Three Things to Know About Abortion and Moderate White Women

With so much in the news about reproductive freedom, and so much on the line this year as we await multiple Supreme Court decisions about our reproductive rights, everyone is asking what the newest research says about white women and abortion. Our award-winning research team is hard at work running multiple surveys to increase our understanding of how salient this issue is for moderate white women and to better understand changing opinions around abortion. Let’s take a moment to touch on three interesting points about abortion from Galvanize Action’s April research.

ONE: Abortion remains a top issue, but not THE top issue for moderate white women. Our April findings suggest it is an important factor in their vote choice decision among other topics, namely the economy.

Our April audience understanding survey (AUS) asked 1,200 women to select the vote choice issue they care most about from a provided list. Try it out for yourself:

A plurality of moderate white women chose the economy as their top issue, and abortion was the top issue for the second-largest group of moderate women. This is very consistent with what we’ve seen from moderate white women in our previous research. Moderate white women were slightly more likely than white women overall to emphasize the importance of the economy in their vote (25% of moderate white women picked it as their top issue, compared to 22% of all white women) than they were to emphasize the importance of abortion (17% to 22%). 

This apparent difference between moderate white women and all white women could suggest both a challenge (more concerns or negative feelings about the economy) and an opportunity (to increase the salience of abortion for our audience). It also once again reaffirms the importance of connecting with moderate white women on both abortion and the economy. 

To better understand why these issues are top of mind for moderate white women, we also ask them why they’ve chosen the issue they did: 

ABORTION: “Because any nominee that would try to take away women’s rights is someone I want nothing to do with.”

ECONOMY: “I’m worried about the state of the economy. Everything is getting more expensive and I can’t even afford to pay my bills.”

TWO: Moderate white women are more likely to side with the Democratic party on abortion, but the Republican party on the economy. 

When we look at all of the issues, moderate white women are split fairly evenly between the two parties: 49% reported that their stance on their chosen issue aligns more with the Democratic Party, while 51% reported that their stance aligns more with the Republican Party. But when we zoom in on how moderates feel about abortion and the economy, the differences along party lines are striking. 

Responses from Ideologically Moderate White Women by Key Opinion

This year, we are centering our economy messages on practical issues like childcare, affordable healthcare and prescription drugs, and paid family leave. These are all very tangible economic issues that moderate women care about and they are aspects of the economy on which they tend to trust Democrats more than Republicans. We’ll also contrast who cares about families like theirs with who is protecting corporate greed and profiteering at the expense of their ability to make ends meet. 

THREE: Increasing the salience of abortion is likely to be important this year. 

The big question: will moderate white women actually turn out and vote based on abortion? Many of them will! In a February poll of 600 women, 75% of moderate white women told us they will vote solely or partially based on abortion. While this is extraordinary, it is still significantly lower than the 89% of white women overall (both pro and anti-choice) who say this issue will influence their vote choice. 

As it stands now, 25% of the moderate white women we heard from said abortion rights will not factor into their vote choice this year. This creates an opportunity for us to move even more moderate women to consider reproductive freedom when they vote in November, and to increase the importance of that issue for those who are merely considering it as they head to the polls.

Fortunately, we have repeatedly demonstrated our ability to increase the salience of this issue among the moderate women we are able to reach with our reproductive freedom ads. In 2022, we increased agreement that “officials should protect the right to abortion” by five percentage points among our audience! 

Join us on our May 30th webinar to be among the first to see our brand new ads that are moving moderate women to support legal abortions!