🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
At a time of record high gas prices, sky-high inflation, and when Congress seems deadlocked and unable to pass virtually anything, the party in control of Washington is gaining momentum with voters and is leading in the race for Congress.
That is unprecedented and Republicans can only blame themselves and their radical anti-abortion agenda for the latest poll results.
Although it has felt much longer, it has been less than a month since conservatives on the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and handed Republicans the victory they have been working toward for nearly 50 years. And in these few short weeks, we have already seen a horrifying and shocking race to the extremist bottom in states with Republican state legislatures seemingly trying to one-up each other for who can pass the most inhumane and dangerous legislation.
Let's review the lowlights, starting with the most-known case. This month, Republicans in Ohio forced a 10-year-old rape survivor to travel to Indiana to seek medical care because they passed a law that would have forced her to have her rapist's child. And now, despite Republicans' explicitly saying they would not target women and doctors, the Republican attorney general in Indiana is investigating the doctor who treated the 10-year-old child. As shocking, awful, and unthinkable as that case is, it is hardly unique in this race to the bottom. In states across the country, people who are pregnant and having life-threatening issues around their pregnancies are being denied care or seeing it delayed because of laws written by Republicans that intentionally do not have health and well-being exceptions. In Texas, hospitals are telling doctors that if a patient's water breaks too soon in the pregnancy, they should just send them home to wait for the fetus to come out, and in one case, a physician was told not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured. Not to be outdone in this race to the bottom, in Missouri, Republicans have made it so that pregnant people can't get divorced until they give birth, and in Idaho, Republicans are considering banning contraception.
And not to be left out of the dystopian race happening at the state level, Senate Republicans recently blocked legislation that would protect people who travel across state lines to get the reproductive health care they are being denied in their home states.
This is the worst-case scenario so many of us warned would happen if Roe were overturned. But instead of taking place over months and years, it is happening in mere weeks after the ruling.
But here is the bad news for Republicans: The country is far more in favor of abortion access than it appears in their protected bubble of Fox News and Facebook. And Republicans are going to learn that lesson this November, because we're not just talking about deep-blue states on the coasts, we're talking about key battleground states that will determine which party wins the Senate this year and the White House in 2024.
Recent polling my organization commissioned shows that the electorate in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin overwhelmingly support abortion rights. The findings confirm the issue of access to safe, legal abortions energizes midterm voters to turn out in November and use their vote to protect abortion access. The data shows that Democrats and pro-choice voters are very motivated to turn out in November in support of candidates who will protect people's right to choose an abortion. It also shows that Democrats and pro-choice voters are much more energized than Republicans or voters who oppose abortion to vote in response to the decision to overturn Roe and the abortion bans Republicans are pushing at the state level.
The polling indicates that voters in every state we tested are more than twice as likely to vote for candidates who support abortion rights than they are to vote for those who support a ban. What's more, pro-choice voters in each state are significantly more likely to engage on the issue by voting for candidates who proactively support abortion access than anti-choice voters are to vote for candidates who support banning abortion.
In other words, Republicans' race to the bottom is energizing Democratic and independent voters while not exciting Republican voters. In fact, the survey found that if the Democratic candidates for Senate and governor in these battleground states just pick up every pro-choice voter in their state, it will likely be enough to carry them to victory.
And it's not just our polling that affirms that Republicans' destructive agenda is hurting them politically. In 14 independent polls taken since Republicans overturned Roe, Democrats now hold an average lead of 44.2 percent to 41.7 percent over Republicans in the race for Congress. That's a 4- to 5-point swing toward Democrats since before the Roe ruling.
It is clear that, on abortion, Republicans are the dog that caught the car. And their extremist race to the bottom is only making their already untenable electoral position on this issue worse.
The fact of the matter is this is a nation that overwhelmingly wants to let pregnant people make choices that are best for them and their families. And voters are poised to punish Republicans this November for being so extreme and out of touch with voters.
Rahna Epting is Executive Director of MoveOn. MoveOn is one of the nation's largest political organizations, with millions of members.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
