Interesting and encouraging, but I’m not sure I buy it.
One year after Texas implemented what was then the most restrictive abortion law in the country, a majority of Texas voters are expressing strong support for abortion rights.
In a new survey, six in 10 voters said they support abortion being “available in all or most cases,” and many say abortion will be a motivating issue at the ballot box in November. Meanwhile, 11% say they favor a total ban on abortion.
“We’ve known that politicians in Texas and across the country have been enacting harmful abortion bans. We’ve known that they’ve been out of step with what Texans want, and now we have the data to prove that,” said Carisa Lopez, senior political director for the Texas Freedom Network, one of several reproductive rights groups that commissioned the poll.
[…]
Polling firm PerryUndem surveyed 2,000 Texas voters in late June, just before the Dobbs decision was issued. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The data release comes one year after the implementation of S.B. 8, which relies on civil lawsuits to enforce a prohibition on most abortions after about six weeks.
Pollster Tresa Undem said she believes the issue is likely to motivate turnout among supporters of abortion rights in states including Texas in November.
“I think that’s probably why in Texas we’re seeing a shift in the Texas electorate becoming more pro-choice — because there’s been that year of S.B. 8, and people experiencing that,” Undem said.
Because of S.B. 8, Texas had provided an early example of the impact of restrictive abortions laws, months before the U.S. Supreme Court released its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade and other abortion-rights precedent.
In response to that ruling in late June, the state’s trigger ban — also passed in 2021 in anticipation of Supreme Court action — also took effect, making abortion completely illegal in Texas except to save a patient’s life during a medical emergency. Doctors say that exception is narrow and subject to interpretation, and some say they fear terminating pregnancies for patients facing medical crises.
Undem says she’s seeing growing support for abortion rights among several key voting blocs including women, Latinos, and younger voters.
The poll memo, which includes some data, is here. I have two issues with it. One is that we don’t get the exact wording of each question, which is significant because as we know the wording can make a big difference in the responses. Two, these results are a lot more pro-abortion rights than we have seen in other polls. The post I did on the UT/Texas Politics Project data, which also was from June, illustrates this. In that poll, they broke down the situations into much more specific subgroups, with certain circumstances under which the person got an abortion, and the number of weeks they were pregnant. In cases of rape or incest or a threat to the mother’s health, support was in line with this poll – in particular, the “never available” number was down in the 10-15% range, as it is for the “never available” number in the PerryUndem poll. But for discretionary abortions, the level of support in the UT/TPP poll was much lower, and the “never available” number was up in the 30s. That’s a huge difference, and it’s in two polls taken at about the same time.
The most likely reason for those differences is the way the questions were asked. From what I can see, the PerryUndem poll didn’t get into any specific situations, which likely meant people were more lenient in what they would acquiesce to. You could argue that some of the specifics of the UT/TPP poll skewed responses in the other direction – I strongly suspect that most people in that poll didn’t know that Roe generally allowed abortions through 24 weeks, and that the law in the Dobbs case, which restricted abortion access to 15 weeks, was still looser than the 12 week choice that the poll gave. Texas’ law was allowing abortion up to 20 weeks before SB8 was passed, and that itself was technically illegal under Roe but went unchallenged in court on the very reasonable concern that SCOTUS (well before Amy Coney Barrett was there) would have upheld it and maybe done more than that. Point being, I think general ignorance of the law and of pregnancy probably contributed to some of the more restrictive answers.
The thesis of this poll was that attitudes in abortion had already begun to shift in Texas even before the Dobbs decision was handed down, because of the effect of SB8. I buy that to a point, but because this poll had no “before” data to compare with, that’s just a guess. If you want to extrapolate from there and decide that attitudes have loosed further since June, you can do that, but I’d want to see an updated version of this poll – or the UT/TPP poll, as one example – before I reached that conclusion.
One more thing about this poll, which neither NPR nor the Texas Signal noted, is that it also included an Abbott/Beto question. This poll, taken in June before the Dobbs decision and the surge in generic Democratic numbers since then, had Abbott leading Beto 47-43, the closest gap we’ve seen in any public poll so far. The crosstabs are a bit wonky – how you get to this result when Beto leads among Latinos 49-39 and leads among Black voters 70-14 is a mystery to me – but there it is. We’ve only seen one post-Dobbs poll so far, and it didn’t show any real movement. But as we always say, it’s one poll. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more soon.
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