By Dave Andrusko
As you no doubt know, President Biden and pro-abortion Congressional Democrats sing the same sour note in harmony: Pro-life Republicans are the “extremists.”
Well, a new survey from the Republican polling firm WPA Intelligence put the lie to that nonsense.
Nate Hochman, writing on National Review Online, begins “U.S. voters believe that the mainstream Democratic Party’s position on abortion is ‘more extreme’ than the mainstream Republican position by a nearly two-to-one margin.”
1,000 voters were presented with two options:
“allowing abortions up until 9 months of pregnancy for any reason,” or “restricting abortions to only in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.” When asked which of the two was “more extreme,” 57 percent of respondents chose “allowing abortions up until 9 months of pregnancy for any reason,” as opposed to just 29 percent who chose “restricting abortions to only in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.” Fourteen percent said they were unsure which of the two positions is more extreme.
Since the major media have zero interest in laying out the Democrats out-of-the-mainstream position on abortion and 100% interest in demagoging the Dobbs decision, the public is left hearing only side (pro-abortion) bashing the other side(pro-life).
Hochman writes that the first rush of conventional thinking was that
“the abortion issue would be a millstone around the neck of Republicans running in competitive races in the midterms. But just a few months later, the GOP appears to be surging back to pre-summer levels of red-wave momentum.”
He then quotes Matthew Continetti:
“Not long ago, President Biden and congressional Democrats were riding high,” Continetti wrote earlier this month. “Now it’s autumn, and there is a chill in the air and a change in the political temperature. Republicans, the polls suggest, have a path to a Senate majority. They are on track to take the House. The GOP has recovered from its summer swoon.”
Hochman does a nice job pointing out that the public is ill-informed on two other critical aspects. In the poll, sixty-five percent of Democratic voters “believed that ‘the United States is one of the few countries in the world that limits abortions,’ and 59 percent believed that ‘fewer than 500 abortions are performed each year after 20 weeks of pregnancy.’”
Both are bogus:
As National Review has exhaustively catalogued, America’s abortion laws are far more permissive than most of our counterparts in the developed world, and, as Alexandra DeSanctis noted in 2019, “about 12,000 [abortions] take place after viability,” which “means there are more post-viability abortions each year than gun homicides, according to the most recent FBI estimates.”
One other very important point. WPA Intelligence vice president and director of analytics Matt Knee told National Review
“Even with strong majorities supporting limits after a certain point, it is harder to find common ground on abortion when the majority of one half of the country believes elective late-term abortion is a myth and that most nations around the world hardly regulate the practice,” Knee said. It’s not that voters are on the Democratic Party’s side — it’s that they’ve been routinely lied to about what Democrats actually believe.
A very much needed corrective.