As Abortion Looks Like a Key Issue in 2024, Voters More Divided by Party Than Ever

At NPR, Sarah McCammon reportsthat PRRI’s newest survey finds a growing number of Democrats say abortion is a top voting issue since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. McCammon underscores that the increasing gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on abortion is due to rising support for abortion legality among Democrats over the past decade, while Republican views have largely remained consistent. The poll also found that women (66%), Americans ages 18 to 29 (67%), and young Democrats (86%) are some of the groups the most supportive of abortion legality.

Lots of People Are Not ‘Absolutely Thrilled’ With Abortion Laws

At The Washington Post, Phillip Bump writes that former President Donald Trump’s claims that Americans widely support the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling shifting abortion regulation to the states contradict polling data. PRRI’s latestsurvey on abortion attitudes reveals the majority of Americans support abortion legality across most states, even in states that had the highest levels of support for Trump in 2020. According to Bump, analysis of Americans’ abortion attitudes and state population data suggests that around 33 million adults support making abortion legal in all or most cases but live in states that ban the procedure, compared with about 11 million people who believe abortion should always be illegal and live in states that ban it or severely restrict the procedure.

Will Abortion Drive Voters to the Polls in November? It’s Unclear

At Bloomberg, opinion columnist Francis Wilkinson uses new PRRI datato consider the effect that Americans’ views on abortion legality will have on the 2024 election. Describing the post-Dobbs landscape as “topsy-turvy,” Wilkinson writes that voters have a lot of new information to absorb about the effects of Trump’s and Biden’s policy positions on this issue. The new PRRI finding that majorities of every religious group — including white evangelical Christians — “oppose laws that make it illegal to access abortion pills by mail” is one illustration of the stakes that voters will have to evaluate before casting their ballots in November.

New Poll Reveals Real Dividing Line Between Abortion Supporters and Opponents

At TIME, Philip Elliott reports that according to PRRI, abortion legality is supported by a wide swath of Americans, including those in nearly every major religious group and in all but five states. However, Elliot writes that the survey’s most revealing insight is that anti-abortion sentiment is strongest among white supporters of Christian nationalism: 29% of white Americans who qualify as Christian nationalism supporters say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. At the state level, support for Christian nationalism aligns closely with efforts to either protect or eliminate access to abortion — typically against the will of the majority of those states’ residents. In states with total bans on abortion, PRRI finds the majority of residents (53%) say they support abortion legality in most or all cases.