Roe’s end moved voters’ attitudes about abortion, but not necessarily their votes
By Edison Research
One of the most discussed issues in the 2024 election cycle was the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the return of abortion law to the state level. Various states adopting more rigid restrictions on abortion access, and the increased awareness of the impacts of these decisions, seems to have significantly moved perceptions among the American electorate.
In the exit polls performed by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool, respondents were asked if abortion should be “legal in all cases,” “legal in most cases,” “illegal in most cases,” or “illegal in all cases.”
As the graph below shows, among the overall electorate there was a clear shift in the direction of ‘legal’ responses. The combined numbers for the two ‘legal’ positions went from 51% of Americans in 2020 to 65% this year. In addition, the portion of voters now taking the strongest position against abortion has dropped dramatically, perhaps influenced by far more public discussion of cases where women have been denied health-care access with disastrous outcomes.
However, there is scant evidence that the general changes in attitudes about abortion led more voters to vote for Harris. As the graph further shows, shifts occurred among voters for both candidates. When we compare Harris voters to the Biden vote of 2020, almost all traces of support for ‘illegal’ are gone and there is a pronounced shift to the ‘legal in all cases’ position.
With Trump, one can similarly see the group shift. The support for ‘illegal in all cases’ fell by two-thirds, pushing more people into the ‘illegal in most cases’ response and apparently a large number of Trump voters who had been in that group in 2020 jumped the line to “legal in most cases”.
The net effect of this line-jumping is that Trump actually got more votes in 2024 as compared to 2020 among both those who said either of the two ‘legal’ answers and those who said either of the ‘illegal’ answers. This is a function of so many of his voters having crossed that line. When it comes to the abortion issue, the end of Roe seems to have changed attitudes, but not necessarily votes, at least at the Presidential level.
