Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It

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… For many Americans, confronting the loss of abortion rights was different from anticipating it. In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.

One of the first big signs that things had changed came from Kansas. After voters there defeated a constitutional amendment that would have removed abortion protections in the state in a landslide, I sought to understand how activists could have accomplished such an astounding upset. While it takes several weeks for state election officials to produce full reports on who voted in any given election, there was an immediate clue. I looked at new voter registrants in the state since the June 24 Dobbs decision. As shocking as the election result was to me, what I found was more striking than any single election statistic I can recall discovering throughout my career. Sixty-nine percent of those new registrants were women. CONTINUED

Tom Bonier (TargetSmart), New York Times

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Measuring the world can render us helpless — or show us how to help

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… All of us have our own versions of the quantified other. Perhaps you construct yours when you read public opinion polls about an issue you care about, attempting to anticipate the nation’s inclinations. Or maybe you find it in the study of unemployment numbers, which you track even though you are stably employed. The former might reveal something troubling about the health of our democracy, while the latter might help you understand the strength of our economy. Neither describes your life, at least not directly or immediately, and neither responds meaningfully to your actions — but both have the power to affect you. CONTINUED

Jacob Brogan, Washington Post

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Abortion Could Define California’s Elections

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Abortion rights dominated the message when the Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen sent off a small group who had gathered to canvass for him here early on Sunday morning.

“A right that we had all assumed we would have, the right of a woman to have control of her own health-care decisions, was taken away after 50 years,” Chen told the volunteers. He reminded them that his opponent, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, had co-sponsored “a federal ban on abortion” that would prohibit the procedure even in deep-blue California. “You name it, she’s on the extreme end of all these issues,” Chen said. “She’d be a complete outlier even in deep-red Kansas because even in Kansas they protected the right to an abortion. So for her to try to represent [this district] does not make any sense.”

Chen’s exhortation captured the outsize role abortion rights could play across this year’s unusually large field of competitive U.S. House races in California, after the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. The Golden State offers Democrats the nation’s single largest concentration of opportunities to offset losses elsewhere by flipping House seats now held by Republicans. And the abortion-rights issue offers Democrats their best chance to do so—particularly with a state constitutional amendment protecting access to the procedure also on the November ballot as Proposition 1. CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

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Americans’ Satisfaction With K-12 Education on Low Side

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Americans have become less content in recent years with the quality of the nation’s K-12 education. The 42% who say they are satisfied today is the lowest measured in the past two decades by one percentage point and the second-lowest reading in Gallup’s 23-year trend. Americans’ satisfaction with schools was at a near-record high of 51% in 2019 before dropping slightly each year since.

At the same time, parents of children attending kindergarten through grade 12 remain largely content with their oldest child’s education. CONTINUED

Lydia Saad, Gallup

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Americans continue to feel U.S. democracy is under threat — CBS News poll

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Americans continue to believe democracy and the rule of law are under threat — a view that’s remained high over the last year and is at 72% today — though they believe that for an assortment of reasons.

The influence of money in politics tops the list of reasons, among those who feel it is threatened. The potential for political violence concerns most across party lines. Two-thirds cite people trying to overturn elections as a major threat. Just under half of Americans believe a major threat comes from people voting illegally, but this view is held by a majority of Republicans. CONTINUED

Anthony Salvanto, CBS News

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Independent Voters Now Tilting Toward Democrats in Midterm Elections, WSJ Poll Finds

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Democrats are entering the homestretch before November’s election in better shape than earlier this year, boosted by gains among independent voters, improved views of President Biden and higher voting enthusiasm among abortion-rights supporters, a Wall Street Journal poll shows.

Republicans have electoral fuel to tap into if they can keep the debate focused on the economy and what has been the highest inflation in four decades. Nearly two-thirds of registered voters say the economy isn’t good or poor—a larger share than in the last Journal survey, in March—and close to two-thirds say the pain of higher costs makes them more likely to cast a ballot. CONTINUED

John McCormick, Wall Street Journal

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