this region: The predominantly white working-class voters who swung from Barack Obama to Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election tended to back abortion rights.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/upshot/polling-abortion-states.html

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