William Saletan is still the in-house pro-choice hack at the Bulwark
Remember when they were supposedly conservative?
10-months ago William Saletan wrote in The Bulwark that the polling over abortion was “conclusive and overwhelming” against abortion restrictions. I explained here how Saletan was cherry-picking poorly worded polls to justify The Bulwark’s anti-conservative stances. After last week’s election, Saletan is back at it again. He has written a new piece arguing abortion was the “decisive” issue in last week’s election. It “torpedoed” the GOP!
To argue this he cites multiple pieces of evidence:
The Democrats overperformed relative to “the fundamentals”.
According to one exit poll, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. 27% said abortion was the most important issue in casting their ballots. Democrats won both these groups.
The salience of abortion decreased for Republicans and increased for Democrats relative to the 2018 midterms.
Another exit poll found 63% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The same exit poll found that pro-choice voters were more likely to say that abortion has a “major impact” on their vote than pro-life voters.
The second exit poll also found 47% of respondents said Dobbs was a major factor in which candidates they voted for. This 47% broke dramatically for Democrats.
Pro-choice voters were more likely to say Dobbs had a “major impact” on if they were going to vote or not.
He cites similar data for states like Arizona and Nevada, but these are just more specific versions of the above arguments.
But all this evidence has a critical flaw: it doesn’t actually show any votes were changed because of Dobbs. If Democrats won the 60% of voters that said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, that does not mean that any of that 60% changed how they were going to vote relative to a no-Dobbs midterm. An abortion rights activist, for example, would say both that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. That abortion rights activist would also likely vote Democrat if Dobbs never happened. Similarly, someone can answer that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, but vote Republican because they’re more concerned about economic issues.
But let me be fair: just because none of Saletan’s arguments prove his thesis doesn’t mean that his thesis is wrong. While he could just be bad at arguing for this thesis, surveying the actual midterm results suggests he is simply wrong. The backlash to Dobbs could explain why Kari Lake and Blake Masters lost1 Arizona, why JD Vance struggled in Ohio, why Herschel Walker is going to a runoff in Georgia, and why Mike Donald Bolduc got beat by almost ten points in New Hampshire, but it can’t explain why Kimberly Yee got more votes than any other statewide candidate in Arizona, why Mike DeWine easily cleared 60% of the vote in Ohio, why Brian Kemp easily avoided a runoff in Georgia, or why Chris Sununu easily won by fifteen-points in New Hampshire. A theory of the 2022 midterms needs to be able to explain all these races— not just a handful of them. Dobbs as the “decisive” issue can’t. What can explain the variation in races is, to paraphrase GOP strategist David Kanevsky, voters that “somewhat disapproved” of Biden voting for “traditional” GOP candidates, but being unable to vote for “Trumpy” GOP candidates.
Exit tweet:
As I write this, Katie Hobbs is favored over Kari Lake on PredictIt by a 86-15 margin.