News
Featured Image
 Shutterstock

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 8, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – U.S. voters who consider themselves pro-life are far more likely than their counterparts to support a politician who holds their views on abortion, a new poll found. 

About one-third of American voters who identify as pro-life said they will only vote for a politician who shares their pro-life views. They are single-issue voters when it comes to abortion, supporting only candidates who are pro-life, as well. At the same time, 19 percent of voters who support abortion would only vote for a candidate who is also pro-abortion.

According to a new Gallup poll, the percentage of pro-life voters who are not willing to compromise on abortion is higher than ever before, having risen from 23 percent in 2016, before the election of President Donald Trump, to 30 percent this year. “Thirty percent of pro-life, 19 percent of pro-choice adults say abortion is threshold issue,” the poll highlighted. 

Before Senator John McCain and then-Senator Barack Obama faced off in 2008, only 15 percent of voters in the pro-life camp made abortion a non-negotiable issue.

“Those who consider themselves pro-life are significantly more likely than their pro-choice counterparts to say they will vote only for a candidate who shares their views on abortion,” Gallup pointed out.

Combining the pro-life camp and the pro-abortion camp, Gallup determined that for 24 percent of voters, the candidate has to share their view on abortion, whether that be in favor of killing unborn babies, or against it. In other words, for a quarter of Americans, abortion is the deciding factor in who they vote for.

Another quarter of Americans do not consider abortion a major issue during this election, meaning it won’t influence their decision on who will be elected to office, from the presidency to smaller races.

Forty-seven percent, almost half of voters, say abortion is one of many important factors.

“Americans currently consider race relations, the coronavirus, the government and the economy to be the most important problems facing the U.S.,” Gallup summarized what is on voters’ minds. “Abortion is not near the top of that list; still, a core one-quarter of U.S. adults consider it to be a threshold vote issue.”

Gallup speculated that the recent Supreme Court decision, striking down a Louisiana law requiring basic medical precautions in the event of abortion complications, “has the potential to galvanize” pro-life voters. “The abortion issue potentially works more to the advantage of Republicans than Democrats, given the parties’ respective platforms and the greater proportion of pro-life than pro-choice voters who will vote only for candidates who share their views on the issue.”

Twenty-six percent of Repbulicans say their candidate must share their views, which would almost automatically amount to a pro-life position. For 23 percent of Republicans, however, abortion is not a major issue.

Similarly, 27 percent of Democrats want their candidate to reflect their position on abortion, which generally means being for abortion.

According to Gallup, “abortion may serve to mobilize voters to turn out more than it does to influence their candidate choice, given the increasingly greater alignment of Republican and Democratic candidates with their party’s position on abortion.”

Gallup’s new findings come shortly after another poll by the organization had painted the grim reality of American attitudes on a number of moral issues, including abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and assisted suicide.

A small majority of Americans said abortion is morally wrong. Forty-seven percent said abortion is unacceptable, whereas 44 percent said it is acceptable. However, those numbers don’t translate into political action, given that only a quarter of Americans would only vote for a candidate opposed to abortion, whereas almost half of Americans said abortion is morally wrong.

What sounds like a victory for the pro-life movement is put into perspective by the fact that 43 percent of Americans also think buying or wearing clothing made of animal fur is immoral, and only 31 percent say medical research involving stem cells obtained from human embryos is wrong.

A striking 90 percent of the population, the earlier poll found, thinks contraception is morally acceptable, with only seven percent saying it is morally wrong. More than half of Americans support assisted suicide, but only 18 percent said suicide as such is morally unacceptable.

Compared with 2007, several issues are now considered morally acceptable by a larger percentage of the population. Divorce rose from 65 percent to 77 percent. Sex between an unmarried man and woman is fine with 72 percent this year, up from 59 percent 13 years ago.

Fifty-four percent said having a baby outside of wedlock was morally acceptable in 2007. That number has risen to 66 percent. The acceptance of homosexuality rose from 47 percent in 2007 to 66 percent in 2020, less than one generation later.