More people hate bans on abortion than ever:
By Dobbs has, as you would expect, made the public even more pro-choice:
Voters have grown more supportive of legalizing abortion following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, with a clear majority opposing restrictions, like bans at a certain point of pregnancy or barring women from traveling to get a legal abortion, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that underscores the importance of the issue in the midterm elections.
According to the survey, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 55% in March. Another 29% said it should be illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered, compared with 30% in March. And 6% said it should be illegal in all cases, down from 11% in March.
The court’s decision to end federal constitutional protections for the procedure has injected new Democratic energy into a midterm election that Republicans expected to be dominated by economic issues. About a dozen states have banned many or most abortions since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“Abortion is not an issue that most people, prior to Dobbs, spent a lot of time thinking about,” said Democratic pollster Molly Murphy, whose firm conducted the poll with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. “What Dobbs has done is one, we’ve had a national conversation about it. Two, it has gone from hypothetical to real.”
More than half of voters said the ruling made them more motivated to vote in the midterm elections.
Asked broadly about their top issue for the midterms, voters cited the economy and inflation first, followed by abortion. But when offered a choice of five issues and asked which made them most likely to vote, they put the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade ahead of inflation.
Among those who named the court ruling as the most important issue tested against others, 77% were Democrats, 8% were Republicans and 9% were independents.
[…]
On which party is best able to handle abortion policy, 48% said Democrats, 27% Republicans, 16% said neither and 6% said both equally. A total of 41% of independents said they trust Democrats most to handle abortion policy, compared with 18% who said Republicans were best.
I think we can see why even some of the most egregious ghouls on Republican tickets are fleeing from their longstanding position on the issue like Josh Hawley scampering away from a seditious mob he helped to incite.
In particularly devastating news for the nation’s punditry, bans on second trimester abortions are unpopular in addition to being arbitrary and irrational:
But something something France!