In any election cycle, parties and candidates invest a great deal of energy in trying to determine which issues are most important to voters. With that in mind, the latest USA Today/Suffolk University poll included an open-ended question in its latest national poll: “Thinking about your vote for US Congress in November, what is the most important issue that will affect your vote?”
As is often the case when voters aren’t presented with specific options, the responses varied quite a bit, with only a handful of issues exceeding 3%:
- Savings: 20%
- Abortion: 16%
- Inflation/cost of living: 11%
- Immigration/border control: 5%
That same poll found Democrats leading Republicans in the generic congressional ballot, 44% to 40% — a change from the tied parties in the same poll a month ago.
Granted, this is just a poll, and it’s hard to predict what public attitudes will look like when Election Day rolls around 101 days from now. Moreover, when voters say that abortion is a major election issue for them, it does not tell us which side of the debate they are on.
That said, if you were a Republican strategist, you probably wouldn’t be too happy to see abortion rights outpace inflation in an open-ended question on the most important issue of the election cycle.
Indeed, these are the precise circumstances that GOP officials and candidates predicted. would not occur.
Just last week, Senate candidate Herschel Walker was asked about government restrictions on abortion rights. “You’re going to raise things that people don’t care about,” the Georgia Republican said. He added: “They don’t even talk about that.”
As we discussed, this has been a standard GOP line for months. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NPR in May that he didn’t expect reproductive rights to matter much as voters head to the polls in the fall. “I guess in terms of impact on federal races, I think it’s probably going to be a washout,” the Kentucky Republican said.
A day earlier, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said something similar, telling the Wall Street Journal, “I just don’t think it’s going to be the big political issue that everyone thinks it is, because it won’t be that big. a change.”
Around the same time, Senator Ted Cruz pushed a related line. “Angry leftists, many of whom are quite ignorant and don’t even know what reversal deer means, I think a month later, I’m going to be surprised – “Wait, nothing has changed in my life,” the Texas Republican said. said.
It is possible that some of these GOP voices sincerely believed that the disappearance of deer would be largely irrelevant. It is also possible that this rhetoric represented a profound example of wishful thinking.
Either way, whether Republicans like it or not, abortion rights are very much on the minds of Americans as we approach the halfway point.