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The Spectacle Blog
Gallup reports today that 39 percent of female registered voters in swing states believe abortion is the most important issue in this election.
This raises a few possibilities:
- Women are ridiculous.
- Gallup’s sample is ridiculous.
- Women like Romney’s position on abortion (unlikely in large numbers).
- My head explodes trying to understand how this poll can possibly be true at the same time that the same polling organization says Obama leads Romney by single digits among women.
The same Gallup poll asks respondents which issues will most impact their vote in November (or in October with all the early voting spreading like a fungus across the country). Among women — and I realize that birth control is not the same as abortion, but abortion wasn’t asked about — birth control came in a very distant fifth after unemployment, foreign affairs, healthcare, and the federal debt and deficit.
So, if the same poll gives a result that says abortion is by far the most important single issue to women but that a similar issue is not close to being the most important vote-influencing issue, it becomes rather difficult not to conclude that there may be some merit to the first bullet point above (perhaps along with the second and fourth.)
Please don’t tell my wife I said this.
View all comments (11) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Ross Kaminsky
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/10/17/is-it-me-or-is-it-her
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mike 3/505| 10.17.12 @ 5:46PM
"Please don't tell my wife I said this."
How much is it worth to ya? Heheheheh
Regards,
Mike
Butch| 10.17.12 @ 6:04PM
Are you sure the issue question wasn't worded something like "in addition to your most important issue, which of these . . . etc." If not, this is highly suspicious. I have worked a lot with Gallup; it is a large organization shot through with incompetents.
Occam's Tool| 10.17.12 @ 7:00PM
They may believe that being pro-life is very important, because the problems of growth are preferrable to the problems of population decline---thus making abortion a very important issue, as Mark Steyn might say.
wombat1| 10.17.12 @ 8:54PM
The thing to remember about a poll is that they can't talk to people who won't talk to them.
And the Pew organization, surveying itself for a change, suddenly discovered that only one in nine contacts actually responds.
Let's face it, the so-called polls are not measurements of anything. Rather they are a command from the ruling class, dressed up in numerological drag, on what to think about a given issue, question, or occurrence.
One is reminded of the Manchu mandarins of the last days of Imperial China, trying to keep control by citing Confucian texts and casting the I-ching...
Albert Constantine Jr.| 10.17.12 @ 9:42PM
Another way of looking at the same information is that 61% of women do not believe that abortion is the most important issue in the election.
Yet another might be that that 39% is a significant subset of the 47% who weren't going to vote for Romney anyway, as was previously (if not artfully) noted by the candidate.
John Navratil| 10.18.12 @ 8:00AM
Albert Constantine Jr.
I don't believe abortion is the most important issue in this election. I still think it is quite important.
geronl| 10.17.12 @ 11:09PM
Okay, how about government NOT funding it??
JD| 10.17.12 @ 11:48PM
I know a lot of women, and very few of them support abortion. Many are more horrified by it than I am. I think, Ross, that you have been misled by the Democratic media's portrayal of women voting as a bloc.
That said, the key to polls is the wording of questions, and this one does seem like an outlier.
Ralph Gizzip| 10.18.12 @ 6:30AM
"That said, the key to polls is the wording of questions, and this one does seem like an outlier."
Absolutely correct. A couple of years ago I lowered myself to participate in a telephone poll concerning a gubernatorial election in my state. It was clear to me the poll was commissioned by one of the candidates because of the wording of the questions. I asked the pollster who commissioned said poll and she said she knew not. I explained to her how polls can be skewed by such wording. She said she hadn't thought of that point herself. I may not have altered her perception of her chosen occupation but I did give her pause to think about it.
Grzmlyk| 10.18.12 @ 10:11AM
It proves that abortion has become a symbol of a much larger pathology in our society - many, many educated women are liberal. As such, they seek out victimization - which is, after all, the effervescence in the liberal tonic. Ever since feminism reared its ugly head, middle-class women, who previously had pretty comfortable lives, suddenly had to get in on the oppression act. After all, they have to find SOMETHING that gives them street cred among life’s victims as they drive their Volvos, sip their Starbucks lattes and enjoy a standard of living unheard of just 60 years ago.
And, while their vaginas may be, uh, open to all comers without much compunction, their uteruses are supposedly sanctified by Gaia - but only to the extent that they have the right to scrape them clean and destroy life, should the evil Republicans deprive them of life-saving birth control (the Gaia-given right to free receipt of which is clearly enshrined in the Constitution).
The adage is true - abortion is a liberal sacrament. Which I find odd - you'd think it was a joyous, life-affirming experience the way most women fetishize it, but most women I know of who've had them - granted, that's only 97% of the women I know - do not look back on their rite of passage into the pantheon of progressive sainthood with anything approaching joy.
MRD| 10.18.12 @ 1:33PM
Why the assumption that women are pro-choice? There is no evidence for this. In fact in the most recent Gallup poll there was no difference among men and women calling themselves pro-life vs pro-choice. Most people favor a position more Pro-life than either the current state of affairs or that the Democrats favor. 22% favor abortion be totally proscribed and 53% favor permitting it only in certain circumstances. This means that only 1/4 people favor the current industrial scale abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy funded by the tax payor. It seems the pundit class, and the Democrat left think this is what most women want but the facts are otherwise. As to the larger point it does seem unlikely that significant numbers of people are voting based on this issue so the 39% number is a high. ( or it may be in some swing states with high numbers of Evangelical and orthodox Catholic voters its helping Romney, especially given the Obama's push to force people to pay for it.