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My God. The backlash is real. The red tsunami has become a red kiddie pool!
That’s what NPR would have you believe, at least.
This data is noteworthy but it’s dishonestly presented to imply a much bigger impact from the Dobbs ruling than really exists.
This issue presents volatility into the 2022 midterms, because 78% of Democrats say the court’s decision makes them more likely to vote this fall, 24 points higher than Republicans.
A bare majority of 51% say they would definitely vote for a candidate who would support a federal law to restore the right to an abortion, while 36% would definitely vote against such a candidate…
Democrats have regained the favor of voters to control Congress, with 48% saying they are more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate in the fall and 41% more likely to vote for a Republican. In April, Republicans led on that question in the poll 47% to 44%, which was within the margin of error. However, the lead for Democrats may not translate into maintaining control due to the way voters are geographically distributed and how boundaries of congressional districts are drawn.
Democrats went from -3 in April to +7 now, a 10-point swing in two months. That’s a big deal.
But isn’t something missing from that last paragraph? There’s a month that comes between April and June, no?
If you flip your calendar back to May, you’ll find that NPR also polled the generic ballot then. Result: Democrats led 47-42. In other words, of the 10 points the party has supposedly gained since April, eight of them were gained before Dobbs was handed down.
It’s possible that the leak of Alito’s draft opinion drove that eight-point shift, as the May NPR poll was conducted a week after it happened. But if it did, it’s curious that that D+5 result turned out to be an extreme outlier: Of 23 other surveys conducted since then, not one has found Dems ahead by that much. Only four of the 23 have found Democrats leading at all. Republicans lead on 15 out of the 23, in some cases by eight or nine points — uncharted territory in this metric. If there’s a backlash to Dobbs among the public that began gathering after the leak, somehow only NPR seems to have picked it up.
Ed reminds me that NPR’s polling also found Biden enjoying a huge eight-point bounce in job approval after the State of the Union in March. How has that…
