… On Election Day, voters in critical states like Michigan and Pennsylvania ranked abortion — not inflation or crime — as the most important issue in the midterms, according to exit polls. The red wave never arrived. Instead, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate and Republicans, badly underperforming expectations, […] Read more »
It wasn’t just “the economy stupid”—it was abortion
… Inflation is unpopular with both parties—there is no pro-inflation and anti-inflation party. In fact, if we’ve learned anything about politics in our polarized time it’s that voters see almost all issues through their partisan lens. Democrats worried about inflation could think that Joe Biden was dealing with it and […] Read more »
Women powered Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Will they again in 2022?
… In the coming weeks, The Washington Post will be looking at some of the voters who will decide the fate of the next Congress, and assessing whether Democrats can maintain the coalition that propelled them to victories in 2018 and 2020. This “Deciders” series begins with a look from […] Read more »
The real gap on abortion views isn’t about sex, it’s about gender
… The problem with an analysis of abortion views based on sex is that it’s conflating two concepts: sex and gender. There aren’t many social scientists who are going to argue that someone’s reproductive organs make them hold certain social or political views; rather, it’s the way that those organs […] Read more »
‘They’re getting killed among women’: Skeptical female voters stand in way of GOP Senate
Republicans this election cycle thought they had finally achieved a breakthrough with suburban women after years of losing support. Now, as the primary season has all but ended, the GOP is back where it once was: Appealing directly to skeptical female voters, the women whose support will make or break […] Read more »
Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It
… 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 […] Read more »