Pollsters underestimated female voters in the midterms

Exit polls have shown Democrats and Republicans alike that they underestimated how important abortion rights are to the American electorate

Women hold signs supporting the right to an abortion as Joe Biden speaks in Washington DC (Getty)

Pissing off a demographic that makes up more than half of the electorate. Who could possibly have thought that was a good idea?

After a little more than four months of gruelling post-Roe midterm electioneering and endless speculation from Washington DC pundits, we have finally arrived at the conclusion that Democratic activists were quietly coming to months ago: yes, abortion matters. Taking away a right that people have relied on for decades matters.

What seems like an obvious calculation was one that seemed to elude supposed experts in Washington for months. An October edition of Politico’s Playbook newsletter asked whether the effect of the Supreme Court decision was “fading” among Democratic voters. Many, including progressives in the Democratic Party, publicly warned that their side needed to focus more on economic issues, such as the prices of food and fuel, in the hope of staving off disaster.

And while there’s a fair argument to be made that the Democrats still lost the battle on the biggest issue of the night – the economy – it’s also fair to say that the hand-wringing from pundits about an undue focus on abortion rights was unfounded. Exit polls are now in, and we can see that the issue ranked just behind the economy in terms of voters’ priorities at the polls this year – that’s an unprecedented finding, for the record. In 2018, the issue of abortion rights didn’t even track in the top four reasons driving Americans to vote.

The message from voters is clear: conservatives won a pyrrhic victory when their Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v Wade. GOP-controlled states are now free to ban the practice or restrict it as they see fit, but doing so may very well come at a political cost that some Republicans are not willing to bear. The court’s decision may have cost them the Senate this time round, and certainly energised Democrats around the country in an effect that simply did not manifest in GOP voters.

In Michigan, it likely contributed to the inability of Tudor Dixon to capture the governor’s mansion, as incumbent Gretchen Whitmer won a re-election victory by only slightly underperforming a ballot initiative to codify reproductive rights in the state constitution. Similar ballot initiatives won in California and Vermont, while voters in deep-red Kentucky rallied and defeated a ballot initiative that would have removed the right from the state’s constitution.

All in all, it was a bad night for Republicans, and particularly for Donald Trump, who gets to watch the man who defeated him in 2020 achieve the best midterms performance of any US president in a few decades. And they may have six unelected justices on the nation’s highest court to thank for it.

Yours,

John Bowden

Political reporter (Washington DC)