It was a truth universally acknowledged among pundits that voters don’t care about abortion. To be fair, those pundits weren’t just making broad conjectures: polling data did suggest that abortion rights weren’t voters’ top concern. Take, for example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released in September. It put abortion as the fifth most important issue for midterm voters, behind the economy, education and schools, inflation, and crime (but before immigration and climate change).
And yet, there was room for nuance, even in those early days. Polling data should be taken with at least a grain of salt, because it’s never perfect. And abortion seemed especially tricky to analyze by way of polls, because it has not historically been on the ballot as prominently as it is now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v Wade.
