Which Party Has Momentum Heading Towards November's Election? - Opinion: Potomac Watch - WSJ Podcasts

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

48% : And just one point about abortion and its importance in the election.
47% : Well, I'll start with the first two, abortion and inflation.
47% : Republicans thought they'd win and turnout there for Democrats, way up in all of those seats, so that underscores the evidence that abortion is very significant.
47% : 60% of the voters in The Wall Street Journal poll say that abortion should be legal in nearly all cases.
43% : Obviously, it's going to energize Democrats when they know that there are going to be states where restrictions are going to be increased on abortion, but it's also going to energize our own voters.
43% : And it turns out if you look at the recent polling, more people now say that they think abortion should be legal in all or most cases than said so a few months ago before the Supreme Court ruling.
41% : Paul Gigot: Democrats have been saying since the Dobbs decision, not the Supreme Court, the majority acted politically to help Republicans on abortion.
41% : But I would also say that I really don't think that abortion is necessarily a winning issue for Democrats in the way that it has played out over the past few months.
40% : We've seen a lot of people under the impression that overturning Roe V. Wade is going to sort of lead to the elimination of abortion rights or that Republicans were planning to pass some sort of national legislation to ban abortion.
40% : And so if Republicans want to try to stop some of these losses, they're going to have to narrow the debate from what it is now, which is basically a referendum on, do you think abortions should be legal, and turn it into a more specific one about what do we think the right restrictions on abortion ought to be?
37% : I mean, to start with abortion, I do think that the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe V. Wade caught Republicans flatfooted just a little bit.
36% : I think Republicans had been lulled into the sense that abortion is a 50-50 issue in America.
36% : When you had Roe V Wade as the judicial directed law, what politicians said about abortion really didn't matter.
35% : And that if Republicans do manage, now that they've seen how seriously voters are taking it, to present on a state by say basis bills to pass reasonable restrictions on abortion, they will still find that there are pretty large majorities who are in favor of restricting abortion, say at 15 weeks at 18 weeks, as opposed to some of the more expansive positions that Democrats in places like Michigan are trying to take that would allow abortion up until the third trimester and sometimes even afterward.
33% : But abortion is number two, with 13% saying it is the leading issue.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.