Exit Poll Data

CNN Exit Poll Data.

It's all fascinating, and I hate to choose, but...

On the abortion question, "always legal" got 21%; "mostly legal" got another 34%.  That is a majority of voters.  If the Dems could work their way back to "safe, legal, and rare", they should be OK on this issue.

On gay marriage, "legally marry" had 25%; "civil unions" had 35%.  My suspicion - if the Dems would actually try to advance this agenda through the legislative process, rather than by judicial cram-down, they might find the country on their side.  Respect the people!  (As if.)

UPDATE:  The NYTimes has exit poll data going back to 1976 in the pop-up graphics associated with this story.

Comments

[mark]

"Safe,legal,and rare" has always been a wonderful soundbite. But that's all it is - a soundbite. Dem policy makers work to keep abortion legal . Safe and rare ? Those are just noble sounding afterthoughts.

[Jor]

Mark, you do know abortions increased under Bush right? They were going down under Clinton, but since Bush resorted honor and dignity to the country, they started going back up. I don't know why they went up, but I'm going to bet that they will keep going up with Bush's sexual education that completely focus on absitinence. Reality-based community, try it sometime!

Democrats are too f'n stupid to frame discussions. They let republicans argue against gay marriage, instead of trying to focus on approving civil unions. Part of this was due to legislative maneuvers, but still, they needed to make this a pro-civil-union argument instead of a wishy-washy me-too no-gay-marriage argument.

[Cecil Turner]

At Andrew Sullivan's (of all places) there's a good analysis that suggests the effect of gay marriage amendments was negligible.

[TM]

...you do know abortions increased under Bush right?

Actually, I am having a hard time knowing that. In my "trust, but verify" mode, I went to the Center for Disease Control, and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which everyone agrees are the main sources for thses stats.

Strangely, I can't find anything after 2000. One source said the CDC does an annual report; another said they do a report every few years.

And this AGI study is dated Jan 2003, but has data only to 2000.

I'm currently stumped, but maybe someone who does know this can help me out.

[Eric Anondson]

Apparently some biased goof at Sojourners (the group of pacifism-until-death folks) twisted selective and never-before used "datasets" to prove that abortions were increasing during Bush. It has been later examined and debunked. It hasn't made it's way to the "reality-based community" yet.

And that abortions were decreasing during Clinton's term had zip, zero, zilch to do with Clinton. It had to do with the drastic increase in individual states taking it upon themselves to increase their own anti-abortion laws after the Casey decision (I think that's the decision...).

[Stephen M. St. Onge]

      If 21% of the voters think abortion should always be legal, then it follows that 79% think abortion should at least occasionally be illegal.

      The "always legal" people keep telling the Republicans and Democrats to fold on abortion, the Republicans keep not folding, the Democrats keep folding, and the Republicans mostly win.

      I like that.

THE SAUDS MUST BE DESTROYED!

[Jor]

A friend had told me the abortion story and I incorrectly assumed that it must have been from CDC #'s. However, it a appears a professor @ Fuller Theological Seminary (whose also a statistician) looked at some state #'s and compared them to a CDC report, to suggest that the # of abortions is going up. The NRL responded that it might be better reporting that accounts for some of it. Then they went on to make some attrocious logical fallacies that I'll leave to the interested reader to find.

The CDC claims to do abortion surveillence every year since the 64 (before it was legal?). They have reports from 96 to 2000 online. Two of them are published on pubmed. Its very curious how the data just stops @ 2000. Maybe it takes time to compile these reports, or maybe something else is up.

Anyway, I'll accept for the moment that there is only some evidence indicating abortions went up. We'll ahve to see the CDC's 2001 report to see what actually happeend. Although you would think 4 years is enough time for someone to run it through excel.

[Jor]

Eric do you have an example of a state law that decreased the number of abortions? If I had to guess, I'd put my money on better education (contraception) & less poverty (leading to more people keeping). Those are just guesses.

[TM]

Ok, Eric and Jor, thanks vey much - that was my head-scratching experience, too. I did find state data for Illinois and Minnesota through 2003 (IIRC), but no trend jumped out.

Somebody has to have guessed that welfare reform played a part, somehow, if only because it is invoked in connection with every other social phenomenon of the late 90's.

[Slartibartfast]

Hmmm...Bush caused those extra women to have abortions? Who knew?

Or was there a different point there that I missed, somehow?

[Eric Anondson]

An example of a state anti-abortion law? Specific examples state by state I don't have at my fingers. But I know that many states added parental notification laws. Others added laws that required clinics that offered abortions to hand out all the scary information about how abortions could go wrong compared to carrying to full term. Some clinics did this anyway, but some states mandated this across the board to all clinics.

I don't know if it has happened yet in other states, but here in Minnesota in 2003 a 24 hour abortion waiting period law was past. Effectively requiring any woman considering getting an abortion to have to wait 24 hours before she can get it. (I don't know how to do an html link so here is a url to a 2003 story on it in Minnesota).

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2003/07/01_scheckt_abortionlaw/

And as the 2003 story notes, 2002 was the lowest abortion rate in Minnesota since records started being kept in 1998.

Minnesota's "Women's Right to Know Act" was a copy of other states' own legislation on the issue like North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Nebraska that had been on the book a while.

[Eric Anondson]

I probably should say that the so-called "Women's Right to Know Acts" that various states have been passing are very much educational measures in some sense, which fits under one of Jor's theories. But that they are almost univesally opposed by militant feminists are one reason they are tagged with the label of being "anti-abortion" laws.

[Jor]

I contacted one of the authors of the CDC study, she said the report usually comes out at the end of Novemeber. Considering the 2000 data was published in 2003, I guess it just takes them time to get the data from States. So we'll know soon enough if they went up or down.

Personally, I'm not opposed to wait periods, educational (that is actually scientifically valid), or listing alternative choices.

[Leon]

Jor - It may not be that the D's are letting the R's frame the discussion. Ideological purity seems to be more of a driving force. Gay marriage is the approved option so any thing less is verboten. Both sides have been doing too much of that kind of approach (watch Specter vs the "pure" fight that has started).

Civil unions could be presented as more than just a "gay issue". For instance, it would provide a nice alternative for seniors who want to be together but cannot get married without losing her social security. They could be "married" in their own church but have the state regard it as a civil union. The permutations could be many and be done at the state level if people would go back to politics being the art of the possible instead of the insistence of the pure.

[digitalbrownshirt]

Jor,
I'm not sure why a president opposing abortion would cause it to increase and vice-versa. Is it possible that not everything that happens in the U.S. is traceable to the initiatives of a president? Also, since there are no current empirical data on abortion, how about birth-rates? Not number of children born, but number of children per population. If the rate is going down, then one may surmise that contraception is becoming more successful or fertility is declining or sex is on the wane (which would correlate with the declining number of democrats). If the rate is going up, one may surmise fewer abortions, which may be explained by the unhinged as an act of rebellion against a president who opposes abortion or perhaps by an influx of people whose religion, say Catholic or Muslim, may oppose abortion.