Florida Advocates Officially Have Enough Signatures to Put Pro-Choice Initiative on the Ballot

Tori Otten for The New Republic writes that Florida abortion advocates have reached the number of verified signatures needed to put an amendment protecting abortion access on the state’s ballot in November. Florida currently bans abortion at 15 weeks, with a decision pending from the Florida Supreme Court on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ more restrictive six-week ban, “before most people know they are pregnant,” Otten writes. The ballot measure, which would permit abortion up until viability (typically around 24 weeks), has a strong chance of meeting the required passage threshold of 60%, with PRRI data finding 64% of Floridians support access to abortion in all or most cases.

Nikki Haley Talked About Her ‘Black Friends.’ What Do Data and History Show About Friend Groups?

At The Washington Post, Philip Bump analyzes presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s defense of her failure to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War at a town hall on Dec. 28. Considering her explanation (“I had Black friends growing up. It is a very talked-about thing”), Bump cites PRRI’s 2022 report on Americans’ social networks, which found that, overall, Americans’ friendship networks are about two-thirds white and about 11% Black. While Asian Americans are the least likely group to have networks that include only people from their own race, only 2% of their friendship networks are Black.

Marking Jan. 6 Anniversary, Biden Warns Political Violence Poses Grave Threat to Democracy

For PBS NewsHour, Laura Barrón-López reports that President Biden condemned political violence, saying it has “no place” in a democracy, in his speech commemorating Jan. 6 near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The president chose the location – a pivotal site in America’s Revolutionary War – to contrast George Washington and Donald Trump, showing that Washington was willing to give up power. At The Hill, experts monitoring political violence expressed concerns about the increased risk of violence, citing recent polls including PRRI’s 2023 American Values Survey, which found that 23% of all Americans agreed when asked if true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

Deceptively Stable? How the Stability of Aggregate Abortion Attitudes Conceals Partisan Induced Shifts

A new academic article published in Political Research Quarterly and co-authored by PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman, Ph.D., provides insights into American abortion attitudes using longitudinal General Social Survey data from 1973 through 2018. Although nationally abortion attitudes remained relatively stable during this time overall, Deckman and her co-authors show major shifts on abortion among several subgroups of Americans. Over that time, Republicans and evangelicals became more opposed to abortion, while Democrats and the religiously unaffiliated became more supportive of abortion rights. In response to the Dobbs decision, however, PRRI datasuggests there has been a modest increase in the percent of Americans supporting access to abortion in all or most cases.