A weird disjunction

I keep getting comments, which I do not publish because they are factually false, to the effect that too bad for me, the American People want to ban abortion and guarantee the right of 18-year-olds to purchase and carry military rifles and high capacity magazines. No, they do not. I'll just talk about item number 1 today.

 

Here is recent polling from the Public Religion Research Institute which finds that 65% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in "all or most circumstances." Obviously there is a partisan divide. Only 35% of Republicans agree. But still, that's actually a lot of Republicans and the overall majority is about as strong as you're going to get for any disputed proposition. Then they break it down by religious affiliation, and show how this has changed before and after Dobbs, the recent ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade:

 

Notice that the Catholic Cardinals have a big problem here. Aside from that, two things should jump out for you. One is that when the question got real, rather than abstract, support for legal abortion went up, by a lot, for almost everybody. The second is that there is one, and only one religious group with majority support for banning abortion. And no, white evangelical protestants do not, for the most part, belong to the same denominations as Black protestants so we are talking here about a specific religious category, not just a religio-ethnic category. However . . . 

 

In spite of this, voters installed a president  in office who pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and a Senate that would confirm them. Now, about half the states are moving to ban abortion under pretty much all circumstances. (By the way there is majority support for that in only 10 states.) So how can this be?

 

It's largely attributable to what political scientists call concentrated vs. diffuse interest. For the people who want to ban abortion, it's the most important political issue -- in many cases, the only issue, the sole determinant of their vote. Preserving the right to abortion is, or at least was, equally important to a smaller number of voters. So lots of people who would say they wanted abortion to remain legal still voted for candidates who did not. This was even easier for them to do because they thought it would remain legal no matter what Senator Foghorn said or did because of Roe v. Wade. We'll see how this plays out in November but it may well be that the Republicans will find they are the dog who caught the car.