I mentioned in the previous post that (a) national polls about abortion are useless, and (b) attitudes toward abortion have been very stable. So here's a set of (a) three national polls (b) showing that attitudes toward abortion have become more liberal over the past couple of decades:
These three polls are all reliable and have been surveying abortion for a long time. Unfortunately, their question wording is just different enough that there isn't a single response that's common to all of them. So for GSS and Gallup I showed the share of people who think abortion should be legal in all cases, and for Pew I showed the number who think it should be legal in all or most cases.
The outlier here is GSS, which says that 54% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all cases. This is far different from other polls, which range in the 20-30% region for this question.
Also worth noting is that in polls that break down responses by political party, the reason for the liberalization of views is strictly due to Democrats. Republicans have stayed about the same for the entire time.
I like the short and sweet blogposts as much as the next guy but it would be interesting to know precisely how the wording is different enough to provoke such a dramatic difference
Not really. It's the same mistake you make for immigration. Adjust for land.
Do not feed the troll.
Again dipshit. Use your brain. You don't.
Thanks for the interesting chart. The GSS is showing something different from Gallup and Pew, somehow. All of them together don't show much change between 2000 and 2010. From 2013 on, there is an upward trend, but the polls aren't too consistent.
The GSS has a series of questions on whether it should be possible for a woman to get an abortion under various conditions. The last condition is "The woman wants it for any reason." This was intended to reflect the most liberal attitude, of not wanting to impose any restriction. But the responses have proved that many people don't interpret it that way. Some will say yes to that condition even though they said no to one or more of the specific conditions (if there's a severe fetal defect, if the pregnancy resulted from rape, or if the woman can't afford another child, among others). What these respondents are thinking, I guess, is that the "for any reason" question means "Is there any reason for which you think abortion should be possible?".
This means the GSS's "for any reason" result shouldn't be interpreted as affirming support for allowing abortion in all cases.
So to be clear, when you say "thanks to Democrats" you don't mean D politicians did anything useful, you just mean D voters became more approving. It is, however, more interesting that despite the worst GOP pols and FOX et al have been doing, Rs stayed steady.