Abortion may not be a game-changer for Democrats in 2024

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision was announced last year, there has been much discussion about the impact of the decision on the 2024 elections. Some have referred to the decision as a “political earthquake,” or asserted that the “political landscape has been altered significantly, with no reversal in sight.”

Indeed, Democrats believe that abortion is a winning issue for them. They have already started airing ads attacking Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for supporting abortion bans, and Joe Biden plans to make his 2024 campaign for president “the most overtly abortion rights platform” in history. 

There is no doubt that the abortion issue was influential in 2022. Studies suggested it was a motivating factor for women under 50 in the midterm elections that year. Many experts credit the issue for flipping the Michigan legislature from Republican to Democratic control and for mitigating Democratic losses generally in that election cycle. Also, when abortion was literally on the ballot, as it was in the six states that held abortion referenda, initiatives protecting abortion access prevailed in each state, including reliably red states like Kansas and Kentucky.

As a policy issue, Americans have long been divided on the legality of abortion. Even after Dobbs, which held that the states have the ability to make their own abortion laws, we have seen movement toward the extremes. There has been a shift by Democratic and independent voters to maintain or expand the protections provided under Roe v. Wade (1973), while a majority of Republicans have not softened their stances on abortion and support a complete ban.

Although national polls about attitudes toward abortion are interesting, they are often not instructive for examining the issue’s effect on 2024 elections since the Dobbs decision threw abortion back to the states. Since the decision was handed down, states have passed various types of abortion laws. States like Indiana and North Dakota have passed laws banning abortion entirely, states like South Carolina have a six-week ban and North Carolina passed a twelve-week ban with some exceptions.

Despite Democrats’ confidence that Americans are on their side concerning abortion, in a recent Meredith Poll, we found that North Carolinians were almost evenly divided between those supporting the new abortion law (47 percent) and those opposed to it (45 percent). We also found that only 14 percent of those surveyed identified abortion as the top issue in terms of their voting decision in 2024—well behind economic issues, which was the top issue for 40 percent of respondents. Finally, we asked about the new abortion law’s effect on motivating the respondents to vote, and there were no differences in the law’s impact on men and women voters or voters in different age groups. There were only slight differences between Democratic and Republican voters who saw abortion as a motivating issue.

The other problem with giving abortion too much significance in the 2024 elections is that it discounts the effects of polarization on the American voter. Two kinds of polarization are affective polarization, or feeling close to your chosen party and negatively about the opposing party, and policy polarization, or people of different parties choosing very different policy outcomes. Using data from the Meredith Poll from 2017-2023, we analyzed responses to questions about policy issues, including abortion, as well as their perceptions of people affiliated with the two major parties. We found that affective polarization was significantly stronger than policy polarization, even on a divisive issue like abortion.

The bottom line for 2024 is whether voters—even those who have strong policy preferences on the issue of abortion—will vote based on their position on abortion or for their political party. Our evidence suggests that Democrats may be overstating the influence of abortion, and party identification will be a better predictor of a person’s vote.

David McLennan is a professor of political science at Meredith College and director of the Meredith Poll. Whitney Ross Manzo is an associate professor of political science at Meredith and assistant director of the Meredith Poll.