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The Pew Research Center published a report this week on public attitudes related to abortion rights, and for proponents of reproductive freedoms, there was a lot to like about the results. The non-partisan organization found that 63% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases — a number that has increased since Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade.
In fact, since 1995, support for abortion rights has never been higher than it is now.
On the surface, this looks like great news for Democrats ahead of the 2024 elections. The party has long championed reproductive rights, and the more voters reject the far-right line on bodily autonomy, the worse it will be for Republican candidates and officeholders.
But just below the surface, there’s a nagging problem. The New York Times reported this week on a headshaking detail from the latest Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll in several battleground states:
Nearly one in five voters in battleground states says that President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion, a new poll found, despite the fact that he supports abortion rights and that his opponent Donald J. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade.
In other words, the Democratic president — who champions abortion rights, who condemned the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices for overturning abortion rights and who’s running on a platform of codifying abortion rights into federal law — is being blamed by 17% of voters in key states for the demise of Roe v. Wade.
For reality-based observers, this obviously doesn’t make any sense. Indeed, it turns the basic facts on their head. And yet a frustrating number of voters have embraced the mistake anyway.
The Times spoke to a 30-year-old woman in Georgia, for example, who supports abortion rights and opposes a new law in her home state that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. “I don’t think a group of men should be able to decide that for us,” she said.
The same woman nevertheless said she believed Biden was responsible for ending Roe — because it happened in 2022, during the incumbent Democrat’s presidency.
This data comes on the heels of a national NBC News poll which found Donald Trump excelling among disengaged, low-information voters “who don’t follow political news at all.”
Roughly eight years ago, after Trump won a key nominating contest in Nevada, the future Republican president declared, “I love the poorly educated.”
The relevance of that quote lingers for a reason.