In any election cycle, parties and candidates invest an enormous amount of energy trying to determine which issues are most important to voters. With this in mind, the latest USA Today/Suffolk University poll included an open-ended question in its latest national survey: “Thinking about your vote for U.S. Congress this November, what’s 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 topping 3 percent:
- Economy: 20 percent
- Abortion: 16 percent
- Inflation/cost of living: 11 percent
- Immigration/border control: 5 percent
This same poll found Democrats leading Republicans on the congressional generic ballot, 44 percent to 40 percent — a shift from the parties being tied in the same poll a month ago.
To be sure, this is just one poll, and it’s tough to predict what public attitudes will look like when Election Day rolls around in 101 days. What’s more, when voters say abortion is a top election issue for them, that doesn’t tell us what side of the debate they’re on.
That said, if you were a Republican strategist, you probably wouldn’t be too pleased to see abortion rights top inflation in an open-ended question about the most important issue in the election cycle.
Indeed, these are the precise circumstances GOP officials and candidates predicted wouldn’t happen.
Just last week, Senate hopeful Herschel Walker was asked about government restrictions on abortion rights. “You’re going to bring up things that people are not concerned about,” the Georgia Republican said. He added, “They’re not even talking about that.”
As we’ve 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 at all as voters head to the polls in the fall. “My guess is in terms of the impact on federal races, I think it’s probably going to be a wash,” the Kentucky Republican said.
A day earlier, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said something similar, telling The Wall Street Journal, “I just don’t think this is going to be the big political issue everybody thinks it is, because it’s not going to be that big a change.”
Around the same time, Sen. Ted Cruz pushed a related line. “Angry leftists, many of whom are pretty ignorant and don’t even know what overturning Roe means, I think a month afterwards are gonna be surprised — ‘Wait, nothing about my life changed,’” the Texas Republican said.
It’s possible that some of these GOP voices genuinely believed that the demise of Roe would be largely irrelevant. It’s 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 Americans’ minds as the midterms near.
