that was the other sleeper issue in the last election. you know, some people said, yes, abortion could be important. i don t think a lot of cynics, there were any cynics that saw democracy as being really front most in people s minds, but it was. i hope it still is. i mean, it is striking to me, what one person can do. donald trump was able to do. obviously, there were forces building up in the republican party. the party was changing. there s a sense in which trump was a symptom and not a cause of the disease, but he was the vector. he was the person who allowed all these anti-democratic forces in the republican party, these
Disapprove of the decision to remove federal protections for abortion rights. 36% support the ruling. that is unchanged from a poll taken last september. the new opposition number includes not only democrats but 60% of independents and almost a third of republican voters. let s bring in nbc news capitol hill correspondent ali vitali. ali, you spoke to lawmakers, medical providers and women who shared their deeply personal stories with you. tell us about it. yeah, mika, i was really grateful for their candor because, look, over the last year since i ve been reporting on what it looks like to be post roe, i have heard from anti-abortion advocates who are overjoyed about the current state of things, and i ve also heard from advocates who are in sheer terror about what this means for women across the country. in this conversation, though, we went to the very heart of it, to the doctors who are tasked with providing this care, to the
In a way i think few could have imagined. just the scale that the tremors would have been felt all the way to wisconsin, kentucky, kansas, and in deep red states. that s exactly right, joe. if you look at the recent polling from the nbc poll, you have 80% of women between the ages of 18 and 49 who oppose the overturning of roe. you have 60% of independents. you have 30%, about one-third of republicans. those are earth shattering numbers. and in many ways, as you said, for a long time, there s been greater support for keeping abortion access in place than getting rid of it. this has awakened women, men and women, independents, people of all political stripes across the country. we saw that in the midterm elections, and it looks to be that that enthusiasm, that anger, that passion has not
This has never happened before. a fundamental right has never been taken away before in the history of the court. there was a stable compromise that was in place for 50 years. if you mess around with this and try to claim ultimate victory and grab all the ground you can and have a power grab, there s going to be a backlash. it was predictable in that sense. you couldn t predict how much energy it would unleash on the part of women who were standing up for their health and their rights, but you could have predicted the backlash. republicans did exactly the dumbest thing they could possibly have done in a lot of these states, which is, joe, all the things you cited, do things that would be easy to campaign against because they were outrageously radical. yeah. that s why you look at polling even now. i discount polling. i don t care who it s positive for or negative for, i discount polling like we discounted polling before the 22 election, when everybody was talking about a red wave
It is also a deal breaker issue for women voters. meaning, if the elected official does not share their values on abortion, they absolutely won t vote for them. i think what s really interesting and that has changed is point that ali was making, is that the landscape for republican voters has also really shifted. we really found some significant changes there. more republican women are deeply divided over this issue. it is not a unifying issue. that republican women also are struggling with the bans in the states. i think lawmakers are not listening to them on these issues. it s gone too far. that was particularly true for voters in states that have enacted abortion bans. so i think this is the top issue for voters going into the election, and republicans have not caught on to this. lauren, you ve spoken a lot about women voters. you also looked at men, the