Abortion, Polling and Other Republican Midterm Troubles

If ducking the abortion question for the next eight weeks isn’t an option, how should pro-life candidates talk about it? That’s the question I posed recently to veteran Republican pollster and political consultant

Whit Ayres.

“Republicans need to take a mainstream pro-life position,” he told me. “What that mainstream position is depends on the particular state. But what it is not is a ban on abortion in all circumstances without exception for rape, incest and the life of the mother.” There’s no national consensus on abortion, he added. “But a mainstream pro-life position includes those exceptions.”

Mr. Ayres also stressed that tone and language matter immensely if the goal is to win over people who disagree with you. “More than half of Americans know someone who has had an abortion or has had one themselves,” he said. “So any politician talking about this issue needs to project a tone of tolerance to those with different views. They need to express compassion for women who are struggling with an unwanted pregnancy. Calling abortion ‘murder’ will never persuade anyone to join their side.”

The Dobbs ruling, which has boosted enthusiasm among Democrats generally and younger women in particular, isn’t the only reason that Republicans have been forced to temper their hopes of big congressional gains in November. Gasoline prices that many consumers view as a proxy for overall inflation have fallen for 13 straight weeks, helping to neutralize a key vulnerability for Democrats. The FBI raid on

Donald Trump’s

Mar-a-Lago home has put the former president back on the front pages, which is where Democrats want him, to divert attention away from violent crime, illegal immigration, the deficit and other domestic problems they’d rather not discuss.

The biggest GOP problem, however, may turn out to have been self-inflicted. In several prominent Senate races, Republican voters chose rookie candidates over more experienced rivals, and those nominees are struggling. The Republican nominees in Arizona and Ohio have had trouble raising money. In Georgia, where for months Republican Gov.

Brian Kemp

has held a comfortable lead over

Stacey Abrams,

his Democratic challenger, Senate nominee

Herschel Walker

hasn’t been able to pull away from incumbent Democrat

Raphael Warnock.

Minority Leader

Mitch McConnell

took some lumps recently for musing that candidate quality had him worried about the GOP’s ability to retake the Senate, but current polling suggests that he was on to something.

Of course, citing polls isn’t popular with a lot of Republicans these days, even though news media continue to rely on them to gauge voter sentiment and speculate about outcomes on Election Day. When pollsters miss the mark, cynicism rises, and recent election cycles have led to more people questioning the trustworthiness of political polling.

In 2016 the polling underestimated support for Donald Trump, and four years later it happened again. According to an analysis published last year by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, national surveys for the 2020 presidential contests were the least accurate in four decades, and state polls for congressional and gubernatorial races weren’t much better. The errors seemed to run in one direction. “Whether the candidates were running for president, senator, or governor, poll margins overall suggested that Democratic candidates would do better and Republican candidates would do worse relative to the final certified voter,” the report said.

Conspiracy theorists won’t be satisfied, but Mr. Ayres and others in his profession insist that the still-unresolved problem boils down to the difficulty of getting Trump voters to engage with pollsters. “The criticism of the polling in 2016 and 2020 was not overstated,” he said. “The errors were driven primarily by nonresponse bias—that is, people who supported Trump simply refused to have anything to do with pollsters.”

Still, Mr. Ayres warned against extrapolating too much from these past two presidential contests. “In the 2018 midterms, polling nationally was far better than in 2016 or 2020, and our own polling in 2018 was dead on,” he said. “I believe the polling error is a Trump phenomenon. Trump was on the ballot in 2016 and 2020 but not in 2018. And he won’t be on the ballot in 2022.”