Before Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the Supreme Court decision that ended abortion rights, it was a truism in the Beltway press that Americans were "bitterly divided" on abortion. Driven by polls that mostly asked people if they are "pro-life" or "pro-choice," journalists portrayed Republican voters as strongly opposed to abortion for moral and religious reasons. So it's quite the shocker to see recent polls show that a plurality — and in many cases, the majority — of Republicans plan to vote for abortion rights in various state ballot initiatives this November.
Polls show "GOP support for abortion rights measures outpacing states that had similar ballot measures in recent years," Aaron Blake of the Washington Post wrote Monday. Just a couple of years ago, state polls showed Republicans only backing abortion rights by 14-18%, he reports. Now "2024 ballot measures show Republican support between 28 and 54 percent" supporting abortion rights.
As these polling changes demonstrate, their actual policy preference has started to eclipse what used to move them: culture war nonsense.
It turns out that "pro-life" conviction was only an inch deep.
What's going on here isn't especially confusing. Prior to Dobbs, calling yourself "pro-life" was a low-cost way for Republican voters to tell a story where they are morally upright heroes while casting feminists, urban liberals, college kids, and racial minorities as oversexed heathens. When abortion is legal, it's easy to condemn other people's abortions as a matter of "convenience" or say they're "using it for birth control" or employ other euphemisms for promiscuity, while quietly believing the abortions you and your friends get are justified.
We saw this shell game in action during Tuesday night's vice presidential debate, when Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, talked about a friend who had an abortion. "She felt like if she hadn't had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship," he said, falsely implying that he is fine with keeping these kinds of abortions legal. In reality, as the fact-checkers lamely noted, both current and proposed abortion bans, which Vance has backed wholeheartedly, do not make exceptions based on the reason a patient seeks an abortion.
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It was an outrageous lie by insinuation, but why he lied is not mysterious. Vance understands that his voters want to hear a pretty story where people like themselves will get to have abortions, but those other people — imagined to be "sluts" and "welfare queens" — will not. The problem for him and Trump, as this polling shows, is that the cold, hard reality of abortion bans is hard to ignore, now that they're law and not just an abstraction. Post-Dobbs, "abortion" isn't just a way for MAGA voters to gloat about their self-defined moral superiority. Instead, they realize that the bans apply to MAGA and non-MAGA alike. It's shifted from cheap identity politics to real-world impacts. As these polling changes demonstrate, their actual policy preference has started to eclipse what used to move them, which was culture war nonsense.
Republican politicians win by keeping their base voters focused on phantasms and symbolic, ego-driven identity politics, rather than real world issues. It's why Trump and Vance are laser-focused on immigration. It's not just that it has no material impact on their base voters, but because it doesn't. For the average MAGA voter, stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats feel like a low-stakes way to wallow in a sense of racial superiority. Many of them don't even pause to consider how these ego-fluffing lies harm real people. To them, "Haitians" are a largely imaginary group — like the "sluts" of anti-abortion mythology — that they can feel safe hating, without considering the consequences. But suppose Trump is successful in deporting millions of people from the workforce, which economists believe would trigger an economic depression. It's safe to say these voters would not enjoy that outcome.
We can see this tension playing out in the battle over union endorsements. Regarding the brass tacks of policy, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is vast. President Joe Biden has been regarded by experts as the most pro-worker president since FDR. He's aggressively defended unions, made organizing much easier, and sent law enforcement after companies for union-busting and other shady tactics. Trump, on the other, can barely conceal his contempt for workers, and especially for unions. He praised Elon Musk for firing workers for going on strike, which is illegal. He bragged about cheating workers out of overtime pay, which is also illegal. This is why United Auto Workers endorsed the Democratic ticket, with the president Shawn Fain calling Trump a "scab."
But while UAW did the right thing, the same cannot be said of the Teamsters, who refused to endorse this election. The Teamsters are whiter and more male than other unions, and subsequently 60% of their members are voting for Trump instead of Vice President Kamala Harris. It's easy for white, male union workers to live in the world of fantasy politics, where they're more focused on protecting their ego against admitting a Black woman could be president, rather than the real world, where the white male candidate is coming for their job protections. They are, in the internet parlance, in the "effing around" period. But if Trump gets elected and unleashes Project 2025's plans to dismantle organized labor in the U.S., it will be a finding-out season. But, as Republican women learned after the Dobbs decision, by the time you get there, it's too late to stop it.
Democrats are often accused by the pundits of being the ones who practice "identity politics," usually when they note the real world impacts of sexism, racism, and homophobia on real people. But what Republicans do is pure identity politics, a politics about ego and identity that is disconnected from material implications. Their propaganda apparatus encourages white people to wallow in sick urban legends about cat-eating immigrants, which creates the temporary thrill of feeling superior without doing anything substantive to improve their lives. Or to complain about imaginary "loose" women who use abortions as "birth control." Or to get mad about "cancel culture" or make-believe slights from liberals.
As long as they aren't feeling palpable consequences for their votes, it is more fun and satisfying for some voters to live in the constant ego-reinforcement chamber of GOP propaganda. It's a cheap thrill, to be told you're morally, intellectually, and physically superior to various "others," simply by being part of the MAGA tribe. On abortion, reality has eclipsed fantasy, as the polls show. Unfortunately, Trump's neck-in-neck race with Harris shows that far too many Republican voters have not yet received their wake-up call.
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