The NPR Politics Podcast - Will Threats To Abortion Access Motivate Democratic Voters? Maybe.

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

The leak of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court earlier this month that showed the majority-conservative court ready to overturn Roe v. Wade has led two-thirds of Democrats to say that they are more likely to vote in November, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. That compares to just 40% of Republicans who said so. It remains to be seen whether that enthusiasm will wane in the months before the election.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Horsley, demographics and culture correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey y'all, this is Daniel from Florida. I moved here two weeks ago from Vermont to start a graduate program and drove past many sheets and wawas on the way. It's day two of my program and I already have a ton of reading to do. This podcast was recorded at... I feel like Vermont to Florida might be a lifestyle shift, so good luck. It's 1-06 Eastern on Thursday, May 19th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I'm done with my reading. All right, here's the show. Boy, I can't believe this Sheets Wawa thing is still a thing. This is never going to go away.

This is like six years at this point. Six years, the most memorable offhand comment I made in my life. And you're lucky to find either one of them if you're on the road, I will tell you that. I'm just saying this is Casey's erasure. Casey's is the greatest convenience store of all time. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Domenico, you got engaged over the weekend. Congratulations.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. We're very excited. And thank you, guys. And Domenico, in addition to getting engaged, equally importantly, I might say, you worked on a brand new NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll that just came out today with some interesting results, some topical results.

It shows that about two thirds of Americans say they do not support overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the U.S. The poll also showed the issue is not quite that clear cut, which we're going to get into. And of course, the backdrop to all of this is that leaked draft opinion that makes it clear the Supreme Court will likely overturn this 49 year old decision sometime next month. So Domenico, let's get into those specifics. People are supportive of abortion broadly, but that does not mean people want to see no restrictions. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, you know, like you said, about two thirds of people do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. 64% said that, but 68% are in favor of some degree of restrictions on abortion rights. And that's where this kind of messaging war kind of winds up because you have a broad array of when people think abortion should

be legal. There's a lot of gray area and a lot of nuance in the middle. And, you know, frankly, depending on how a question is asked and what state laws are being put in place in which state and how much information people have, their opinions really change. Yeah. And Danielle, one of the things that you've repeatedly raised, you cover this issue a lot. We've talked about it a lot. And is that when you're thinking about public opinion and polling and where people are, this has been generally a hypothetical issue for so many people. Not all people because a lot of states have kind of made this more restrictive over the years. But it's generally hypothetical.

But if this ruling goes into place, this is something that would drastically affect millions of people's lives. Yes, absolutely. And it's an issue that I think is really easy to underestimate how much it would affect people's lives. To put this into, you know, cold political terms, it's really easy ahead of the midterms to say, well, inflation is an everyday thing. That is what's going to drive people. And, yeah, people are buying gas and groceries on a daily basis. That's true. But also an estimated one in four women will have abortions by the time they're age 45. This is according to the Guttmacher Institute, which is a pro-abortion rights organization. One in four. That is a lot. And because there is in many communities shame and stigma around abortion, it is quite possible, probable that many people know someone who has had an abortion and but do not know that they know someone who has had an abortion. is also just that this is an issue that very much could affect people's lives in unforeseeable ways,

in ways that people do not foresee right now. Were Roe v. Wade to be overturned, and again, it has not been yet, many states have trigger laws that would go into effect that could affect, in some places we don't quite know, could affect things like emergency contraception or IVF. The effects of this, it is hard to really gauge them or even get our heads around them right now. But this could very much affect people's lives in huge ways. So this is something that as it moves from more hypothetical to more real will have big impacts and that could change opinions. This is something where the way you ask a question, how you frame the question, really does affect things. Because look, there are millions of Americans who firmly believe

that a fetus in a womb is a life and that abortion is murder. There are millions of Americans who firmly believe that this is a concrete health care issue and a constitutional right, and that overturning it or restricting it in any way is absolutely wrong. And there are millions and millions and millions of Americans who believe something in between. And Domenico, that view can shift the way you frame it, the way you present it. Yeah, let's look at the two, you know, sort of polar ends of this. You have about a quarter of Americans, 24%, who say that they think abortion should be allowed at any time during a pregnancy without any restrictions,

which, by the way, is up six points from the last time this question was asked four years ago. On the other end of that, only 9% of the country thinks that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Everywhere in between, there's a lot more variability. But there is a pretty broad agreement that abortion should be allowed within the first three months. About 6 in 10 are in favor of allowing it in the first three months of pregnancy, at least only, you know, but when you talk about some of these contradictions, people are split when you ask them about 15 week bans, like one that's in front of the Supreme Court currently, and that's, you know, 49, 48. There's really no difference in that as far as whether they're for it or against it. And even with that, only a slim majority of Republicans are in favor of that ban. You know, and even though 7 in 10, for example, oppose allowing abortion only until cardiac

activity, they're split on whether or not pills, abortion-inducing pills should be allowed to be mailed home, even though a majority of abortions, by the way, take place now by pill very early on in pregnancies. Mm-hmm. You know, Domenico, this is an issue that clearly has quite a few people fired up, but again, Roe hasn't been overturned yet. It could be in June. Do we know if everyone has even heard this news or how many people haven't? And do we have a sense of what kind of enthusiasm people have and how lasting it might be? some evidence of that before this when we asked people which party do they trust more when it comes to the issue of abortion. And Democrats had double digit advantages on that. And in this survey, what we're seeing is that the contents of the leak from the Supreme Court of the draft

opinion that was leaked earlier this month, 66% of Democrats say that that makes them more likely to vote this November. Only 40% of Republicans said so. And that kind of gap is really big considering in this election year, Republicans had a huge advantage, certainly overwhelmingly favored to win the House. You know, when you look at inflation on the rise, President Biden's approval on the decline, Republicans were certainly looking like a shoe-in to at least win the House. And they still are favored in that way. But this is an issue that I've heard from a lot of Republicans. They're not quite sure how it would play out because they know that two-thirds of people have been saying in surveys for a long time that they're against overturning abortion rights.

A lot to talk about there. We're going to keep talking about it. We're going to take a quick break now. And when we come back, we'll get into some of the other findings from this brand new NPR poll. We are back. Let's talk first about something that sounds a little wonky and boring, but it's actually not. And it's really important to how November's elections are going to go. And to Nomenico, that is the generic ballot poll. Tell us why it matters, what it's been looking like before, and what this latest poll that we did found. Yeah, that's really just shorthand for when pollsters ask, who would you vote for today? Would you vote for a Democrat or a Republican in your congressional district?

That's called a generic congressional ballot test in wonky polling terms. But it's important for sort of the direction of the headwinds of which direction the country is headed. And last month, we saw Republicans do the best that they had done on this question in eight years in the Marist poll. They had a within margin of error lead on Democrats 47 to 44. This month, after that leak from the Supreme Court, Democrats are ahead 47 to 42, which is an eight point net turnaround. Yeah, it's really not something you see very often. And I think the real question here is whether that's going to last. We've seen some enthusiasm, obviously, jump up from Democrats

around this issue, as we noted a little earlier. So I put this question to Lee Miringoff, who's the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts the poll. I asked him if this would last, especially considering we've seen other bounces recede, for example, after President Biden delivered his State of the Union address, he got a boost, but then came back down. My sense of it is that this is not going to be one of those issues that shows up and vanishes soon thereafter, because so many of the states are going to then have a key decision making role in what the policy is within their jurisdiction. You know, you have court decision that comes out. And as Lee's talking about there, what the states are going to wind up doing. And we did ask about a lot of what's, you know, been proposed by, in particular, Republican-led legislatures,

but also some Democratic ones. Domenico, you mentioned that there are a bunch of Republican states that have their own more restrictive laws on abortion. What do we know from this poll about people's attitudes towards those restrictions? Well, yeah, a four in five people say that they don't want to allow private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone who assists a pregnant person in getting an abortion. And three quarters are against making abortion a crime where you might require fines or prison time for doctors who perform those abortions. So we're seeing a lot of that and also people in support of, for example, allowing for safe havens in their states for people who are seeking abortions from out of state. And we've seen some Republican states try to cut off that path for access for

some people. Danielle, you're talking to a lot of voters this year. What are you hearing as you have conversations about this stuff with them? Yeah, I was just out in Texas along a few border districts just before the leak. And those are a few battleground districts. And Republicans are very enthused in districts that they think they can flip, especially. So were this to greatly increase enthusiasm on the Democratic side, it really could, of course, it really could change things. I mean, the final point that I would add on that is that over the years, and you guys may have encountered this too, when I ask voters, what is your most important issue? Very often when abortion comes up, it has been Republicans, because Republicans who, particularly Republicans who are very opposed to abortion, have felt like underdogs. They have felt like they have to fight against Roe v. Wade,

against laws that allow abortion. Well, if this puts Democrats in the place of thinking they really have to fight for this, that this is not a guaranteed right, it is possible, and I'm very much going to be watching this, that when we're out there talking to voters now, that Democrats bring up abortion a lot more often. I mean, that's quite easy to see happening. All right, that is it for today. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.