Demonstrators hold up signs during a Mother’s Day rally in support of abortion rights at the U.S. Supreme Court on Sunday: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

With only six months to go before the midterm elections on November 8, Republicans are still more enthusiastic to vote than Democrats, although the party in power is gaining some ground thanks to a recent leak of a draft ruling on abortion out of the United States Supreme Court.

The share of Democratic voters who said they were “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic to vote in the midterm elections increased from 48 percent to 54 percent, according to a recent Morning Consult poll, while Republican enthusiasm increased from 59 percent to 61 percent.

This new data comes after Politico published Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion revealing that the court’s conservative majority is set to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Predictably, the jump in enthusiasm to vote among Democrats was propelled by women, with 51 percent of female Democrats reporting that they are very enthusiastic to vote this November, up 11 points over the week before the leak and at its highest point since weekly tracking began in September.

“The figures paint only an early picture of the potential impact Roe’s dissolution could have on 2022’s political landscape,” Morning Consult analysts say in the report.

The court has issued no official ruling yet, and most likely won’t until July near the end of the court’s summer session. All abortion services are still in place in states where they are offered, and many Americans have yet to hear much about the news or pay attention to it, they say.

“But at this point, the data does not suggest that abortion will upend the midterm dynamic in a decisive way,” they say, which goes along with what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is saying.

“I think it will be certainly heavily debated in state legislative and governor’s races because the court will have, in effect, returned this issue to the political process,” McConnell said. “My guess is in terms of the impact on federal races, I think it’s probably going to be a wash.”

Clearly some Democrats in the House and Senate believe it could have an impact in their favor, since they are already using the issue in fund raising campaigns.

Democrats and affiliated outside groups raised more than $7 million in a week after the leak surfaced.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat from California, called the draft Supreme Court opinion a “slap” to the face of women.

“Here we are on Mother’s Day, a week where this court has slapped women in the face in terms of disrespect for their judgment about the size and timing of their families,” Pelosi told moderator Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“So the fact is, let’s keep our eye on the ball. The ball is in the court of those justices, one of them at least said over and over again,” she said.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other outside groups are already highlighting the issue in fund raising ads.

According to the latest public opinion survey, however, only 36 percent of voters said they had seen, read or heard “a lot” about the draft opinion, up from 23 percent in a survey conducted the day after Politico revealed Alito’s document. As is often the case, Democrats (44%) were more likely than Republicans (31%) to report hearing “a lot” about the news.

The share of voters who heard a lot about the draft abortion ruling is slightly less than the portion who said the same about news on inflation, and survey data continues to show that the economy is the dominant midterm issue for voters, despite a recent increase in prioritization of reproductive health care.

“Abortion is rising as an issue, but it’s trumped by the economy,” Morning Consult says.

In another survey, conducted May 5-9, 79 percent of voters say the economy is “very important” to them when deciding whom to vote for in the 2022 elections.

The share of voters who say abortion is “very important” when thinking about their vote in November increased from 47 percent to 52 percent over the course of a week, including a 9-point bump among Democrats, to 64 percent, and 1 in 5 Democratic voters now identify matters such as birth control, abortion and equal pay as their top issue when thinking about their vote for federal office, up from 10 percent before Alito’s draft opinion leaked.

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The latest Morning Consult/Politico survey was conducted May 6-9. 2022, among a representative sample of 2,005 registered U.S. voters, with an unweighted margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

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