An anti-abortion activist prays in front of a Planned Parenthood center in Philadelphia in September 2022. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images Rachel Rebouche, Temple University The abortion landscape in the U.S. has been upended over the past five months, as many clinics offering the procedure have closed and people have […] Read more »
Republicans Paid a Price for Overturning Roe. It May Have Been Worth It.
The Republicans’ under-performance in the midterm elections has been described a lot of different ways — a failure, a rebuke, a mistake, etc. — but rarely as a price. That is, however, exactly what happened. Republicans took a hit at the polls because that’s the price to pay for a […] Read more »
How Much Did a ‘Dobbs Effect’ Blunt the Red Wave?
The expectations for 2022 midterms were set early on. The Democratic Party was expected to easily lose control of the House and potentially the Senate as a result of lackluster approval ratings for Joe Biden and concerns about issues like crime and inflation. But then came the end of Roe […] Read more »
Why were the midterm elections close? Exit polls offer clues.
A set of countervailing political forces may have contributed to the closeness of this year’s midterm elections, according to the current results of the national exit poll conducted for CNN and other news networks by Edison Research. It remains uncertain which party will control either the Senate or the House […] Read more »
How the 2022 Midterms Became a Squeaker
… How the midterms turned out so improbably was, in many ways, a function of forces beyond Democrats’ control. A Supreme Court decision that stripped away a half-century of abortion rights galvanized their base. A polarizing, unpopular and ever-present former president, Donald J. Trump, provided the type of ready-made foil […] Read more »
How Abortion Boosted Democratic Candidates in Tuesday’s Midterm Election
While inflation was clearly at the top of voters’ minds in this year’s midterm elections, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade played a significant role in motivating key voting blocs that likely contributed to the Democratic party’s stronger-than-expected performance, a new analysis of KFF’s supplemental questions on the […] Read more »