The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll, conducted in conjunction with Noble Predictive Insights, found that 88% of voters, including 76% of Trump-first voters, support some form of legal abortion. Included in this 88% are those 37% who believe it should be legal in all circumstances and 51% who believe it should only be legal under certain circumstances.
“You would assume that the pro-lifers are more hardened in their support, but Republicans are actually more open-minded on this issue than their counterparts across the aisle,” said Mike Noble, founder and CEO of Noble Predictive Insights, which conducted the poll.
An especially salient issue especially since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, abortion has been on the ballot in seven states in the intervening year, with anti-abortion measures failing on each occasion. Earlier this month, an Ohio ballot measure to make it harder to add items such as abortion rights to the state constitution failed, earning only 43.3% of the vote in a state where former President Donald Trump won 53.3% in 2020.
Significantly, 51% of the subset of voters who said they support abortion in some circumstances said that they only support abortion if there is no heartbeat detected, a stage of a fetus’s development that occurs between five to six weeks after conception, which is reflected in the ongoing increase in the number of states adopting “heartbeat laws” that ban abortion if there is a heartbeat detected. According to a study by the University of California, San Francisco, one in three women learn they are pregnant more than six weeks after conception.
This position was fairly consistent across party lines and levels of education in that subset of voters taking the middle position, with 54% of Republicans, 49% and Democrats, 47% of independents, 54% of those without a college degree, and 47% of those with a college degree believing that abortion should only be legal before there is a heartbeat.
Meanwhile, 80% of voters who say they support abortion in some circumstances support abortion if the mother’s life is in danger, 74% if conception is the result of rape or incest, and 70% if there is likely to be no quality of life due to detected health complications.
Of voters polled, only 12% said abortion should be illegal under all circumstances, including 20% of Republicans, 5% of Democrats, and 9% of independents. Strikingly, younger voters were the most likely to support complete bans on abortion, with 14% of voters 18-34 opposing any abortion compared to 12% of those 35-44, 13% of those 45-54, and just 10% of those over 55.
The poll was conducted from July 31 to Aug. 3 and included 2,500 voters – 1,000 Republicans, 1,000 Democrats and 500 independents. The margin of error for the aggregate sample was ±2.4% and each political group was independently weighted. For information about the methodology, visit www.noblepredictiveinsights.com.
